Plan For Progress, Not Perfection: The Commitment Blueprint
It’s easy to think 2-dimensionally about the money in your business: revenue and expenses. But 2-dimensional thinking makes it much harder to find the money to grow. If you can start to think 3-dimensionally (revenue + expenses + time), then you can expand your opportunities.
Managing for cash flow gives you a way to see the interconnected components of money in your business. Plus, it’s a way to powerful financial systems and live out feminist & anti-colonialist values.
It takes money to start a business. Money can come in the form of a loan, a credit card, a savings account, or even pre-orders. Or, time and sweat equity become a proxy for money until there’s enough cold hard cash to invest in growth. It also takes money to grow a...
Our feeds are full of people trying to sell us goals. More money. Passive income. Working far fewer hours. Building a community. Working 1-to-many. Charging more. Writing a book. Building a team. These are all solid goals. But are they your goals? Marketers sell us...
Most new business owners treat business-building like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. There’s the backbone of the story—the plot points that have been chosen for you. You know that you need to have something to sell, a customer to sell it to, and a plan for...
How do you make a big change to your business model without making it harder than it has to be? How do you navigate...
I’m convinced that every entrepreneur has a fantasy business that they daydream about.
It’s free from all of the baggage and assumptions that we’ve built up around our existing businesses.
And I’m also convinced that that fantasy business—as pie-in-the-sky as it may be—has something to teach us about our existing businesses.
They can show us how we’d market differently, set policies differently, and protect our time differently. They show us the kinds of relationships we’d prefer to have with clients or the type of work we’d rather be doing.
And, maybe more than anything, they show us just how simple a business can be.
With a few exceptions, I don’t think most of us daydream about convoluted, complicated businesses. We dream up simple businesses—ones that thrive with minimal BS.
Today, I’m sharing 3 ways that I built my fantasy business—the one I’d been dreaming about for years—and how it’s different from What Works.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
– Why making changes to an existing business is less like steering a big ship and more like dragging the anchor behind you
– How focusing on process & systems helped us create a simple business model
– What we did to create an offer that was an obvious “yes” for the right people and an obvious “no” for the wrong people
– And how we’ve gotten away with almost zero marketing since we got started almost 2 years ago
What's the right business model for your small business? Which model will afford you the financial sustainability you crave with the type of work, flexibility, and satisfaction you value? And do you really need to create an online course or membership site...
I have a reputation for being a decisive, proactive, making-things-happen kind of person. I’m quite proud of this. But really? It’s a facade. What others admire as fearless action-taking is just careful branding. I’m actually an anxious reactor. Oof. Even though I...
More work doesn’t equal more money. More offers don’t equal more money. More marketing doesn’t equal more money. More lead magnets, more email subscribers, or more followers don’t equal more money. And, the flip side is also true. Making more money probably doesn’t...
Try as you might, you can’t squeeze your way to a bigger business. We certainly try, though. We squeeze more hours into every day. We squeeze more customers through our sales process. We squeeze more offers into our business model. We squeeze more and more...
Host of What Works
Tara is a podcaster, small business community leader, strategist, and speaker. She’s been helping small business owners build stronger businesses for over a decade.
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