How Transforming Her Coaching Business Reignited Sasha’s Creative Practice
Welcome to Thought Leader Stories
This series highlights the incredible stories of ambitious changemakers, experts, and thought leaders. Read on to explore how we helped them transform their business and amplify their impact—on their own terms.
As told to and written by copywriter, Nailah King of The Content Witches.
Meet Sasha
Sasha Patpatia (she/her) is a talented multidisciplinary artist, essayist, and coach who helps artists develop their projects through her Artist Homecoming methodology framework. Within this framework, artists can move forward in their creative practice by exploring and accepting who they are as artists and creating their own path free from the projections or expectations of others.
After working for several years in her business, Sasha was ready to take it to the next level but had deeper, more pressing questions about how to do it.
Embracing Coaching to Drive Change
Sasha's entrepreneurial journey started early and close to home. Coming from an enterprising and entrepreneurial family with a creative parent, she learned young the challenge of managing the balance required when pursuing your art and creating a livelihood for yourself.
She's always surrounded herself with entrepreneurs. After studying music journalism, she graduated and started working at a record label.
The corporate path proved unfulfilling, leaving Sasha searching for a new direction. Sasha took a job as a personal assistant for a film composer, which would be a turning point in her career.
“It felt like what it would be like business grad school. Because, you know, artists are entrepreneurial in spirit. We need to find a way to make money and do it your own way. And so working for this composer was a very entrepreneurial experience.”
Still, Sasha was being called to do meaningful work that contributed to the creative community beyond what conventional spaces and methodologies offered.
From there, Sasha pursued coaching. After completing the program, she launched her coaching business.
Later, as her business evolved, Sasha was ready to take her business to new heights, but she lacked the capacity, bandwidth, and clarity to do this work independently.
“And when I say next level, I specifically mean like earning more income, attracting more aligned clients, working with people more on my level, levelling up my game in a lot of ways in my systems, and having more clarity around what I'm selling really, really specifically.”
She had deeper sales and marketing questions that needed answers but needed to find the right collaborator. After working with a writer, Sasha didn't get the support she had hoped for. They didn't understand her niche or business to the breadth and depth she needed.
Instead, Sasha was left with a one-size-fits-all approach that didn't capture her unique voice or point of view.
“It became like a very cut and dry and kind of formulaic process of what blogs I was putting on my website and things that they were advising me that just didn't feel like me or my tone or feel at all personal.”
Sasha knew it was time to find someone who actually understood her business, in all its intricacies, could provide custom support, and was willing to provide support without placing her in a constant sales cycle of staggering solutions as add-ons:.
"There's no sales experience with [Sarah]. It's not like, ‘Oh, well, you can, you know, add on this service where I take, do an audit of your website.’ It was incredibly clear, open, and of service. And I think that's what a really good coach is as well. It's like someone who's very much showing up to serve you at your place of need, at your moment of need. And so Sarah really leads with that."
— Sasha Patpatia, Coach
Connecting Through a Shared Language
Sasha initially connected with Sarah through her friend and web designer, who had been a business coaching client of Sarah’s, when they suggested that she would be someone who could be the right person to help Sasha move forward in her business.
Once Sasha landed on Sarah's website, the copy and overall professionalism confirmed that Sarah was the most aligned person to partner with on taking her business to the next level.
“With Sarah, it was a different feeling. It was like a very firm yes. I've worked with other business mentors in the past. And I've been way more hesitant at those stages because I didn't feel as heard, seen, understood as Sarah does.”
Sarah's approach is similar to her own, and they have a shared language:
“I think Sarah is just in her mindset, and her practice and her application of her work is really similar to what a coach is anyway. And so it felt like right away, we're speaking the same language because she's really not big on, I mean, she does sometimes in a fun way, but she's really not big on telling you what to do. She's not gatekeep-y.”
So, Sasha began her first collaboration with Sarah in a one-hour Strategy Session.
Despite being a single session, together, they co-created an expansive but actionable roadmap for Sasha's next steps in her business.
But she needed more support, including more touchpoints and a partner to guide her through the journey/process.
“I had done so much work, had known and amassed a lot of information, and I needed the mentorship. Of just where to apply it and where to put it. I needed the clarity, conversations, and the check-in like we would send Voxer memos in between. I needed a partner at that time, and she took 110% of the time to deliver this, just being like, that is the right idea. Or I would do this in this scenario.”
— Sasha Patpatia, Coach & Artist
Building a Dynamic Artist's Framework
During the mentorship, they built a bespoke framework, the Artist Homecoming Methodology, which she uses to enroll her clients successfully.
Building her own custom framework as part of the mentorship was a critical methodology to create in her business and filter her incredible work through, not just for her own work but how they help clients overall.
Throughout their time together, Sarah consistently met her where she was at and actively encouraged her to pursue life as an artist without apology or an uneven balance.
“I think it’s good for people’s brains. It’s good for clients and people to know where they are or what they’re doing. Frameworks, to me, they’re like maps that you read. A really successful framework is really broad and really encompasses anywhere that you might be at. Frameworks are really great ways to focus people and keep a team together.”
“Sarah really consistently met me with where I was at in my work. I was doing a lot, and Sarah really met me there and was available for my evolvement, for how I was evolving, and was helping support me in finding myself on that path through the lens of my business. She was like, ‘It sounds like you want to be an artist, so you need to be making art, and then we're going to make your messaging about that.’ She really just saw what I was trying to do in my life and integrated that into my business.”
— Sasha Patpatia, Coach & Artist
Embracing Life as an Artist
Following the mentorship, she has a comprehensive framework that showcases her coaching methodology and what coachees can expect when they work with Sasha.
She successfully streamlined her sales system, refined her marketing, and stayed consistent with her efforts, including email marketing.
Sasha experienced so many takeaways from mentorship, but the biggest one was having the space to reflect on and be celebrated for her own personal journey and the grit and strategic moves that it's taken to get Sasha to this point and beyond:
“How much credit Sarah reminds me to give myself for what I have built and what, you know, what I have done in my career and how easy it is to downplay that, but really like how, how much detail has gone into every step. And so that was like a really big takeaway.”
Sasha's progress hasn't stopped there. She continues to move forward in her business, armed with everything she built and learned within the mentorship—at her own pace
"I just sat on a lot of things, and I'm okay with that, and I'm okay with that because Sarah let me know that was okay, and that was really cool. I always felt like I had direction in my business. I didn't want to take it at that time. That's really powerful. That gave me the freedom to explore my art and a new life potentially in another country because it grounded me in a word."
Thank you, Sasha, for sharing your story! We can't wait to see what's next for you.
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