Susan Bennett Fisher is the CEO and Co-Founder of Body of 9. Body of 9 is a company dedicated to introducing and teaching about a body-based assessment that, through your posture, body type, and how you physically express yourself, identifies what is called your Natural Number. Since 2012, Susan and her husband and Co-Founder Martin Fisher have identified the Natural Number of over 8000 people from around the world. They share the understanding of how the Body of 9 shows up in many aspects of the human experience.
Having your Natural Number Identified gives you an experience of your innate self, taking your understanding of who you are to a whole new level. Through the course of her work with the Body of 9 system, Susan has witnessed the transformation that takes place within people once they have learned their Natural Numbers. Within six months of finding out their Natural Number, people report being happier, more fulfilled, and on a path to their greater purpose. The knowledge accelerates any healing modality, providing a context for any system by understanding the Natural Number origins and how it applies to them.
Susan Bennett Fisher and her husband, Martin Fisher, are pioneers in the study and research of the 9 Natural Numbers. With over thirty years of combined research and experience, their work has led to many new discoveries. They offer a deeper understanding of the importance, power, and impact of knowing your Natural Number personally, in their relationships, and as a parent.
Please tell us a little bit about your business – what is Body of 9 all about?
Body of 9 works with a discovery that there are nine physiologically different kinds of people. We have developed a simple physical process either in person or online, that determines which of the nine centers in our body is born most active. We call that center your Natural Number. Once identified, we can tell you what a thousand people who share your Natural Number have told us about what it is like to live in a body with your Natural Number active.
How you take in information, how you build relationships, how you move, what you care about and so much more is specific to your Natural Number. It is your nature, you were born with these abilities. When you can live consciously from your nature, and understand the differences between yourself and others, it opens up a possibility for greater understanding, appreciation, acceptance, and acknowledgment. It is the most empowering knowledge and experience that we can offer you.
We identify people’s Natural Numbers, train coaches, teams, and holistic practitioners to integrate this into their modalities, speak about our work, and offer corporate programs for leadership, teamwork, and productivity.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company.
I have a degree in Mathematical Economics and Computer Science from Brown University and an MBA/MA from The Wharton School of Business, at the University of Pennsylvania. I worked in software development, marketing, operations, and finance in Silicon Valley for 20 years. In 2002 I found my Natural Number when studying to become a Coach. It was a life-changing discovery. It explained all the things I knew and loved about myself, that no one else seemed to understand. It gave me a context for understanding the world in a way that truly honored who I was and where I fit in. I also found my purpose and calling in researching, teaching, and developing the body of knowledge that has become Body of 9.
My husband and CoFounder, Martin Fisher, who has a degree in computation from Manchester University in England, and 30 years of experience in software development in Silicon Valley, joined me in 2012 to start the first incarnation of Body of 9, then called 9 Energies. We researched for nine years, working with over 8000 people from over fifty countries, all races, and dozens of cultures. We developed our knowledge by distilling the most relevant and specific descriptions of each of the Natural Numbers.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
- First, knowing yourself, by knowing what your Natural Number is and how to use it is the most important skill you can develop! When you understand who you are at the level of your nature, the skills, gifts, and talents that come with your body are more available. It’s easier to tap into your personal power and understand how others are different. It reveals your leadership style and how you build relationships empowering and enhancing your leadership skills.
- The next skill is to be able to understand the Natural Numbers of your team and how each shows up best and how to support them. This helps you create happy, productive, and effective teams and staff. It teaches you how to communicate more effectively, set a vision and goals for the organization, and align the organization in pursuit of these goals in the most efficient way possible.
- The third skill to cultivate is curiosity and openness to change. Being curious continually brings new information and possibility into your sphere of knowing. If we don’t stay curious and open, we cannot grow and change. Growing and changing are essential skills for any entrepreneur.
What are your plans for the future, and how do you plan to grow this company?
We reinvest everything that we earn back into Body of 9. When our income grows sufficiently and sustainably, we bring on the next most important role that will continue to grow Body of 9. Right now, we are growing our revenue programs adding new positions to support each of the major markets into which we are expanding. Our infrastructure and marketing teams are solid and in good shape. The next round of hiring is designed to take some of the burden off my husband and me so that we can continue to focus on where we are most valuable and offload the jobs that can be done by others, specifically in running our programs that will continue to generate revenue.
We hope to continue to be self-funding and are working on more passive and leveraged revenue options.
How have the pandemic and Lockdown affected you or your new business?
We completely changed everything about our business during the pandemic. We closed our center where we held workshops in person. We closed our non-profit and started Body of 9 completely re-branding everything. During the pandemic, we developed our online process to identify people’s Natural Numbers which opened us up to work with people all over the world. We completed writing our second book. We hired our first staff and began building our team. We tried online marketing and direct sales and failed miserably. Once we got clear on our niche – partnering with Coaches and Holistic practitioners, everything started to work. We now have a successful Partner Program where we all benefit and work together to create a greater understanding and awareness out in the world.
Martin always jokes that it will be ten years to our overnight success. The good news is it’s ten years now and things are indeed taking off.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
Body of 9 is body-based. If you compare us with other psychological models, we provide an assessment that comes from your body, not from how you decide to answer questions – your mind and personality are not involved in the assessment. We look at a series of physical characteristics, how you move, your energy signature, and a variety of other elements to determine which is your Natural Number.
We also provide a highly accurate description of your skills, gifts, values, and talents that is distilled from the over 1000 people who have described what it is like to live in the bodies of each of the Natural Numbers. Most importantly, we connect you back to your physical nature which provides you with a way to know yourself and to use your body to recover, grow and expand your awareness. No other system out there combines the physical with the spiritual and intellectual in a system of 9.
Our work is also based on a combined thirty years of in-person research using a falsifiable, testable, and repeatable process. It is not channeled as some models are and it is not based on grouping people by how they answer questions. We start with the physical identification and then move to the highly-accurate descriptions.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
- While our work is relevant to anyone, every person has a Natural Number and would benefit from knowing it, however, the first mistake we made was marketing to everyone. Our work is still in the early adopter phase and needs to be experienced in order to have it make sense to people. In the beginning, we didn’t focus on those who were more likely to take the leap of faith required to understand the impact of this revelation. Once we identified our niche – working with others already committed to making the world a better place, that we define as Coaches and Holistic practitioners, everything started to change and we started to grow.
- We thought we needed to do it on our own in the beginning. We ended up just working harder and harder, to the point of exhaustion. We learned that we do best when we partner with like-minded people and groups. For example, once we started to develop our Partner Program and help our partners differentiate and accelerate their practices, we all grew together. Finding the right partners and providing the support they needed made all the difference.
- The third mistake we made was to think we needed to do it like everyone else. We tried social media marketing, we tried online marketing, and we tried the different systems that are out there. Until we created our own system, our own way to uniquely provide value to our clients and their clients, we were just wasting money. We did learn as we tried these different approaches, and we did develop solid assets in our online marketing which are there as a base for us now. We learned that this is iterative – try something, keep what works, and then try again. We also learned that it needs to be authentically aligned with who we are and what we are trying to create. As long as we stay true to our larger purpose, trust the universe will support us, and continue to take wise action, it is going to work!
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
As mentioned in the section on mistakes – alignment of purpose, message, and action is so critical in our marketing. Knowing that there are nine physiologically different kinds of people and that each responds to different messages threw a monkey wrench in how to effectively communicate given the complexity of humanity. We didn’t want to go down the path of creating fear, anxiety, and doubt, to get people to do something.
That is where the partnering came in. We identify the Natural Numbers of each of our partners and support them in developing their unique messages that also contain our system and know that they will each reach one-ninth of the population. We have Partners of all nine Natural Numbers and each one markets with its own natural language and messages. Through our partners, we are able to reach all nine Natural Numbers.
We also run any marketing campaigns or programs by at least one person of each Natural Number so that we know it will not alienate any particular Natural Number and will include as many of them as possible in a supportive and encouraging way.
We also stay very true to our greatest purpose in all that we do. Our goal is for enough people in the world to know and understand and is actively exploring the possibilities that this understanding presents so that a greater conversation can develop about the importance, possibilities, and meaning of Body of 9 so that it will continue past our lifetime into the overall knowledge of humanity.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
- The biggest challenge I have faced is in introducing new information which is important to the world but which is not necessarily aligned with the core beliefs or understanding of the world at the moment. It requires overcoming resistance, being interesting enough to get through the noise, finding ways of instilling excitement about it and living it oneself as an example of its effectiveness.
- Knowing your Natural Number and learning to activate the other eight takes courage, time, and commitment. Knowing who you are and how to work with others so you can be your most effective and powerful self is the art of being who you are as a part of humanity. Being in your fullness, not tempering who you are, and still being received by others is really challenging. As a Natural Number 6, I am powerful, and directive and my voice carries and resonates – these are all part of my Natural Number 6 ness. When I discovered my Natural Number, I felt greater permission to be myself, love who I am, and understand the impact I have on others. Instead of feeling like I was just loud and fast, I got to own both of those attributes as skills, and learn to integrate them into a whole by learning to activate all nine Natural Numbers in my body. I am a more cosmic and whole human as a result. This makes life easier. I am happier, I live on purpose, and with a conscious choice about my beliefs.
- This has presented the challenge to learn to face my own unconscious beliefs, make choices about them and then develop new habits. This is not always the easier path, but it is always the most rewarding. We can become attached to our belief systems, they can become crutches that keep us from moving forward, especially when unconscious. For example, as a woman in our world today we are bombarded with messages about our bodies from the time we become aware of the world around us. I embedded these messages in my body and was carrying around a belief that I did not have value unless I was thin and beautiful. As I began to age, this became even more debilitating, throwing in the natural changes as we age – this unconscious belief had me in a state of anxiety and self-doubt. I felt invisible. I realized that this was a belief that I was choosing, and although commonly held, was completely invalid and inflicting unnecessary self-suffering. So I began to work on changing this body-based belief. It has not been easy to develop new habits and new ways of holding myself, but it has been worth it!
I have developed a continual practice of looking at my beliefs, to be sure they are serving me and are consciously chosen. This has enabled me to eliminate self-imposed suffering. It has freed up my energy to focus on what matters to me, to my company, and to the greater good. It helps me notice and challenge my judgment of myself and others and to choose love in all interactions. You would be surprised how far this will carry you in both business and your personal life!
What was your first business idea and what did you do with it?
My first business idea was to create a software program that generated custom knitting patterns. I love knitting and have created my own patterns and variations of patterns since I was in my teens. While I never followed up on this idea, it has since been done, but not as well or thoroughly as I would have liked to do it. It turns out that to do it well you would have to integrate so much information and variations that it would be quite a sophisticated piece of code. It is so rare that the person with the ideas has the ability and resources to manifest them.
What are you learning now? Why is that important?
I am continually learning about how Natural Numbers manifest out in the world. We regularly work with groups and individuals and we are constantly learning about how to describe the capabilities that are inherent to each of the Natural Numbers. Also, as we become more and more proficient at activating the other eight Natural Numbers, our ability to perceive, connect and communicate continues to improve. It is the most fun, proactive, and fascinating body of knowledge that we have ever encountered.
If you started your business again, what things would you do differently?
We learn from everything that we do. Each step along the path is a teacher of something that we will need to know later. Whether it is failure or success, plodding along or experiencing lightning-fast change, painful or joyful, each experience offers us something for later. Perhaps I might have skipped spending a chunk of our resources on Facebook marketing, but it could be said that learning it wouldn’t work for us was critical to finding something that did work.
What are the top 3 online tools and resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
An in-house developed application based on NodeJS that integrates Active Campaign for email marketing, Calendly for Event Scheduling, and WordPress for our website, plus YouTube for our videos.
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
Learn your Natural Number and get everyone in your world identified! When you know yourself, and you know those around you, everything gets much easier and more productive.
Can you recommend one book, one podcast, and one online course for entrepreneurs?
Unfortunately with just one, you only get the perspective and learning of the wisdom that comes from the creator’s Natural Number. It is not surprising in the personal growth and development market that most books hit 11% of the market – that’s one-ninth. Your wisdom is most easily heard by people who share your Natural Number or are needing what you are offering. But often your wisdom will fall on deaf ears if you don’t put it out in a context that can either be heard by others or at least acknowledges the nine perspectives. I like to listen to podcasts that are at least authentic in their voice.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
I would use it to buy food and pay rent – if you’ve only got $1000, stay fed and housed. Before I would spend a penny on anything else, I would figure out what my product was, and who I was selling it to and I would sit down with my target market and see if anyone wanted to buy it. Once I have one customer, I would make the best one I could, sell it to them, see how they like it, improve it, and then find another customer. I would repeat this process until I knew I had something of value that is repeatable. Then I would start to invest in the infrastructure to make and market the product.
What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
The work we are doing matters. It helps people. People know themselves better, live more aligned with their purpose, and are happier. Knowing and understanding the Body of 9 and the Natural Numbers creates sustained change in the world for good. That’s what keeps us going. It’s making a difference, one person at a time.
What is your favorite quote?
My favorite leadership quote is one that came from my own experience.
“Your life is made up of the sum of your days – do something that matters to you each day, then when you get to the end, your life will have mattered to you!”
I took this on in my thirties and pay attention every day to doing something that matters to me.
What valuable advice would you give new entrepreneurs starting out?
Make sure that you care about what you are working on. If it doesn’t matter to you, it won’t be good for you in the long run. And build yourself a team, making sure you all share the same vision, everything is easier when you don’t have to do it by yourself.
Who should we interview next and why?
Adriana Monique Alvarez, because she is changing the shape of publishing!
What is your definition of success?
Figure out who you are and then – Do you! Be you! Love a lot!
How do you personally overcome fear?
I take a deep breath, expand my chest and feel into what is the most alive path. Then, any fear or anxiety will abate in my body giving me access to what is most important to do next or how to deal with what is coming.
How can readers get in touch with you?
You can connect with us at www.bodyof9.com.
