This morning, fellow mediator Dina Lynch and I were chatting and the subject of competition between mediators came up. The phone line practically buzzed with our energy on the subject! We were of a similar mind: A scarcity mentality about the mediation market leads to an unfortunate narrowing of opportunity for many mediators.
Years ago, when I was first starting out, someone said the following to me and it’s been a mantra of sorts ever since: More work for any good mediator means more work for all mediators. I say it to my own mediation graduate students now. The more well-trained, quality mediators out there help the public understand the merits of what we offer, the more members of the public there are to help spread the gospel.
It’s easy to get caught in a scarcity mentality when you wait on court-connected mediation programs to send you low-paying business, or try without success to get yourself on one of those panels, or shy away from marketing because you don’t think of yourself as a business person.
Scarcity breeds a lack of sharing among mediators about what really works in marketing and business building. Scarcity breeds way too much bragging at conferences and not enough genuine exchange of successful approaches. Scarcity leads you to think you have to grab onto whatever work comes your way, even when that work isn’t your passion or strength and that fact conveys itself to your clients.
Successful mediators don’t wait on others. We create our own markets, our own work. We don’t rely on referrals from a few limited programs to build our business. We readily refer work to our trusted fellow mediators when we can’t take on a project or when a call comes in for mediation in an arena that’s not really the center of our passion. We are tenacious in our desire to do this work and make a living at it.
We don’t think scarcity, we think abundance. We don’t fret about competition, we do quality work in a niche or market that sets us apart.
So, if you were to use some good ol’ mediator expand-the-pie thinking instead of market scarcity fixed-pie thinking, how would that change your business-building strategy?
