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...
What can you do with your business if you look beyond your individual needs and your individual success?
That’s a really exciting question to me.
What kind of impact on the collective could this business have? How I can I use this business to meet others’ needs, too?
These questions don’t have many easy answers. But they’re fertile ground for imagining different ways of doing business.
It’s with this in mind that I want to share my conversation with Kate Strathmann. Kate and I share many similar concerns about the state of online business and the even the broader small business, freelance, and gig economies.
As always with my conversations with Kate, this might be confronting at times. You might be nodding along, digging on what we’re saying, and then all of a sudden feel a twinge of recognition that isn’t as nice.
But none of this is aimed at your personal responsibility for where we’ve gotten as a market or even the things you’ve done in your business.
Our goal is to explore some big, hard questions about how we do business and how we can better take care of each other.
Stay tuned to hear us talk about the messages we consume that make it hard to imagine things a different way, why focusing on individual success causes us to devalue the care work that goes into making our businesses work, and why small business owners feel trapped between the worker class and the owner class.
Plus, Kate offers some powerful questions for reframing the potential of your business and gets super pragmatic about the choices we can make without becoming a martyr for the sake of positive change.
What’s the ROI on mental space?
What would it be worth to you to get some peace of mind?
What would you be willing to do to alleviate a bit of uncertainty from your life or business?
All this month, we’ve been talking about simplifying and the immense benefits you can experience by building a simple business.
We’re going to close things out here by taking a look at how operational improvements can create a profound sense of relief—and open up mental space that you didn’t even know was cluttered!
Today, we’re kicking off both a series on simplifying and a set of two episodes with businesses owners who have direct experience with dramatically simplifying their businesses—and in turn, creating immense growth.
Brigitte Lyons is the founder of Podcast Ally, a PR agency specializing in getting experts and idea people booked on podcasts.
Sophy Dale is a copywriting mentor, messaging coach, and brand storyteller who helps coaches, designers, and course-creators write compelling copy.
Both Brigitte and Sophy know what it’s like to run complicated, bloated businesses.
And both of them figured out what the real problem was they wanted to solve. For Brigitte, it was scope creep that caused her to always be reinventing systems and getting involved in projects she shouldn’t have. For Sophy, it was a lack of traction due to the fact that she was actually running three businesses so no one quite knew what she was offering when!
In this episode, we’re going to get into how they ended up with complex businesses in the first place, how they identified the need to simplify, and what the process of actually letting go of that complication looked like.
In next week’s episode, we’ll dive into how they actually restructured things, how doing business is different today, and what the results have been—hint: they’re both making more money.
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...
Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash If you’re a freelancer, contractor, or micro business owner, you’re about to hear a lot about the PRO Act—which recently passed the U.S. House of Representatives. The PRO Act is designed to revitalize the labor movement by...
This week, my guest is Justine Clay, a business coach for creatives. Justine is one of the most thoughtful decision-makers I know. And her story proves that taking the time to really weigh your options doesn’t mean you’ll never take a big step in a new direction.
In fact, during this conversation, you’re going to hear about a number of really big opportunities that Justine made—including moving to the US with her rebound boyfriend, taking a job she had no experience with, starting her own business, and then making a big pivot in the midst of the Great Recession.
Justine shares how she processes her opportunities and, ultimately, how she makes the choices she makes.
Can you navigate a financially sustainable way to moving from 1:1 client services to more flexible, leveraged offers?
Yes, of course. And here’s how I would do it.
Instead of figuring out what stack of offers is going to supposedly add up to the revenue you’re generating from client services, put your effort into figuring out what 1 offer is going to be able to eventually grow into a revenue stream that can replace what you’re generating now.
Don’t figure out how to generate $10,000 at a time with multiple offers. Experiment with ideas that you can imagine growing to $100k of revenue or more. You’ll still have to try some things out–and it’s likely that the journey will be a little windy and involve some backtracking. But you’ll have a much longer-term view of your business’s financial sustainability in the end–and that is going to feel oh-so-good.
Now, this kind of thinking still applies no matter the field you’re in or the business model you’ve built til now. If you want the opportunity to grow your business, you need to think about long-term financial sustainability–not just what’s working right now.
To take this point home, I want to revisit a conversation I had with Jordan Gill, founder of Systems Saved Me, in 2019. Jordan found herself in a position that’s familiar to many service providers; she was trading dollars for hours and the path to growth just wasn’t clear.
So she started to pay close attention to how her clients were actually using her services and considered how she could bring them an experience that would actually create better, longer-lasting results.
After considering the possibilities, Jordan found her opportunity. She shifted her business model away from hourly client services to results-oriented VIP days. She created a more financially sustainable business by finding a way to make the numbers add up without adding MORE to her workload or burden the business’s operational sustainability.
You’ll hear all about that—plus how she decided on pricing and how this shift has impacted her personal sustainability in this conversation.
In this episode of What Works, I’m exploring how getting into right relationship with yourself can help you get into right relationship with your business. In the process, we’ll examine learning to enjoy the process (instead of just the outcome), setting stronger boundaries, using boundaries to do business your way, and making your business your #1 ally.
You’ll hear from Shirin Eskandani, Nicole Lewis-Keeber, Mindy Totten, and Jennifer Armbrust.
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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