What Works

Do you ever get the feeling you’re white-knuckling it through business ownership? Like if you just squeeze the wheel hard enough and focus on what’s in front of you, you can keep your business from ending up in a serious fender bender (or worse)? I’ve certainly felt that way. All throughout 2020, I felt like my extreme vigilance was the only thing between my business and an 8-car pileup. And we didn’t get hit nearly as hard as many businesses. It’s a burden, being able to control situations with my hyper-vigilance, but it’s my lot in life. — Tina Fey, Bossypants That hyper-vigilance can look like needing to have my fingers in every project or having to touch base with every customer. It can look like working 10 hours a day or checking in on the weekends. It can look like not going on vacation for fear of things crumbling without me or always leaving my inbox open throughout the day. This last year involved every one of those habits at one point or another. Sometimes all at once. Truthfully, I’m still burnt out from The Year Of White-Knuckling. And I need a break. That’s why, if you’re reading this at the time it’s published, I’m unplugged and on vacation. Note from writing self to vacation self: seriously, let go—don’t work this week. Of course, “taking a break” isn’t just about taking a vacation. It might mean making space for a creative project. Or making time to work on your business. Or taking Fridays off. Or putting your podcast on hiatus. There are so many ways to take a break from things that drain us (even if we love them) but hyper-vigilance is not the way you do it. Last year notwithstanding, I’ve led my business to a pretty peaceful equilibrium. We have strong systems, predictable cycles of work, and a dreamy community of customers who cheer when we take some time off. But I also catch a glimpse of my former hyper-vigilant self every time I see Sean worry about our clients on the weekends or try to make vacation plans around reliable access to the internet every morning. While it would be wonderful to work in a world where taking a break meant just shutting down the computer on a Friday with no preparation and not giving work a second thought for 10 days, taking a break takes some work. There is work to be done on the business—I’ll get to the specifics in just a moment—and there is also mental work. Now, if you’re not the anxious, hyper-vigilant business owner that I am, maybe mentally preparing for a break isn’t so hard. I have no idea what that’s like. Feel free to skip ahead, though. For all the worriers out there, probably the most helpful mental shift I’ve made over the years is learning that: There is no amount of worry or hyper-vigilance that will stop something bad from happening. I can’t not take a break because I believe checking email every day averts all potential problems. Ish happens. Even the best systems, happiest customers, and most independent team members won’t stop the random problem from breaking through. But just because I can’t stop a problem from happening doesn’t mean that a problem will happen. I can take a few days or a few weeks off without there being a problem that... ★ Support this podcast ★

I did not like group work as a student. I much preferred to take on a project myself. I wanted complete control over the vision for that project, its execution, and all of the details along the way. And when I say I “preferred,” what I really mean is that I still prefer to do things on my own. However, building a business has taught me that I’m not going to build what I want to build without group work. All this month, we’ve been exploring the possibilities for teaming up as we run our businesses. We explored hiring & managing with Podge Thomas, and I shared how I cope as an anxious, introverted, and autistic boss with Annie Schuessler. We explored how we can expand the visions of our businesses to ask how they can help us take better care of each other–and not just meet individual goals for success–with Kate Strathmann. And we explored how to guide ourselves through the process of asking for and receiving support from others with Shulamit Ber Levtov. This week, we’re going to wrap things up by exploring 5 things that are only really possible when we team up. As I mentioned, group work is not my thing. And, I’ve realized that the things I’m most passionate about pursuing and creating are things that can only be done as part of a group. I need a team to build community. I nurture community to transform small business ownership. I need a team to help people express themselves & their ideas with podcasts. Heck, I need a team to produce this podcast! A lot has been written about the promise of “solo entrepreneurship” over the years. And 8 years ago, I wrote about how I believed that solo entrepreneurship is a myth. Businesses aren’t built in a bubble, I wrote. The only reason it feels like we can build a business on our own is because we have so many ways of working together. Only we take those ways of working together for granted. The reason social media can work for marketing? It’s because we’re all collaborating on the content we put there–intentionally or not. The reason so many of us can sell to individual consumers or entrepreneurs with no middle man? We’ve all agreed that supporting each other is a key part of creating the world we want to live in. The reason the technology we use to run our businesses gets better and better? We’re all a part of the feedback loop driving innovation. The more we can draw out how we’re all a part of an implicit collaboration, a quiet team of supporters, the more we can ease into the power of making those collaborations explicit. Entrepreneurship isn’t actually group work. It’s a huge opportunity to take better care of each other. An opportunity to make our little corner of the world a better place through the vehicle of business. And we just won’t do that alone. Today, I have 5 ways we can team up to do bigger and better things. SEO consultant Meg Casebolt shares a story about teaming up to create a truly unique experience. ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How mindset & resilience consultant Shulamit Ber Levtov became interested in the mental health challenges women face in entrepreneurship* Why she took a month off from work to prevent experiencing a full burnout last year* The methods she uses to identify what she needs and how she’s feeling* Why she always starts with getting her emotional support needs met first* How she crafts clear boundaries and direct communication about what she really needs When was the last time you asked for help? The last time you tried to solve a problem by asking for guidance instead of throwing yourself into Google? The last time you told someone about something that was really weighing on you, not looking for answers but just reaching out for empathy and understanding? I can’t remember the last time I did. So if you’re having a hard time picturing it, I’m right there with you. I’ve been my identity around being the one with the answers, the one who has it all together. Of course, much of that has been a mask for how utterly out of place and clueless I feel most of the time. The more I can present myself as a smart, successful, and altogether resourceful leader the less likely I am to consciously worry about being rejected. Today, we’re talking about cultivating emotional resilience and accessing support as a small business owner. In their book, Burnout, Drs Emily and Amelia Nagoski term the collection of symptoms we face as the ones who have to have it all together as Human Giver Syndrome. The “human giver” idea comes from philosopher Kate Manne who uses it to make a distinction between the expectations put on women, along with people of color, queer people, immigrants, and other marginalized groups, and the expectations put on white men. Human givers are the people who human beings rely on for moral support, emotional labor, admiration, attention, and care. The Nagoskis suggest that human givers who give and give without the ability to take time to receive support for their own labor and stress are on a fast track to burning out. I think this same dynamic can play out with business owners—no matter their gender. Under-resourced business owners are often relied on for moral support, strategic direction, project management, post mortem analysis, and planning with little ability to receive support on those tasks—or many others. What’s more, our culture valorizes entrepreneurs who do this work day in and day out, for long hours, with no breaks. Of course, none of that valor translates into a better safety net and more abundant collective resources for business-building. Now, I’m in way trying to make entrepreneurs the subject of sympathy. The upside to building a business, even as an under-resourced business owner, can be immense. But that doesn’t lessen the strain of making that upside reality. It’s hard. And it’s lonely. And it often goes unrecognized. Even though I am one of the many business owners who has a hard time setting aside my I’ve-got-it-all-together identity to ask for & receive support, I have created a container where people to do this on a daily basis. ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * Wanderwell founder Kate Strathmann and I unpack how our personal values often don’t line up with economic forces—and how that impacts our business* Why rethinking the purpose of your business might help you rethink your goals to be more aligned with your personal values* How expanding your vision to include taking care of others as well as yourself can create a paradigm shift in your business Marketers love to tell you: do this and you’ll make more money. Or, do this and you’ll have more freedom. Or, do this and you’ll get to be more you. If you do what I tell you to do, your life will significantly improve. The reason for this is simple: capitalism turns life improvement into a task of consumption. We’re convinced we can buy our way to an easier, more satisfying life. And that means many of us are convinced we can work our way to the money we need to do that. Further, the more we improve ourselves and enhance our lives, the more we can use our selves as a form of capital to reinvest in the market. As Jia Tolentino writes, selfhood is capitalism’s last natural resource. Now, I’m not meaning to pick on marketers here. Because the way we (and yes, I’ll include myself here) market our products and services is only one very small part of a systemic problem. The larger, systemic issue is how most of us are conditioned to focus our effort on the individual pursuit of success. We focus on our individual challenges, our individual needs, and our individual opportunities. And that’s great because businesses can sell us answers to the questions of individual success and the solutions to individual challenges. When their solutions don’t bring about the results we’re looking for? Well, it’s likely because we’re just not as capable as we need to be, right? Ugh. Individualism is insidious. Of course, just because individualism is insidious doesn’t mean we don’t have individual needs, goals, and desires that are absolutely worth pursuing. It’s just that individualism as a system, along with the personal responsibility doctrine and the false promise of meritocracy create a series of assumptions that ultimately pit my success against your success, my needs against your needs, my desires against your desires. We can talk about wanting business to be a win-win all we want but, as long as we’re working in these systems, it’s incredibly difficult to make it happen. So what that does is put our personal values in conflict with economic forces. It puts the way we want to see the world in conflict with the way the world works. Over the last 5 years, I’ve been trying to imagine and build ways of doing business that meet & exceed my individual needs while also broadening my focus beyond only my individual success. I still have many more questions that I have answers—and I’ve peeled back many layers of privilege and conditioning to see things in new ways. Last spring, a new layer to peel back started to emerge. My friend and our resident business radical, Kate Strathmann, made it clear that many of the ways we were responding to the pandemic and resulting economic shock were an attempt at “individual solutions to ... ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How I decide what roles to hire for (and why understanding our team structure is key)* When it’s time increase capacity by hiring versus fixing messy operations* Why you don’t want to clone yourself to get more done* How product and operations can overlap to creating some really exciting opportunities When I say I’m an introvert, I mean I’m a hardcore introvert. People don’t believe me when I say that because I’m loud and enthusiastic—but being loud and enthusiastic is not the same thing as being extroverted. If you spend more than an hour with me in a social situation, you’ll see the life drain from my eyes as my internal batteries release their last burst of energy. I wish I was kidding—but I am not. I also happen to be an introvert surrounded by extroverts. I’m an internal processor surrounded by external processors. I’m an avoider of small talk surrounded by people who love small talk. It’s a tricky situation. Who are these people? They’re my team members—and among them, my husband. Sean and I often joke about how unfortunate it is that I’ve ended up with so many extroverts in my life. Not because there’s anything wrong with extroverts but because it can be exhausting! My friend Annie Schuessler asked if I’d be willing to talk about managing a team as an introvert and I jumped at the chance. I’ve learned so much about team-building in general over the last 5 years but I’ve also learned a bunch about how to put guardrails in place around my own energy and bandwidth as I work with my teams. Since recording this interview, I’ve also started to talk publicly about how the way I work and relate to others is filtered through the lens of autism. So many of the things I’ve always thought of as a result of introversion and social anxiety are present because of my autism. I am introverted, I do have social anxiety, and I’m autistic. That’s a pretty thick soup to be wading through as a manager. The main reason I wanted to share that before you hear this interview is because my experiences as an introverted boss may be quite different from your experiences if you’re also an introverted boss. The other reason reason I wanted to share that is because, before I had the framework of autism to make sense of my life, I was constantly working against myself in an effort to fix things I perceived as problems & deficiencies. While I’m still working to become a better manager and leader, I’m also looking much more objectively at how I can build structures that don’t require me to work against my nature quite so often. In so many ways, my autism is a strength for business-building, writing & podcasting, and team-building. But it takes work to embrace those strengths when they’re so different from what other people expect! Alright, here’s what you’re going to hear in this interview—Annie and I talk about how I find team members, why you need to know what you’re really hiring for before you start looking, how I’m onboarding new hires now, and why you don’t want to clone yourself. ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * Why management specialist Podge Thomas believes your team should be your biggest asset* How to prepare to hire—and how to take better care of your team member through careful onboarding* How our previous experiences with management shape the way we approach the prospect of hiring today Managing has gotten a bad rap. In fact, if I had to guess, I’d say that “not wanting to manage people” is the biggest reason people cite for not hiring. Sure, there might be financial issues. There might be issues with finding the right person. There might issues about knowing what to hand off. But almost everyone I talk to has either a fear or an unwillingness to manage people. So why do so many of us have such an aversion to management? Why have so many people sworn off hiring help? Why has solopreneurship become such an enticing thing for people wanting to build a business? Here’s my take: we grossly overestimate the risks & liabilities of hiring people and managing them. And we grossly underestimate the benefits of doing so. Typically cognitive bias, especially for entrepreneurs, works the other way. We fixate on the upsides and ignore potential risk. That’s entrepreneurial optimism in a nutshell. So maybe this is managerial pessimism? I don’t know—but what I do know is that hiring might be the best thing you ever do for yourself and for your business. That’s not to say that I think it’s the right decision for everyone—but I do believe it’s a good decision for more business owners. This episode is going to be perfect for you whether you’ve avoided hiring to this point, whether you’re considering making the leap, or whether you’ve already got a team and looking to become a better boss and really receive the benefits of building a team. But before we get into the meat of it, I want to paint a picture of the upside of hiring for you. Because there’s a very good chance that, even if you’re already paying people, you haven’t experienced this yet. Upside #1: People have your back Team members—especially employees—aren’t just there to get things done for you. They’re part of the fundamental support of the business. And sometimes, that looks like making sure you’re in a position to the do work that only you can do. They might keep you from getting derailed by an unhappy customer. They might watch out for you when they know you’re under the weather. They might pick up an off-hand remark as an idea for a game-changing project. I simply cannot oversell the benefit of having a team that has your back. Of course, building this kind of team takes work—management work—but it is so, so, so worth it. Upside #2: Other people can create or deliver value for you Most micro business owners—solo or not—operate as if they’re the only ones who can create value for the business. But team members can create value, too! They can turn ideas into reality. They can work with your clients or lead conversations in your course. They can build systems that dramatically increase efficiency and effectiveness. They can even build offers for you! Maybe that seems incredibly far-fetched at this point. Maybe you never even considered that as a possibility. But it’s all true. Of course, you’ve got to hire the right people and guide them... ★ Support this podcast ★

How do you know what content should be free? And, what should be paid for? This month, we’ve been talking all about building an audience and/or finding customers—as well as how those two things are different. And one of the things a conversation about audience-building always comes back to is content. What kind of content do you create? Where do you share it? Who do you create it for? And on & on… The big question I get repeatedly, though is: How do I know what content should be paid for and what content should be free? And I get it! There’s a whole industry out there that appears to be helping you sell content–whether as ebooks, online courses, membership sites, Patreon incentives, or paid newsletters. But what I’ve learned is that we are never really selling content. Or information. Or even ideas. We’re always selling an experience. We craft an experience of content that facilitates transformation–and that’s really what people buy. Because the info is out there, right? Even if your product is quote-unquote only an online course with no feedback, no live calls, no engagement from you, it’s still an experience. Because you’ve crafted each module and what order they appear in, you’ve chosen the course platform, you’ve designed the way you’re delivering the information–all to facilitate change. That’s an experience. I want to share a clip of The What Works Network Insider Hour from this month where I share how I approach this question specifically in my own business and, specifically, how my thinking has changed over the years. I get into my overall strategy for content as it relates to our product and I talk about how that approach ties into our sales process, too. ★ Support this podcast ★

This month, we’ve explored finding customers and building an audience—which are not the same things. Every business needs to find customers. But not every business—not even most businesses—needs to build an audience. Yet, so many small business owners get hung up on building their following counts or email lists instead of doing the things that actually lead to sales. The drive to build an audience partially comes from the false belief that “scale” is the universal goal for all businesses. Many successful businesses never scale—or they don’t scale in terms of serving thousands of people instead of tens of people. They might scale in terms of efficiency or price or team—but scaling up one or all of those things does not require you to build an audience. But everywhere you look on social media, someone is telling you that you have to scale. As Maggie Patterson put it, they’re serving you poison and then selling you the cure. Now look, if you’re excited about scaling up or you’ve found success with scaling up, wonderful!! I personally love the idea of serving at scale and enjoy speaking to an audience. But I also recognize that this is the best way to build a business for only a teeny tiny segment of the business owner community. A stronger, more sustainable, more effective way to build a highly profitable business is to… wait for it… Stay small and do things that don’t scale. Today, I have 3 more stories of people who are serving and building in a really impactful ways without building an audience in the way you might have been taught. You’ll hear from messaging consultant Dr. Michelle Mazur, branding expert Amy Walsh, and leadership consultant Nancy Hess. ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * Why storytelling is good for business and how it can help you build your audience* Why you don’t have to squeeze your story into the hero’s journey* How finding a related emotional touchpoint can lead to telling a powerful story even if it isn’t directly related to the information you’re sharing* How to start your own story bank so you’re never at a loss for a good story to tell Nothing fosters human connection faster than a story. Stories are the most direct way to tell someone else—or a whole audience of people—an important truth about you. Stories give us shared experiences and emotions to build relationships from. Stories make even the biggest concepts or most technical information feel real. Practicing storytelling has been a game changer for me in the way I communicate, market, and teach. And I believe it can do the same for you. Today’s episode is a sort of conversation-meets-workshop excerpted from a special joint event for The What Works Network and Standout Podcast Club. I talk with Tell Me A Story founder Hillary Rea about how we can more effectively use stories in the content we create and why stories have such a positive impact on our results as business owners. This conversation is chock full of ideas, explainers, and ways to experiment with story so you can forge a deeper connection with your audience. So settle in for this conversation on connecting with story with Hillary Rea! Check out Hillary’s 30 story prompts. ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * Why brand strategist Felicia Sullivan doesn’t bother with using social media to find clients* How she uses coffee dates to make long-lasting relationships* Why she prioritizes consuming remarkable content and how it helps her meet the people she wants to meet* How she uses Medium to deliver remarkable content on the platform her clients are most likely to be engaging with “Do things that don’t scale.” That’s venture capitalist Paul Graham’s advice to new entrepreneurs. What he means is that instead of trying to appeal to the masses or market an idea with a million-dollar advertising budget, start by wooing 1 person at a time. I’ve always loved this advice and found it to be unfailingly effective. But… it’s possible to take this idea too far. When I say it’s possible to take the idea of doing things that don’t scale too far, I’m talking about the tendency to assume that you do things that don’t scale until you can do the things that scale. For Graham’s audience, that is totally the right idea. But for small business owners, more often than not, the idea is: do things that don’t scale—and then do them some more. And this absolutely applies to how we build audiences or find customers. The activities that have brought me the biggest leaps forward in terms of the size of my audience were things that came from 1:1 interactions. The things that have brought in incredible clients? They certainly didn’t scale. It’s not that scale isn’t possible—it’s just that scale is a potential result not a method. The best path forward for most small business owners is a marketing strategy that doesn’t scale: referrals, word of mouth, networking, interacting with people online. Even creating highly valuable podcast episodes or newsletters! Today, I’m talking with Felicia Sullivan, a brand strategist who has built a thriving business on marketing activities that don’t scale. Felicia works with startup founders and small businesses doing $10-20m in annual revenue—folks who aren’t looking for business help on Instagram. So Felicia spends her business development time on 3 things: coffee dates, writing long-form articles geared directly to her prospective clients, and referrals. This episode answers some of the questions I’m most frequently asked about when it comes to marketing businesses that aren’t built on online courses (which, you know, is most of them). Get ready to take some notes. Let’s find out What Works for Felicia Sullivan! ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How social media marketing expert Andréa Jones balances two different marketing strategies for her agency and for her membership community* Why she prioritizes feelings when it comes to positioning and messaging* How she incorporates social media marketing into the larger context of a sales campaign* Why promotional content isn’t all that useful for building an audience or finding customers—and what’s working instead Some of the most successful business owners I know spend absolutely no time on marketing. They have social media accounts but they’re for posting images about vacations or family or hobbies. They have blogs but they largely sit dormant. They have email lists but never send any email. They don’t have massive advertising budgets or a marketing team that takes care of it for them. Their businesses are simply designed to work—to thrive—without the playing the games we’ve come to associate with marketing in the 2020s. The topic we’re covering this month is always a crowd-pleaser. We’re talking about building an audience. Except that… we aren’t really going to be talking about building an audience at all. Truth be told, I chose this topic about halfway through 2020 knowing that people love to hear about all the ways people work on attracting followers and building their email lists. But the more I thought about what I wanted to cover this month, the more I realized this month needed to be about shedding light on some of the most pernicious shoulds & supposed-tos that exist in the small business world online. So we are going to talk about building your audience, but we’re going to juxtapose that with the reality of how marketing—or more specifically, finding customers & clients—work in businesses that are booming. And that’s exactly where I’d like to start. There’s a difference between building an audience and finding customers or clients. At one point in the recent history of the social web, these 2 actions might have been one and the same. But today, the conversation about building an audience has become detached from finding customers or clients. Building an audience typically looks like working the algorithms by figuring out when to post to maximize likes, what types of media receive the most engagement, and which hashtags to use to broaden your reach. Building an audience has mostly been removed from the context of finding customers. Sure, the conversation might start with identifying your ideal customer… but it quickly devolves into chatter about Reels, and Stories, and stickers, and the best ways to promote your business. The prevailing narrative assumes that every purchase is the result of a long and drawn-out journey from haphazardly discovering something you post, to hitting the “follow” button, to signing up for your email list, to attending a webinar, to finally considering buying from you. Here’s the thing: I can’t say that I’ve ever bought an information product or contracted a service that way. I don’t want to speak for you here—but my guess is that the majority of your purchases don’t follow that pattern, either. Instead, you buy because a friend recommended something or because you h... ★ Support this podcast ★

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! I can easily remember what it was like to run my business before we built solid systems. Cluttered is exactly how I would describe it. It wasn’t just the operational clutter–files all over the place, to-do lists scattered all over my desk, and priorities that could change on a whim. It was also the mental clutter. Where did all that mental clutter come from? Well, it was a result of a whole bunch of unhelpful habits and patterns. It was people-pleasing and scarcity thinking and entrepreneurial optimism. I had mental clutter from my habit of trying to remember all of the things instead of documneting stuff. I had mental clutter from avoiding conflict and never setting firm boundaries. In order to clear up my operational clutter, I also had to clean up those patterns. Because a simple system was never going to stick if my habits were just going to lead to me cluttering things up again. And I think that’s where we so often go wrong when it comes to simplifying and cleaning things up. We put smart systems on top of unconscious mental patterns. We try to apply countermeasures without addressing the inner game of business at the same time. If we’re building awareness of how and why things get messy or complicated in the first place, then we can design a cleaner system AND maintain it. Which is great. AND… it gets better. As I mentioned, one of the best benefits of cleaning things up and simplifying is mental space. Once I was less exhausted and emotionally drained from navigating my own cluttered systems, I had way more space for actually helping people! I had more space for learning more. I had space for thinking more. And I had more space for getting create. You heard Sophy Dale echo this sentiment in Episodes 330 and 331, too. So, I’ll ask again: what is it worth to you to get that mental space? I ask this not because it requires some financial investment. What it likely requires is the discomfort that comes from doing things a new way. Maybe you decide that to clean things up, you need to start documenting everything you do. Or track you time. Or wait 3 days before you act on a new idea. Maybe you realize that you need to actually check items off in your project management software instead of just “checking in” to see what’s overdue. Maybe you commit to organizing your inbox in another way or following a checklist for tasks that often suffer from overlooked details. I’m not making light of any of these choices. These seemingly small operational shifts require a lot of effort in terms of addressing those mental habi... ★ Support this podcast ★

What Works is all about exploring what’s really working for small business owners. Because there are a lot of assumptions and misconceptions about what it takes to build a stronger business. This week, I’m bringing you something a little different. It’s an interview that I did for Andréa Jones’s podcast, The Savvy Social Podcast. Andréa and I are both on a mission to bust some of the assumptions that people have about what’s good for business when it comes to social media marketing. For me, it’s a small part of what I do. But for Andréa, this is her whole business. Andréa runs a thriving social media marketing agency called OnlineDrea as well as a training community for small business owners called Savvy Social School. I’ve featured Andréa here on the pod before and we talked about how she approaches social media pretty differently when it comes to her own business versus how she manages social media for her clients with very different business models. Good news: next week’s episode is a follow up to that conversation. I respect the heck out of the way Andréa approaches social media and the way she trains other small business owners to manage their own marketing. And so when she asked if she could interview me about the unconventional approach I’ve taken to social media this year, I was honored. What follows is that conversation. If you like this conversation, you’re going to love Andréa’s podcast, the Savvy Social Podcast—so check that out wherever you listen to What Works. And tell her I sent you, okay? I asked Andréa if I could rebroadcast this conversation here at What Works because I think it gives a glimpse into how simplifying can help you focus on quality over quantity. So without further ado, let’s get into. Listen up for the most concise explanation I’ve ever given for the philosophy behind What Works, why I’m focused on remarkable content this year, and how that focus has simplified the way I produce content for social media. I also talk about how I view my primary job at What Works as a content creator—which is a job I love but isn’t right for everyone. ★ Support this podcast ★

How do you make a big change to your business model without making it harder than it has to be? How do you navigate sunsetting an old offer (or a few), raising your prices, or shifting your target client? After spending a whole month talking about simplifying on What Works, I’ve had more than a few people wonder what it was actually going to take to make some big changes to the way they do business. This question happened to come up during this month’s Insider Hour—a Q&A session I host each month for What Works Network members. And I wanted to share my answer in case it’s helpful to you and the changes you’re considering for your business, too. You might also find it helpful to check out these resources: * Free Workbook: How To Create A Plan To Grow Your Business* 7 Simple Business Models For Small Business Owners* Why Reactivity Leads To Complexity* Embracing Simplicity with Brigitte Lyons & Sophy Dale* What I Wish Every Small Business Owner Knew About Making More Money ★ Support this podcast ★

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 Read the full transcript below: If you were to start a new business—something that has nothing to do with what you’re doing now… …what would it be? Maybe you daydream about starting a copywriting business specializing in beekeepers, or you fantasize about becoming a tarot reader for financial professionals. Perhaps you’ve thought about how you’d do web design differently or create a curated subscription box in a whole new way. I’m convinced that we all have a business—or several—that we daydream about. And I believe that there’s a lot we could learn from these fantasy businesses. This month, we’ve been talking about simplifying. I don’t think any of us dreams up overly complicated businesses. These businesses strike an elegant balance between your needs and wants as a founder and the market’s needs and wants. None of my fantasy business ideas are complicated. A few years ago, I wanted to launch a brand of bralettes for bigger busts. Just one or two styles sized appropriately for people with a D-cup larger. And mind you, this was before everyone started selling bralettes for bigger busts. I’ve dreamed up a personal training business for high-performing women—part coaching, part fitness, all monthly retainer. I’ve talked about how I’d love to open a simple, high-quality coffee shop in my town. And I’ve dreamed of opening a yoga studio on Main Street, too. While coffee shops & yoga studios might not be high-margin businesses, they’re undoubtedly simple models. I’ve also joked that one of these days, I’m just going to quit everything and set myself up as a professional Canva designer. I also imagine this business to be pretty straightforward. Our fantasy businesses can teach us what we’d do differently if we were starting from... ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How Sophy Dale decided to let go of 2 of her 3 businesses and just focus on one and why figuring out a novel distribution strategy was a key part of the decision* Why Brigitte Lyons paid attention to what would break if her business grew to figure out how things needed to become simpler* Why Brigitte chose to focus on long-term client engagements* How Sophy is actually able to get more support now that her business is simpler* The tools and software that they use to run their streamlined businesses* And, of course, the incredible results of all of this simplification! So… things have gotten complicated. Your business is a mess of competing priorities. Mismatched marketing messages. Dusty old brand positioning. Stale offers. And the clutter from all the times you’ve tried to solve problems by doing more. It’s easy to think that all of this unproductive complexity is a sign that you screwed up—that you’re not very good at this whole building a business thing. But that ignores the fact that all of us have been programmed from birth to equate more work with good work, checking more things off the list with checking the right things off the list. Today, I’ve got part 2 of my conversation with Brigitte Lyons & Sophy Dale about simplifying their businesses. But first, I want to explore a key aspect of how we let things get so complicated in the first place. Last month, I read a book that I just can’t stop quoting or recommending—and I’m not gonna start today. The book is Can’t Even: How Millennials Because The Burnout Generation. Yes, I’m a millennial—an elder millennial to be specific. And I deeply and profoundly relate to everything in this book. But as the author, Anne Helen Petersen, points out the systemic causes of our burnout culture are felt by every generation—just with slightly different results. Petersen writes: Barring a significant, psychology-altering intervention, once someone equates “good” work with overwork, that conception will stay with them—and anyone under their power—for the rest of their lives. She goes on to say: We’ve conditioned ourselves to ignore every signal from the body saying This is too much, and we call that conditioning “grit” or “hustle.” If that’s feeling a little too real to you right now, you’re certainly not alone. I’m quite certain that there are many listeners out there releasing a collective OOF. Here’s the thing, we can say we started our own businesses to gain more flexibility in our lives, more control over our schedules, more time to spend with family or on our art or in our communities… …but we haven’t had the psychology-altering intervention that would allow us to actually make that happen. We’ve been taught that unless we pay our dues through overworking and overproducing and overdelivering, we can’t be successful. And the way that plays out in our businesses? Complexity. More offers. More clients. More emails. More marketing tactics. More social media posts. More lead magnets. More Zoom calls. More deliverables. When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, right? Doing more and inevitably making things more complex is the main tool we’ve been trained to use. ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How Sophy Dale ended up running 3 separate businesses—and what made her realize it was all too complicated* How Brigitte Lyons realized that her PR agency was letting scope creep make it feel like she was still throwing spaghetti at a wall* What both Sophy & Brigitte did to approach simplifying their businesses* And the personal reasons why simplifying was the ticket to creating businesses that worked both for their bank accounts and for their lives What I wish every small business owner knew about making more money is… …it doesn’t have to be so complicated. I mean that literally. Creating a more complicated business doesn’t guarantee you a bigger paycheck, a bigger audience, or a bigger impact in the world. Adding more and more moving parts to how your business runs doesn’t get you more happy customers or more personal satisfaction, either. Of course, this doesn’t put a stop to the anxiety of feeling like, if only you could do more, things would be better. I am certainly not immune from overcomplicating things and feeling despair that there aren’t more hours in the day. I’ve created intricate marketing plans, business models, and schedules all with the hope that I could pass a threshold of doing enough to make it big. But looking back over the last 12 years… I can easily see that my greatest successes have come from keeping it simple. So what does this mean for you? Whether you want to make more money or you’re looking to make a bigger impact or you’re looking for more time, we’ve got to get down to the fundamental challenges that exist in your business. What I mean by that is that “not making more money” isn’t actually a problem to solve. It’s a symptom, an indicator that there’s something else going on. Making more money is the result of solving a more specific problem or set of challenges. It might be a positioning problem. Or a pricing problem. It could be a customer challenge or a capacity issue. It might be a marketing problem—although, I wouldn’t bet on it. It might be a business model challenge or an operational issue. Or, it could be any combination of those things. By addressing those root challenges, we can create simple, sustainable businesses that make a lot more money. Or we can build simple, sustainable businesses that afford us more time, flexibility, or a greater impact in our communities. 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. ★ Support this podcast ★

Sometimes it can feel like you don’t find opportunity, opportunity finds you. But even then, it’s the fact that you were paying attention—listening, watching, taking it all in—that allows you to act on it. It can make me sick to my stomach to think of all of the opportunities I let slide because I wasn’t paying attention! All this month, we’ve been looking at identifying opportunity and making exciting things happen. To kick off the series, I shared a framework for examining your business through the lens of sustainability to discover your next opportunity. Then, I talked with Anna Wolf from Superscript Marketing about how she realized that the building sustainable structures & systems for her business was her big opportunity. Next, we turned our attention to financial sustainability and I shared my 2019 conversation with Systems Saved Me Founder, Jordan Gill. Finally, I shared my conversation with business coach Justine Clay and we looked at how identifying choice is a big part of realizing you have an opportunity–and how to navigate the crossroads when it is time to make a choice. As we close out the month, I have 3 more inspiring stories for you—all on the exact same theme: paying attention. Zoe Linda Pollard shares how she went from working in a digital marketing agency to starting a social media strategy business to finally discovering that her big opportunity was to focus on helping business owners build & run affiliate marketing programs. Erin Detka shares how she went from running a massage studio to starting a web design business in mid-2020 and how it helped her to get back to the kind of lifestyle she really values. And finally Corinna vanGerwen shares how she started her business doing something that–at most–only a few people had done before. And how paying attention to her past experience and the current market helped her find the perfect niche opportunity! Before we get to those stories, though, I thought I’d add my own in. In the last 12 years, I’ve certainly spotted and acted on plenty of opportunities. I wrote & sold one of the first ebooks in the craft & maker business world. I created a group business coaching program before that was a thing. I took the leap to appear on CreativeLive in front of 10s of thousands of live viewers and teach 12 classes over 4 years. But I’m incredibly proud of the story behind YellowHouse.Media and how paying attention helped us spot the right opportunity and build a fast-growing business. I can remember back in 2015 when I started jonesing to host a podcast… I had no idea how podcasting-as-marketing worked. I knew that I had an opportunity to connect with my existing audience and connect with new people to grow my audience. But it was early enough—which wasn’t very early at all—in podcasting that “if you build it, ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How business coach Justine Clay decides whether or not to pursue an opportunity* Why she starts with feelings first and how she builds a “scaffolding” around those feelings with practical execution* What she did in the midst of the Great Recession to create a new opportunity by generously serving out-of-work creatives* How Justine views working on herself as an opportunity for growth Opportunities always come at a crossroads. Sometimes they’re intersections with big flashing lights and signs pointing to what’s ahead in either direction. Other times, it’s impossible to know where each path goes. Maybe it’s even hard to see that there is a choice of direction in the first place. But when we can really take notice of all the places we choose to go one direction or another, we can see that there are opportunities all around us—even when they’re not the opportunities we were looking for. This month, we’ve been exploring how we spot opportunities and what we do with them once they’re in view. Opportunities are, in effect, choices. And while we don’t all have equal access to the same quantity or quality of choices, I think it’s valuable to notice when you do have a choice and how often you make a choice without even realizing it. With every new opportunity—every choice—there’s a trade-off. You might have the opportunity to hire someone to help you—but that means you’re trading off some amount of control. You might have the opportunity to try out a new marketing channel—but that means you’re trading off time and effort you’ve been putting into another marketing channel. You might have the opportunity to develop a new offer—but that means you’re trading off the focus you’ve put on what you’re currently offering. Trading between one option and another isn’t a bad thing, of course. It just is. No matter what we choose or what opportunity to pursue, there’s something else we’re not choosing or pursuing. That’s opportunity cost. If I hire someone for my business and trade off some control, I’m potentially missing out on keeping things simpler and more streamlined. If I pursue a new marketing channel, I’m missing out on the potential growth that continuing to focus on my existing marketing channel could create. If I develop a new offer, I’m missing out on the potential revenue that doubling-down on my current offer could generate. Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Opportunity cost exists with every choice, on both sides of the crossroads. Except that we rarely notice it. When we make a choice or pursue an opportunity without realizing the trade-off, or when we fail to see we’re making a choice at all… …we rob ourselves of the chance to truly evaluate the direction we want to take next. We’re so eager to consider the benefit of choosing one direction or the other that we rarely stop to weigh what we’re giving up no matter what we choose. This week, my guest is Justine Clay, ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How Jordan Gill used data and experience to set competitive prices for her business operations firm* Why she focused on serving seasonal service-based businesses and how that impacts the way she delivers her service* The stat she used to figure out a new way to offer her services* What expenses Jordan accounts for in pricing her unusual offer Is your business financially sustainable? The answer to that question goes beyond how much revenue your business generates, how much you charge for your products or services, and or even how much you pay yourself. We tend to fixate on those measures of financial success because they’re pretty objective. I can check my P&L and spot how much revenue came in last month or last year. I can pat myself on the back for raising the prices on my offer. And I can enjoy a healthy salary or bask in my profit distribution… But none of those numbers really capture the financial sustainability of my business as a whole—and that can mean I might miss out on the opportunities for future growth or impact. In Episode 325, I defined financial sustainability as having a revenue model that supports the business’s operational evolution and the financial needs of the people involved. Let’s unpack that a bit. Your business’s revenue model—or your business model—is the system that you use to create, deliver, and exchange value. In other words, it’s what you sell, how you deliver it once it’s sold, and what you charge for it. Now, we often measure this sort of “in the moment.” Is the revenue model working right now? Is the business generating enough to cover my own pay and the business’s expenses? Am I working too hard today for the paycheck I’m getting tomorrow? Obviously, you want your business to work right now. But if all we ever do is set up our businesses to work right now, then we’re missing opportunities to build margin and resilience into our businesses for the future. Plus, we’re having to continually go in and recalculate–which creates the sort of precarity that leads to burnout. So maybe your revenue model is working today. But will it work tomorrow? As your needs and the needs of the business evolve, will the revenue model be able to keep up? I can almost guarantee you that your next financial opportunity comes from taking a longer view on your revenue model. I’m in the midst of this with a number of business owners right now. Taking a short-term view has helped them get their feet under them and find an impressive level of initial success! But now they’re feeling squeezed just trying to figure out how to eek out a little more growth. For me, the key here isn’t to consider what a little more growth could look like—that shorter-term view. But instead, to consider what a lot more growth could look like and take long-term view. Consider that your long-term, higher-level growth opportunity is rarely a matter of doing more. It takes a long, hard look at each revenue stream and weighing whether it can adapt to hold its weight in a business generating 2 or 3 times more re... ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * Why SuperScript Marketing founder Anna Wolf started her niche content marketing agency aimed at the financial service industry* How learning search engine optimization led to major growth—and a focus on productized service* What prompted Anna to become obsessed with building sustainable structures & systems for her agency* How focusing on SuperScript’s core competency gave Anna a framework for pursuing growth What does your business need to be able to do really, really well in order to thrive? The answer to that question is your business’s core competency—or one of its core competencies. Your core competency is the key capability your business has or a key promise that it makes that differentiates your business from others offering similar products or services. And knowing your core competency is a key way to build both opportunity and capacity into your business—which in turn, makes it more sustainable. This month, we’re taking a closer look at how business owners spot opportunities and choose to pursue them. Now, I know “core competency” sounds like a jargony management consultant phrase. And that’s because it is. But it really is such a useful concept. When you know the core competencies of your business, you can invest your time, energy, and even money, into the systems and structures that are going to allow you to make sure that aspect of your business works as well as it possibly can. When that aspect of your business is working as well as it possibly can, it helps to differentiate what your business does and how it serves its clients or customers—which then helps you position the business, attract your perfect-fit customers, and set your prices sustainably. Let me give you an example. At What Works, our core competency is built on community-building. But we actually get more specific than that. Our core competency is actually how we create conversation to foster learning inside of our community. We do that a few ways: a weekly member-only newsletter, weekly events, and weekly check-ins & conversation-start questions. We also do it through this podcast—which, even though it’s free & publicly available—is still a key part of the conversations we start & nurture inside the private network. A few years ago, we realized that, while we had systems in place for scheduling events, planning community content, and producing the podcast, all of those systems were siloed–disjointed. Despite the fact that they were doing VERY similiar jobs, these systems didn’t play nicely together and they weren’t managed in the same place. So we made a change. We brought together every single aspect of conversation-starting we do at What Works into a single database. Today, you can find the procedures for creating an event, managing our newsletters, or producing the podcast all in one place. Everyone on the team knows what’s happening from day to day–because it’s all right there. Each aspect of our conversation-starting content is designed to work together cohesively, as are the logistics behind each aspect. ★ Support this podcast ★

What if your biggest opportunity didn’t involve doing more but doing less? What if scaling back and simplifying wasn’t only a way to make your life better but a way to build a more successful business, too? This month on What Works, we’re exploring opportunity—how we discover it, how we decide to pursue it, and what we do to take advantage of it. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how we are prone to waiting until “opportunity” comes to us nicely packaged and easy to use. We wonder if the latest social media platform will be the key to growing an audience or if the new trend in products or services will unlock a new revenue level. But I find that the best opportunities don’t come nicely packaged. Instead, opportunities often present themselves in messy ways—a series of “What if?” questions, a loose synthesis of seemingly unrelated information, or a jarring new perspective on an old problem. And I have found, over and over again, that the best way to notice these messy, half-formed opportunities is to put myself in the thick of other people’s “What if?” questions and the din of their seemingly unrelated stories. I’ve discovered my best opportunities at conferences and meet-ups, as well as in masterminds, direct message threads, and even when I’m doing podcast interviews! We have a whole world of information at our fingertips. But what’s really useful are the ideas that are filtered through our conversations and connections—curated, social ideas that help us turn questions into opportunities. These settings hold one of the keys to new opportunities because they help us see things in a new way. They change our perception of what’s possible by presenting options we might not have ever considered on our own. And this is key. Because no matter how creative we might be, it’s hard to come up with a completely unfamiliar idea. Instead, we use what’s familiar or known to make smaller leaps. This contributes to the phenomenon that I’ve been calling “The Squeeze.” “The Squeeze” occurs when you’ve run out of capacity in your business. You simply don’t have the time, energy, or mental bandwidth to do more, and so you can’t really see a way for the business to grow. Still, The Squeeze convinces you that if you just rearranged the pieces or tried a little harder, you could force some fresh growth. But alas, you just end up squeezed into a different arrangement of the same pieces. In other words, you use what’s familiar to try to work your way out of the Squeeze… and so you can’t quite escape because “what’s familiar” is what got you into the Squeeze in the first place. To actually alleviate the Squeeze, you have to take a completely different perspective and see things in a new way. And that’s how talking things out with others and learning how they see things differently really helps inspire opportunity. Now, I know it’s challenging to have those conversations or connect with people who see things in different ways. That’s one of the reasons I started this podcast 5 years ago; I desperately wante... ★ Support this podcast ★

A big part of how I do what I do is by spotting patterns. As a podcaster, I’m looking for the patterns in the stories my guests tell me. As a business coach, I’m looking for the patterns in how a business is functioning or how a business owner is approaching a challenge. As a community builder, I’m looking for patterns in how people connect and ask for help. As a producer, I’m looking for patterns in content, perspective, and voice. We have a lot of patterns when it comes to our relationships. And I’ll spare you the impromptu podcast therapy session and assume that you’ve noticed some of yours. My own patterns include conflict avoidance, overgiving, and ghosting–that’s my non-technical term for my pattern of just disappearing from relationships. I have good relationship patterns, too. Of course, those don’t make for entertaining and educational podcast episodes. All this month, we’ve been examining the relationships in our businesses and how we make them stronger. We looked at our relationship with our customers, our relationships to our team members, and our relationships to our community and internet neighbors. We even looked at our relationships to ourselves and our businesses. This week, we’re going to step back and take a look at the patterns that often make nurturing our relationships difficult. A couple of these patterns are overt–and a couple are more stealthy. As you listen, I encourage you to pay less attention to the specific patterns and stories we’re diving into today and pay more attention to your own curiosity at how your own relationship patterns are at play in your business. You may or may not see these exact patterns and stories as your own–but I know that your own patterns are influencing YOUR story. You’re going to hear from 4 different business owners today and I’ll help you unpack the very common patterns that I see at play in each story. My goal isn’t to pathologize or armchair diagnose. I just want to help you hear what I hear in these stories and celebrate the ways these business owners have overcome their patterns made really great choices for them and their businesses! Today, you’ll hear from coach Carla Reeves, real estate broker Page Huyette, coach & podcaster Shawn Fink, and attorney-turned-community-builder Ali Zucker. ★ Support this podcast ★

Do you know your neighbors? Sean and I know a couple of ours—but most are strangers. At this point in time, not knowing your neighbors is pretty common. We mind our own business. We go about our own lives. We rarely intersect with the people around us–which is even more true today when we are not supposed to be intersecting with people outside of our own households! Most of the time this is fine, right? Maybe it’s not ideal. But it’s fine. It becomes a problem when there’s a need. Maybe you just need to borrow a cup of milk. Or maybe you’ve got to leave town for a month to care for a family member. Maybe there’s an extended power outage in town. Who can you rely on? This week, we’re wrapping up our series on relationship-building. We’ve looked at your relationship with yourself & your business, your relationship with your customers, and your relationship with your team. Now, it’s time to examine your relationship with your network. All the neighbors in your neighborhood, if you will. So as I just alluded to… Getting to know your neighbors is a disaster preparedness skill. I heard Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown talk about this on the How To Survive The End of The World pocdast. Autumn said—and I’m paraphrasing because I have no idea which episode it was in—when you know who is around you, you have a better idea of how you can care for each other. You’re more likely to seek out community-based solutions when things go awry. This idea has stuck with me. Partly because I heard it while walking through my neighborhood of strangers in the middle of an ongoing global health crisis. And partly because it got me thinking about my “internet neighbors.” It probably comes as no surprise that I am a huge proponent of getting to know your internet neighbors. And by that, I mean the people who are closely adjacent to you in your industry, in groups you belong to, and in the social media platforms you frequent. I feel lucky that I got on social media before we’d optimized our tactics and sliced & diced the amount of time we spend actually getting to know people in those channels. I really got to know my internet neighbors in those early years. We had each other’s backs. When something bad happened, we could come up with a solution together. We knew each other so much more than just as personal brands or headshots. I think it’s legitimately harder to get to know your internet neighbors today–despite it being more important than ever. So few people are actively engaging with social media. They’re planning & scheduling their content and then getting the hell off the platform. In her book, Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes, “On the internet, a highly functional person is one who can promise everything to an indefinitely increasing audience at all times.” That’s not advice—by the way. It’s a warning. And it’s one of the reasons why our internet neighborhoods feel so foreign and impersonal. Social media has taught us to be flat, to optimize our identity, to be as consistent as possible for as long as possible. In other words, we rarely have the chance to actually get to know someone as a human being. To get to know your neighbors, ★ Support this podcast ★

I didn’t start a business because I was excited about managing people. I wasn’t dreaming of hiring a team while I was writing blog posts in the stolen moments between nursing my baby and nap times. Truth be told, I’m still not excited about managing people–although, I do dream about hiring more often. Yet, here I am–managing 5 people between 2 companies. If I had to pin down the biggest lessons that I’ve learned about building a business, I think they might all have to do with the relationships I have with my team members. Which is not to say that I have it all figured out! But boy oh boy, do I approach things differently than I used to. This week, we’re examining how we nurture the relationships we have with the people who work with us. I’ll be honest with you: there are so many different places I’d like to take this episode. There are so many of the lessons I’ve learned that I’d like to pass on. Luckily, the lessons I’ve learned have largely come through conversations I’ve had on this very podcast! And there’s one conversation in particular that I come back to time & time again. It was my first interview with my friend and founder of Productive Flourishing, Charlie Gilkey. Looking back on this conversation, I can see that there were already lessons that had started to come into focus about how I work with people and what it looks like to nurture relationships with team members. But what I can also see is how much this conversation actually helped to solidify those learnings into how my thinking & approach have changed since. Before we get to that conversation, though, I wanted dig into a topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot and writing about some—and that’s the value of maintenance work. I think any discussion of the relationships we build with our team members needs to acknowledge that some of the most important work that gets done in our businesses is often under-appreciated and undervalued. And I want to make sure that we approach this topic with the shared understanding that it’s not a conversation about delegating or handing off work you don’t want to do. It’s a conversation about team-building, management, and relationship-building—and to do any of those things effectively, we have to get comfortable with the value of maintenance work. We need to get more comfortable with contributing our fair share to maintenance work—because yes, entrepreneurs and CEOs have maintenance work to do. And, we have to get comfortable with recognizing the contribution that the people who do maintenance work with us make to the overall health of our businesses. Because, there are some really harmful things that happen with hiring & management in small businesses. There are low wages, weird power dynamics, and the mislabeling of workers. There’s abuse, unrealistic expectations, and boatloads of scope creep. It happens in restaurants, in corner stores, and in accounting firms. And, yes, it happens in coaching businesses, marketing agencies, and online course companies. The problem is that many of us have put the work we do as business owners on a pedestal and see all of the other work—the maintenance work—as beneath us. Whether it’s customer service or project management or formatting content or organizing files,... ★ Support this podcast ★

“Exceptional customer service.” I’m sure you’ve heard those words uttered during a training session for a retail or service industry job at some point in your life. Heck, those words might even be in your own values statement or team member handbook. Goodness knows I’ve got nothing against exceptional customer service–it’s just that it’s a little… vague. And more than that… We tend to associate “customer service” with fixing problems. There will always be problems to fix for customers but what about the rest of their experience with us? What if we used the relationship we want our customers to have with our business as the basis for designing their WHOLE experience. Last week, we talked through how critically examining your relationship to yourself as a business owner can help you develop a healthier relationship with your business so that it can take care of you instead of you always taking care of it. This week, we’re taking a closer look at our relationships with our customers. Sure, we could talk about delivering “exceptional customer experience.” But the ideas that always pique my curiosity are the ones where I learn how a business owner is thinking really creatively about how they design their customer experience. Customer experience starts long before you ever make a pitch. It begins when a potential customer first learns about your business and brand. That first impression sets a tone that will likely carry over into their experience of buying from your business and using your product or service. Customer experience carries on through the buying cycle as a potential customer learns more about your business and how it helps people like them. They experience your business in a new way when they actually make a purchase and get onboarded into your world. Customer experience is, of course, baked into how they use your product or service, as well as how they’re “off-boarded.” But customer experience doesn’t stop there! It continues on after they’re done with their initial purchase–the ongoing nurturing they receive from you impacts their experience, too. And then, when make a follow-up offer, that’s ALSO part of their customer experience. Being really intentional about how you design the customer experience from start to finish means you’re being really intentional about the relationship you want to build with the people who are buying from you–and even the people who never do. What I really love about customer experience design is that it can be so creative! There truly is no one-size-fits-all process. Our different values, types of customers, ways of serving, skills, strengths, differentiators, points of view… they each contribute to making our customer experience uniquely our own. During the course of this episode, we’re going to look at 4 ways you can make your customer experience remarkable and help build a more intentional relationship with the people who buy from you. I’ll share some things you can consider as you think about your own customer experience and you’ll hear examples from thoughtful business owners who made customer experience design a priority. You’ll hear from

Businesses are all about relationships, right? Sure, I think we can all agree on that to one extent or another. But what exactly do we mean by that? Most often, a business’s relationships are understood in terms of customer service, promotional partnerships, and management structures. They’re draped in the same words we use to describe our time and money: optimization, efficiency, investment, opportunity. That’s not the language we use to describe our relationships with the people we genuinely care about, though. Most of us don’t want to optimize our marriages or see our friendships as opportunities for advancement. We want to connect. To relate. To belong. To nurture. So what happens when we apply this same motivation to our business relationships? This month, I’ve got a series on relationships for you. We’re going to explore the obvious—our relationships with customers, with our teams, and our colleagues. We’re also going to explore the not-so-obvious—our relationship to ourselves and our businesses. As I mentioned, much of the talk about relationships in business is couched in the language of optimization, opportunity, and even domination and exploitation. When Gary Vee says he’s “crushing it,” it’s not really an “it” he’s crushing but a “who.” When we talk about likes, shares, clicks, and eyeballs, we forget that there’s are living, breathing humans on the other side of that metric. Our capitalist culture has taught us to reduce all of these interactions to their ability to help us earn more and get ahead. We’re taught to value individualism, speed & efficiency, competition, ownership, hierarchy, and the myth of the meritocracy. Jennifer Armbrust, who you’ll hear from later in this episode, describes these traits as part of patriachy and the masculine economy. Jennifer proposes a different type of economy, the feminine economy. In the feminine economy, we value abundance, gratitude, empathy, care, collaboration, and interdependence—the roots of true relationship. It’s tempting to think that, because we’re small business owners, we’re always on the side of good, honest, sustainable business. But since the patterns of domination and exploitation are baked into our definitions of power and success, we don’t get a free pass. Small business isn’t the solution to our problems but it can be a vehicle for pursuing business relationships in a more human way if we’re willing to examine how we do business and what that means for the people we’re in relationship with. This is one expression of how Jennifer describes feminist entrepreneurship. She writes in Proposals for the Feminine Economy: Feminist entrepreneurship requires that we quit equating masculine principles with success and power, and feminine principles with inadequacy and weakness. To do something as audacious as call your business “feminist” requires showing up every day with humility, heart, intrepid creativity, criticality, courage, self-love, and a passion for growth. It requires accountability to yourself, your business, and to the larger social project of dismantling patriarchal & oppressive systems. How we understand the relationships we form in business and how we pursue nurturing those relationships can be a huge step in the direction of doing business through a feminist lens. ★ Support this podcast ★

Margin is space—the space between and around. There is the margin of a page, of course. And there is the margin around the border of a forest. There’s also the margin in your business–the space between your revenue and your expenses. Most of us don’t have nearly as much margin as we used to. At one point in our lives, we uttered the words, “I’m bored…” and our caregivers rolled their eyes and told us to go outside. The margin between planned activities, play dates, and bursts of play gave us an opportunity to feel that boredom. When do we ever feel bored now? When are we ever faced with a lack of things to do or chores to take care of? Even in the midst of this Great Pause, margin feels tenuous. I’ve had countless conversations with people who fear returning to normal and, with it, the crush of things to do and places to go that squeezes all of the margin out of our lives and work. I’m one of those people who feels anxious at the thought of losing the margin I’m now enjoying thanks to the forced change in my habits and patterns. My 12 year-old daughter is too. She loves cooking and crafting and finding endless ways to rearrange her Harry Potter Lego sets without the distraction of constantly coming up with things to do outside of the house. This month, we’ve been talking about how to work our plans—how to see a plan & its execution as a learning process, how to identity the working style that works for you, how to invite change into your plans. Margin is a key component of planning, but one we rarely acknowledge. In fact, a lack of margin is one of the chief reasons we fail to follow through on our plans. We don’t allow for margin at the start or finish. We don’t leave margin between projects or items in a check list. We certainly don’t make room for error. And the result is that everything we do starts to feel rushed, harried, and full of anxiety. In Episode 298, my friend Kate Strathmann told me that she noticed she’s more likely to cause harm when she’s feeling urgency. We were talking about sales in that conversation, but I think this idea applies to many things—including planning. We’ve inherited a pattern of over-scheduling, over-planning, and over-committing, as well as technology that eliminate our margins and induce urgency—and, with it, anxiety. We’re taught to believe that more is better by cultural forces like rugged individualism and white supremacy, as well as our broken capitalist economic system. We try to tackle too many things at once. We think we can do things faster than we really can. We forget to factor in preexisting commitments. We don’t take stock of our resources before we start doling them out—literally and figuratively. It’s no wonder then that we so often feel “the crunch” when we’re trying to stick to our plans. And when we’re feeling “the crunch” we’re much more likely to take action that causes harm to ourselves, to others, and to our communities. Maybe we ignore our families or intimate relationships. Maybe we pull too many all-nighters. Maybe we resort to choices and tactics that damage the community or industry ecosystem we’re a part of. Maybe we start to believe the horrible things we say about ourselves: how slow we are, how unprepared we are, how unskilled we are—and my personal go, how lazy I am. ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * What Sell From Love author Finka Jerkovic learned from the process of writing her book’s first draft* How she determined what problem the book was solving* Why her writing process changed between her first draft and her second draft* Why writing the book was a “top secret” project Planning is a learning process. When we set out an objective, make a plan to achieve it, and then implement that plan, we inevitably learn key things. We might learn that we don’t want to achieve the objective after all. We might learn that the path to achieve it isn’t what we thought it was going to be. We might learn that we need more help or different help, that we need to acquire a new skill, or that we need to adjust our implementation. Making changes—even big ones—to our plan doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned it. It means we’re learning. All this month, we’ve been talking about working the plan. It’s January, after all, and I’m sure you’ve made some plans for this year! I kicked things off by sharing a bit about my personal planning process and how I’m planning for both of my companies in 2021. Then, I talked with Gillian Perkins about how she planned for the parental leave she took last year and what she learned about how she works in the course of implementing that plan. Last week, I talked with Emily Crookston about how she’s learned to leveraged LinkedIn and discovered the way she wants to show up online. This week, I’m closing out the series by talking about 2nd drafts—both literal and metaphorical—with the author of Sell From Love, Finka Jerkovic. You’ll hear how it took writing a first, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink draft in order for Finka to learn what her book was really about and how it was going to serve her readers. You’ll also hear how she’s needed to find a second draft of what makes her feel satisfied and worthy based on her own values instead of the performance-oriented culture she was raised in. And, of course, you’ll hear how Finka planned for writing her book and discovered her writing practice along the way. Now, let’s find out what works for Finka Jerkovic! ★ Support this podcast ★

Flow. Rhythm. Consistency. These are all words we want to associate with how we do our work, but so rarely can we actually describe a week or even a day as flowing, rhythmic, or even possessing some level of consistency. Variable, external circumstances certainly contribute to our state of relentless syncopation. But the way we think about our work–how we organize it, visualize it, plan it–doesn’t help either. Now, this episode of What Works is a bonus. In fact, up until yesterday, I had no idea we were going to be publishing this. But when Sean and I got off our latest round table discussion in the Standout Podcast Club, we knew it was the perfect addition to this month’s What Works series on working the plan. If you haven’t heard, Standout Podcast Club is the brand-new training, coaching, and networking hub for podcasters that we launched through YellowHouse.Media. Every month, we host a round table discussion where we dig deeper into an aspect of podcast production. This month’s topic was finding your podcasting rhythm so that you can stay on track with the workload and avoid feeling like you’re always behind, which is a huge problem for podcasters. Essentially, the topic is working your podcast plan. Now, even if you’re not a podcaster, this is a valuable conversation. If you’re regularly producing any kind of content or you want to be–content like articles, a newsletter, or even social media posts, this conversation applies directly to you. If you’re not regularly producing content and you don’t want to be, there’s likely some other process in your business that often feels disjointed or for which you often feel behind. You’re going to find something valuable in here, too. Sean and I talked through the common pitfalls of managing a podcast workflow, as well as how to mentally organize the flow differently, how to plan ahead, what to consider when it comes to the technology you use to manage the process, and how to find a consistent pace so you’re not feeling like you’re always rushing toward the finish line. You’ll also hear us work through a sort of hot seat example of what we’re talking about with Jacquette Timmons host of the More Than Money podcast. Finally, we mention some graphics and screen sharing, and I’ve included each of those below! How podcasters typically think of their process–episode by episode How we think of the podcasting process–incrementally over time Episode by episode project management Timeline view project management Sean’s spur-of-the-moment mindmap ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How The Pocket PhD founder Emily Crookston started leveraging LinkedIn after the pandemic threw a wrench in her public speaking plans* Why she went from posting spontaneously to planning out her content and using a weekly structure to guide her* What prompted her to start a video interview series on LinkedIn* And why Emily doesn’t care about trying to work the LinkedIn algorithm So you’ve got a big plan for this year (or even this week or this month!). What happens when somebody throws a wrench in the works? Do you fight to get back on track? Do you flee to something else entirely? Do you freeze and hope that it’ll all blow over soon? Each of these 3 responses is perfectly normal & understandable. After all, fight, flight or freeze is a baked-in biological response we all have. But most of the time, we need a different way to respond when our plans get interrupted. Fight, flight, or freeze might be our biological response when faced with a threat but they’re rarely the best response. I propose that the more strategic—more human—response is to adapt. It’s not so much a reaction to the threat as it is a curiosity about what we can do with the new information or circumstances. I’ve been coming back to a line from Sebene Selassie’s book, You Belong, over the last few weeks. She writes, “Curiosity is a crucial component in reducing our reactivity.” Curiosity asks us to consider how we can approach new information or circumstances creatively—instead of trying to figure out how to fight it, how to run the other way, or how to wait it out. Obviously, we all got thrown for a loop last year when Covid hit. That wrench in the works played out different for every one and every business—but we all had to adapt in some way. If you fought, fled, or froze, you’re not alone! I think we all responded that way initially. I certainly did—big fighting energy over here! What was amazing to watch though is little by little, the business owners I’m in community with started to ease up on that immediate reaction and started to find a more adaptive, proactive response. I saw amazing things happen for people when they adapted—even if those things didn’t always lead to financial relief or more time to themselves. One of those people is my guest today, the founder of The Pocket PhD, Emily Crookston. Emily is a ghostwriter and editor who works with experts and thought leaders to help them bring their ideas to the masses. As you’ll hear, Emily’s plan for 2020 was to grow her business through in-person speaking engagements. Her first gig was on March 8—and then… lock down. But Emily adapted—taking the same strategy she was applying to speaking gigs and applied it to LinkedIn. She’s seen tremendous success on the platform over the last year and I wanted to talk with her about how she adapted her plan, decided on LinkedIn, and then figured out how to make the most of the platform by working her plan. We talk about how she made the jump from posting spontaneously to planning her content & scheduling it. We talk about the video interview series she started. ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How Startup Society creator Gillian Perkins prepared for her recent parental leave* What her normal 20-hour workweek looks like and how she adapted that as she was working toward her leave* Why she describes her process as “batching chaotically” and how making that process what she plans for has made things easier for her* What she’s learned from taking time away from the business over the years There are a lot of folks out there telling you how to get your work done. There are planners, apps, frameworks, and methods. And there are even more messages about delegating, time-blocking, batching, and fitting a whole year’s work into just 12 weeks. It’s easy to think that the “way you work” works for you—and maybe it does. But it’s also easy to believe, if you let yourself, that the way you work has been shaped by the “shoulds” of an entire industry devoted to the capitalist pursuit of helping you produce more, be more efficient, and crank out more value for every hour of labor you put into the world. How would you structure your work if you didn’t constantly feel the need to fit more work in? How would you approach your tasks with intention instead of obligation? How would you create plans with stewardship instead of urgency as the motivation? This month on What Works, we’re tackling the topic of how we work our plans. This is a topic near and dear to my heart because I’ve spent years trying to squeeze myself into all the “right” ways of working and planning—only to discover that I really had to make it mine to make it work. I needed to rebuild my understanding of my work and accountability from the ground up to realize just how powerful I could be with how I create my work and use my time. In the last episode, I shared a bit about that and quite a bit about how I’m planning for What Works and YellowHouse.Media. And, I mentioned that one of my commitments for 2021 is Adapt & Emerge. So I want to apply that lens to the conversations I’ve had for this month’s episodes. I want to explore how business owners find the curiosity to question how they “should” be doing something or what they thought the plan was going look like and, instead, find their own way by intentionally adapting as they go. This week, my guest is Gillian Perkins—a YouTuber with over 450 thousand subscribers, marketing expert, business strategist, and the creator of Startup Society. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Gillian through YellowHouse.Media, where we produce her podcast, Work Less, Earn More. Gillian is a disciplined, rigorous executor who is no stranger to making a plan and working it. And there are plenty of conventional ways that Gillian manages the work to be done—for instance, she loves Asana! But there was a really intriguing part of our conversation where I learned that Gillian’s found her true way of working on big projects—like planning for her recent parental leave—doesn’t necessarily fit the way we think it’s supposed to be done. She calls it “batching chaotically” and it’s a mode of operation I can definitely relate to! In this conversation, ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * What Works founder Tara McMullin shares how she’s planning for 2021 at both What Works & YellowHouse.Media, as well as how she’s allocating her resources to better serve her teams* The 3 commitments she’s made to guide her personal and leadership choices throughout the year* The Strategic Priorities her companies are focusing on to move forward and what projects she’s working on to make it all happen!* Plus, Tara’s unconventional take on goal-setting & sticking with her plans Welcome to the first What Works episode of 2021! This episode is going to be a look behind the scenes of my two companies and how we’re planning for 2021, some of the choices we’re making, and what we’ll be looking for as the year progresses. Not only is this the kick-off episode for 2021, it’s the kick-off for our January series on “working the plan.” This month, I’m going to be sharing conversations about planning for parental leave, leveraging LinkedIn, and writing a book—all things that have taken intentional planning and execution! But before we get to those, I wanted to share not only how I’ll be working the plan this year but how the plan got made in the first place. I recorded this episode in mid-December 2020. And in that time, I’ve already discovered some things that are altering my plans. After all, the very act of working a plan means you’re gaining new information and even discovering new ideas. Planning is a learning process. It’s not about getting the plan right, it’s about finding a starting point and then learning from the result as you go. My plan is never set in stone. Adjusting my plan doesn’t mean I’ve failed or done something wrong. It means I’m learning. So I start with my best guess of what I want to do and then adapt from there as I gain new information and experiences. In this episode, I’ll share how I’m reallocating my resources this year to better serve my companies, what commitments I’ve made for the year, the Strategic Priorities we’re focused on, and what projects we’re kicking off the year with. Here’s what works for me when I’m working the plan! ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How Modern Learners Chief Learning Office, Melissa Emler, grew to meet the challenge her business faced leading thousands of educators through adapting to online learning* Why she continues to work her day job—and how it serves her as a business owner and leader* The 3-part framework she used to lead her community through the frantic pace of change this year* Why she’s prioritizing difficult conversations about systemic oppression and racial injustice in education There’s a little cartoon that I’ve seen pop up again and again over the years. A caterpillar and a butterfly sit at a cafe table, each with glasses of wine. The caterpillar says, “You’ve changed.” And the butterfly replies, “We’re supposed to.” “You’ve changed” is often wielded as negative feedback. And sure, I guess there are times when people change for the worse. But more often, “you’ve changed” means something more like, “You’re not playing small like me anymore.” No matter how much you know you’re supposed to change, no matter how much you want to change and grow—leaving people and their expectations behind can hurt. But this is the process we’re called into as business owners over and over again. This week, we’re wrapping up our series on leading ourselves by taking a closer look at who we’re becoming—and how we’re changing—to lead ourselves into the future. If you haven’t heard the other episodes in this series, I highly recommend making to time to do so! The first episode was with Emily Thompson from Being Boss and Almanac Supply Co—and we talked about how she used a “full body yes” to make a big decision. The second episode was with coach & strategist Valerie Black about how she surfed the ebbs & flows this year as the pandemic rocked her business and her ego. Last week’s conversation was with Alethea Fitzpatrick about how she’s led herself & Co-Creating Inclusion, her DEI consultancy, by focusing what she can control and letting go of what she can’t. Today, we’re talking to Melissa Emler, who leads a community of educators & administrators over at Modern Learners. As you might guess from the name of her company, Missy has been through the wringer this year! The pandemic brought an intense urgency to the work she’s been doing and the change she’s been trying to create in education for years. Suddenly, schools all over the world knew they needed a new approach to learning. But that wasn’t the only thing creating twists & turns for Missy this year. In this conversation, you’ll hear how Missy balances leading her company with working in the “lab” of a day job, the 3-part framework she’s used to lead educators through big change, and how she created space for conversation about injustice and systemic racism in education. Plus, you’ll hear how Missy uses a key question about change and figuring out who we want to become to meet the moment to lead herself and others. Now, ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How Co-Creating Inclusion founder Alethea Fitzpatrick navigated this year by focusing on what she could control and letting go of what she can’t* How she took care of herself during troubling times, all while her business was taking off* What operational adjustments she led the business through as they grew* How she’s planning for next year with more uncertainty and growth on the horizon It’s a bit cliche to say that entrepreneurs have control issues. I mean, our drive for control over our time, our work, our creative output—it’s one of the reasons many of us ended up starting our own businesses in the first place! Our control issues can have positive side effects. Needing to be in control can inspire you into resourcefulness, it can motivate you to learn new skills, it can help you find a sense of independence… …but control issues, ultimately, harm us and our companies. Our control issues can hurt the people we work with and can stifle our creativity. Trying to get or maintain control can hold our imaginations and wellbeing hostage. adrienne maree brown writes in *emergent strategy, “*Many of us respond to change with fear, or see it as a crisis. Some of us anticipate change with an almost titillating sense of stress. We spend precious time thinking about what has changed that we didn’t choose or can’t control, and/or thinking ahead to future stress.” Well, yes. That feels familiar. This week, we’re continuing our series on leading yourself with Alethea Fitzpatrick, the founder of Co-Creating Inclusion—a diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting practice. Alethea told me that her go-to practice for navigating the twists & turns of this year has been focusing on what she can control and letting go of what she can’t. As you might guess, Alethea’s consultancy has experienced massive growth this year—which has been its own challenge—while she also had to deal with pandemic life with 2 kids in New York City. I’ve watched Alethea navigate big emotions, uncertain outcomes, and limited capacity and her openness & grace in the midst of oppression and violence has been astounding. Now, let’s find out what works for Alethea Fitzpatrick. ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How coach & strategist Valerie Black led herself through a year of ups & downs* The practices she uses to find her center and stay present—so she doesn’t end up “future-tripping”* What she did to hold boundaries around her work as clients started to come back* The question she’s asking to find direction for the next phase of her work I used to live in Astoria, Oregon. That’s where the mighty Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean—the northwest corner of the state and the home of the Tribes of the Chinookan people. Every day, I’d walk along the river several times and just watch the water flow. Because we were so close to the mouth, the river actually experienced considerable tides. Throughout the day, the height of the river might change anywhere from 6-10 feet. Not only did the level of the water change dramatically throughout the day, it would appear that the flow of the river reversed. When the tide was out, the river flowed as you would expect—toward the ocean. When the tide was coming in, it looked like the river flowed backwards toward Portland. It was wild. Of course, under the surface of the rising tide, the Columbia River continued its journey toward the Pacific. The river never actually changed course—just the water on the surface. Life and work can create a similar illusion. It can feel like half of the time we’re moving forward… …and half of the time we’re being pushed backwards by forces outside of our control. But under the surface, we’re still growing, adapting, emerging. We’re continuing our journey. When you’re building a business, you’ll inevitably experience ups and downs, ebbs and flows. When things are bad, it can feel like every success you’ve ever experienced is being washed away by failure. But, of course, the truth is that we’re always learning and moving forward. As we continue our series on leading yourself and examining the practices that small business owners used to navigate this wild year, I’m thrilled to introduce you to coach and founder of The Change Agency, Valerie Black. I met Valerie at this time last year and was immediately struck by her mix of gentleness and tenacity. She is both strategic and intuitive, open-hearted and strong-willed—not that any of those things are mutually exclusive, of course! Valerie has had a year of ebbs and flows, as she put it. And I wanted to capture her story and learn more about the self-care practices that saw her through this year. Now, let’s find out what works for Valerie Black! ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How Emily Thompson, host of Being Boss & founder of Almanac Supply Co, led herself through a year with plenty of twists & turns* How she knew that taking over Being Boss on her own with the right decision for her & the vision she has* How she managed herself through turning an in-person event into an online one* The practice she uses to stay focused and present with her own experience* What she did at Almanac Supply Co to replace a revenue stream lost to lockdown Well, folks—we’ve made it. It’s the final month of 2020 and we’ve been through a lot this year. I can’t even pretend to know what the year was like for you. I don’t know if you felt incredibly lonely or never got a moment to yourself after March 17th (or both). I don’t know if you finally confronted your racist uncle or spent precious energy reminding people that your life does matter. I don’t know if your business cratered or skyrocketed. I don’t know if you lost a loved one or welcomed a new life into your family. But what I do know is that, if you’re reading this right now, you led yourself through it. You found a way to cope. You found the strength to keep going. You nurtured the resilience to grow and adapt. And you should be proud of that. I’ve had the great privilege of getting the inside scoop on how hundreds of small business owners navigated the endless twists and turns of this year. I’ve watched as they rise to the occasion over and over again inside The What Works Network. I’ve observed their new self-care practices. I’ve seen how they reimagine their brands. I’ve witnessed them wait it out. And I’ve seen how how they’ve grown. This month, I wanted to take a look back at how they’ve led themselves through this wild year. So I spoke to 4 small business owners who each had a very different experience this year. What they all have in common, though, is a fine-tuned sense of self-leadership. Sometimes that self-leadership took the form of intentional practices of self-care. Other times, it was finding the courage the make big decisions. And still other times, their self-leadership stared down challenges with intense creativity & imagination. My first guest in this series is Emily Thompson, host of Being Boss and founder of Almanac Supply Company. Emily had a big year—she separated from her long-time business partner Kathleen Shannon. She reimagined the Being Boss business model. She pivoted an in-person event to the online space. And, she got creative about how to replace a major revenue stream for Almanac. Emily and I talk about all of these moments and much more. We’ll get into the conversation in just a minute. But first, I want to invite you to join me for a different kind of annual review. It’s happening on Instagram—and every day this month, I’m sharing a different question you can use to look back on the year. So whether the year has been up, down, or lots of ups & downs, these questions will help you reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and how you’ve grown. Today’s question is: what did you create this year? Follow along by finding me on Instagram – I’m

In This Episode: * How financial coach Keina Newell realized she had a mindset problem–plus all the ways she tried to make things work without working on her mindset* The personal practices she uses to notice her thoughts and create new ones* How her sales process and revenue has shifted since she started addressing her mindset–and the incredible financial results she’s been able to create* Why taking a more objective approach to noticing her thoughts has helped her keep her mind fresh and her options open Life teaches us a lot. Some of it is good and helpful—the skills that help us make our way in the world. And some of it… well, some of it ends up getting in our way. But we might not realize the friction that it’s causing or the opportunities that it’s blocking until things come to a head. Once you’ve discovered that there’s a problem with what you’ve already learned, what do you do? All this month, we’ve been talking about leveling up and learning new skills. But this week, we’re going to talk a bit about unlearning. Marga Biller, program director at the Harvard Learning Innovations Laboratory, defines unlearning like this: “Unlearning is learning to think, behave, or perceive differently, when there are already beliefs, behaviors, or assumptions in place (that get in the way), at either the individual or organizational level.” Often, we try to do or learn new things without addressing the beliefs, behaviors, and assumptions that we already have—even when those things are contradictory. For instance, it’s hard to speak up on social media and share your big message if you’ve learned through social conditioning or personal trauma that you can only be safe when you’re silent. It’s hard to ask for testimonials or write effectively about your offer if you’ve learned that humility is always playing down your achievements or ability. It’s hard to charge more for your services or products if you’ve learned that money is the root of all evil. Here’s what I’ve learned over the years: The job of entrepreneurship is so different and foreign to most of us that we don’t realize all the things we’ve learned that block our ability to do it effectively until we’re deep in it. Entrepreneurs have to unlearn trading time for money. They have to unlearn old management habits. They have to unlearn perfectionism. They often even have to unlearn old identities. Truly, the list could go on and on. But I won’t—I want to get to this week’s conversation because it’s a good one. This week, I’m talking with financial coach and the founder of Wealth Over Now, Keina Newell. Keina and I started this conversation with the frame that we were going to be talking about learning mindset skills. And we definitely talk about that. But after reflecting on this interview, I think what we talked about the most was unlearning many of the habits and patterns that she’d learned along the way. Keina and I talk about what she thought the problem was and how she tried to fix it before landing on learning and unlearning key mindset pieces, as well as the self-coaching system she used to final... ★ Support this podcast ★

Today, you’re going to hear from four small business owners who have learned to see things in a new way–to shift their perspective–and as a result show up differently for themselves and their businesses. I’ve got stories from writing coach Beth Barany, Work Brighter founder Brittany Berger, business finance coach Lauren Caselli, and speech language pathologist and life coach Melissa Page Deutsch. Each one has a very different story of how they learned something new and it shifted their perspective. Pay attention to how that new perspective helped them see both their challenges and their opportunities in new ways. What Works Is Brought To You By Mighty Networks powers brands and businesses – like yours! – that bring people together.With a Mighty Network, online business owners just like you can bring together in one place: * Your website* Your content* Your courses* Your community* Your events online and in real life* And charge for them…all while building YOUR brand. Visit mightynetworks.com to see more examples of brands bringing people together and taking their businesses to the next level. ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * Why Dana Kaye and Felton Kizer came together to build a stock photography business–and the important mission behind the company* How the process of making things official helped them learn how to work with each other* The skills they’ve learned as they have developed the new business, as well as how they’ve leveraged their existing business-building skills to give it a jumpstart* Why they’re each playing the roles they are in the new business and how that’s guided the development of the business Starting a second—or third or fourth—business is a great test of your skills as an entrepreneur. On one hand, you’re reminded of all the things you learned getting the first venture or few off the ground. You can put those skills to use faster and avoid some of the hassle you went through when you did it before. On the other hand, there are inevitably new things to learn. You might need to pick up skills that come from using a different kind of business model. Or, you might need to learn some new software. Or, you might want to acquire some new marketing or sales skills to support the new company. Last year, I had to level up my own skills as the co-founder of my second company, YellowHouse.Media. YellowHouse.Media is the podcast production agency I run with my husband, Sean. Starting the new venture was a huge affirmation of skills that I already possessed. It was incredibly fun to design a business from scratch and see it come to fruition really fast—almost exactly how I had envisioned it. I even got to exercise skills around package design and pricing that I had learned but never put into practice. But there were also all kinds of new skills to learn, too. I needed to learn how to run the business model I had designed. I needed to develop new communication skills and new team-building skills. And I had to learn new software, too. Of course, the biggest learning curve was figuring out how to work with a business partner—and how to work with my husband. We’re still figuring that one out. All this month on What Works, we’re talking about leveling up our skills and, this week, I’ve got the inside scoop on a brand new joint venture that friend of the pod Dana Kaye and her new business partner Felton Kizer put together. Knowing what I’ve learned about my own second company, not to mention working with a business partner, I knew this conversation would teach us a lot about the skills that go into building a new business. You might remember that Dana Kaye is the founder of Kaye Publicity, a PR firm for authors, as well as the host of the podcast, Branding Outside The Box. Felton Kizer is a photographer and the founder of Off-Kilter Media. Together, they’ve just launched Bouquet Stock Photography. They wanted to see more people of color, those in the LGBTQIA+ community, non-binary folks, ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * Why Christianne Squires created The Light House, a community for contemplative leaders, and how it differs from her first business, Bookwifery* How she uses discernment to explore potential decisions and choose what action to take* How the way she creates value has changed in her new community-based business model* What she’s done to hone her skills for community building and how she sees her role in the business now Different kinds of businesses require different skills. Okay, maybe that’s obvious—but hear me out. I’m not talking about the skills that you offer as a product or service. I’m talking about the skills that you use to actually build and operate the business itself. Learning how to run a wholesale product business is different than learning how to run a creative agency is different than learning how to run a training company is different than learning how to run a digital products business is different than learning how to run a software as a service business. There is plenty of overlap. There are plenty of foundational concepts and skills that are key to each of these different business models. But when it comes to the specific craft of building a particular type of company, that is its own unique skill set. This month, we’re taking a closer look at how entrepreneurs level up their skills to build more effective and profitable businesses. I’ve been reminded just how specific the skills required to build a certain business model can be at least twice in recent memory. Most recently, I’ve been learning the ins and outs of building a productized service business and creative agency model as we grow our podcast production company, YellowHouse.Media. I had to reacquaint myself with retainer pricing, writing proposals, and managing projects—as well as helping clients navigate the ups and downs of birthing something as big as a podcast. A few years ago, though, I pivoted my coaching and training company into a community-based business. I’ve spent the last few years unlearning the expert marketing and product development model my business was originally based on and learning a new skill set around subscription pricing, retention, and community building. It’s been a ride! I had to rethink how we create value (and what that value even is). I had to take a fresh approach to how we market and sell. And I had to reconsider what leadership looks like in a peer-to-peer support community. This year—both as predicted and rushed along by the pandemic—has seen a wave of new community-based businesses. And lots of people are learning just how different this skill set is! I wanted to talk with someone else who has experienced this shift first hand and I was thrilled when Christianne Squires agreed to share her story. Christianne is the founder of The Light House and, formerly, Bookwifery. You’re going to hear all about these two businesses—and what makes them different from each other over the course of this conversation. You’ll also hear how Christianne has been nurturing her skills as a community builder and how that’s pushed her rethink how she creates value, ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How writer Kris Windley learned illustration skills to level up the way she communicates* The process she uses to figure out what she’s going to draw and how it’s going to enhance her writing* The 3 ways she coaches herself through the hard parts in learning a new skill* Where she draws motivation from to continue to learn new things and level up her skills The very first online course I ever created taught students how to build a WordPress website. I created the course about 10 years ago before drag & drop page builders were the norm and before premium themes were easily customized. Back then, building a website was a special kind of skill. If you wanted something custom, you had to know some HTML and some CSS and you had to know where to put it to make it do the things you wanted to do. The first time I taught the class, the sheer newness of what was involved hit the students like a tsunami. They felt in over their heads and they were quickly drowning among the flotsam & jetsam of page templates and child themes and stylesheets. I felt horrible. I wanted to teach them this new skill so badly. I wanted them to feel powerful and in control of their online presences. But instead, I felt like I had resigned them to the horrible fate of feeling confused and overwhelmed by something that seemed so central to building their businesses. We worked through it… but I knew I didn’t want a repeat of that. So the next time I taught the class, instead of diving into the first lesson, I shared a video with them where I explained what was going to happen—not in the class itself, but in their minds. I asked them to remember back to the last time they were learning something brand new—something that they had no point of reference for. I asked them to remember that it was hard at first but, little by little, it started to make sense and they were able to apply what they were learning. After I set this expectation, it was a little easier for everyone. There were still plenty of questions and problems learning the material—but there were far fewer freakouts and panic attacks! Not only were my students learning to build their websites, I was learning a valuable lesson about what it takes to learn a new, foreign skill as an adult. This month, we’re exploring how we level up by learning new skills. We all bring a unique skill set to our businesses. Some of us bring the skills we learned in school or corporate careers that transfer directly into the work we’re doing today. Others bring certifications and licenses from careers that no longer serve us. Some of us bring skills from our hobbies, personal adventures, or relationships. Others bring skills they had no idea would be useful but have been invaluable to their growth. The way we leverage our existing skills and learn new ones helps us to creatively solve business problems, invest ourselves in future outcomes, and differentiate our brands. Over the course of this month, we’ll hear from a number of small business owners who have spent time and energy on learning a new skill so they could level up some aspect of their businesses—or, in one case, start a new one. You’ll hear from Christianne Squires who committed to leveling up her community-building skills so she could serve her people in a new way. ★ Support this podcast ★

I have a confession to make. This month, I committed to speaking up on Instagram Stories every day. I pledged to share something–not necessarily profound, not necessarily useful or valuable–just something. I didn’t follow through. In fact, as of the time of this recording, I’ve been hiding out for more than a week–not really publicly posting anything anywhere. What had been a consistent effort to creatively share my ideas, reflections, and stories has ground to a halt. Today, we’re talking about all the things that keep us from speaking up–and how we can work through them. This is far from the first time I’ve gone dark on social media. It’s the first thing to go when I start to feel overwhelmed and depressed. I’ve been fighting back a period of depression for over a year now and it’s just gotten to be too much. There is something different about going dark this time, though. So far, it’s only impacted social media. And, frankly, I don’t need to constantly post to social media to run my companies. What’s really different about how I’ve kept speaking up outside of social media is that systems and routines that I’ve put in place to help me maintain a consistent practice of using my voice and sharing my ideas. The What Works Weekly newsletter has still be going out every week. This podcast, of course, has still been produced every week. I’m still showing up to share and lead The What Works Network. My businesses can surviving without social media. They can’t survive without me speaking up. Twelve years into this small business leadership thing and I KNOW that my mental health impacts my ability to share. But it doesn’t have to stop me in my tracks. I can focus on systems that inspire me to share my thoughts and give me direction when I need it. I can commit to a sustainable pace for using my voice and pull back on any extra effort when it gets to be too much–without feeling bad about myself or my capacity. Speaking up for yourself and your business is no joke. Putting your ideas, stories, or information out there can be daunting. Any number of things might be going through your mind: Is this really helpful? Hasn’t this already been said a million times before? What if someone yells at me? Who am I to say this? What if they think I’m weird? Is anyone paying attention at all? What if it goes viral and I get inundated with replies? And it’s not just the head stuff that stops us! Sometimes the challenge is finding our people and speaking directly to them. Sometimes the obstacle is finding a message that makes a connection. Sometimes it’s the logistics or the technology that throw you for a loop. So many things can stand in the way of us speaking up for ourselves and our small businesses. Today, I’ve got 5 stories for you. Each story is from a small business owner who identified a hurdle they had to speaking up and found what worked for them to overcome it. You’ll hear from

In This Episode: * How Rebel Therapist podcast host Annie Schuessler found her voice as a podcaster—and how her show has evolved over time* How she plans her content for her podcast and selects the guests she’ll have on the show* Why she decided to start pitching other podcasts to have her on—and the process she uses to do it* The techniques Annie uses to break through the fear of asking to be on other podcasts The number one way I’ve built my audience might surprise you. It’s NOT through especially useful or creative content. It’s not through some top secret ad targeting strategy. It’s definitely not through social media. It’s not even through this podcast. The number one way I’ve built my audience is by borrowing other people’s audiences. When I had a craft and design blog, I borrowed other people’s audiences by doing extensive write ups on makers I loved—who then enthusiastically shared that write up with their audience. When I started doing more business coaching & education, I guest posted on big name online marketing sites and their readers followed the links back to my site. As time went on, I borrowed audiences by appearing on podcasts and speaking for free. And of course, I borrowed the audience at CreativeLive for years—which is a move I still benefit from to this day. There are other ways to grow an audience—things like search engine optimization, PR, and—of course—advertising. But even at the heart of these tactics is the strategy of borrowing audiences from other sources. Now, even though borrowing audiences is something that I know works for me, I all too often forget to build that work into my plans. During our last What Works Network virtual conference, sales strategist Allison Davis shared that it’s the only way she’s working to grow her audience. Sure, she has some social media presence but her core strategy is borrowing other people’s audiences. Once Allison shared that, it became a hot topic of conversation: how do you borrow someone’s audience? How do you get in touch with the people who have the right audience for you and your work? How do you make the most of these opportunities? Today, we’re answering a bunch of those questions with Annie Schuessler from Rebel Therapist. Annie helps therapists and other healers move their businesses beyond private practice. She has her own podcast—also called Rebel Therapist—and we talk about how hosting her show has helped to use her voice. But we also dive into how Annie has been borrowing other people’s audiences all year long through a podcast tour, a concerted effort to pitch other hosts and appear on other shows. Not only has her tour been successful—but it’s helped create incredible results in her business, like overselling her last Create Your Program group coaching offer. We talk about how Annie finds shows to pitch, the research she does to pitch them, how she tracks her pitching, and how she’s overcome the fear she first felt when getting started on this project. Now, let’s find out what works for Annie Schuessler! What Works Is Brought To You By ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * Why Jessica Williams created #jesspicks, the curated weekly newsletter for sidehustlers who love their day job* How each edition of the newsletter is structured* Why going “all in” has been the key to growing her subscriber list* What her weekly workflow looks like to put the newsletter together* How curating the newsletter has helped her to find her confidence as a writer When you think about someone sharing their message, you think about the writers, the speakers, the artists. You think about people who are creating original work. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to constantly be creating original work and finding something new to say. After all, that’s how we prove how valuable we are, right? But creating original work isn’t the only way to use your voice. Curators use their unique perspective and keen eye for connecting the dots to create value. They build and share their message by surfacing the work of others. They tell stories through the relationships between the pieces they choose to display side by side. I see my role as the host of this podcast as one of a curator. The way we choose the topics we’re going to cover, the conversations we’re going to showcase, and the small business owners we’re going to talk to is all an act of curation. I take a lot of pride in curating this show and thinking through how each theme relates to the next, how each conversation builds on the last, and how each guest is the opportunity to highlight a different story. I also send out a weekly newsletter where, yes, I do write an original little piece as a letter, but I also share a set of links that have caught my eye over the last week or so. It’s an opportunity for me to show my point of view by highlighting ideas and voices that don’t necessarily “make the rounds” in the small business space. By the way, if you don’t get What Works Weekly, can can subscribe by going to explorewhatworks.com/weekly I was inspired to add curation to my communication and marketing strategy by Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger and currently creating & curating at Unemployable. Brian started talking about curation versus creation as a way to share your message and make an impact in the summer of 2019. He said that he had started to elevate the role of editor over writer because while there is a surplus of good writing, there was a poverty of attention. In that way, curation does double duty. It’s not only a way to share your perspective with your audience, it’s a way to do them the service of wading through the sea of original works to deliver what’s important to them. I’m all in on curating. And I think it’s something that most small business owners should consider as a potential way to use their voice and highlight their perspective. So to take things really meta, as I was curating this month’s Speak Up theme, I knew I wanted to include a curator. Jessica Williams came to mind. Jessica is the curator behind #jesspicks, a weekly newsletter for side hustlers. Jessica is herself a side hustler, working during the day at &yet, ★ Support this podcast ★

I started my very first blog back on Xanga in 2003. I might be your internet grandma. I used my Xanga blog to share what I was thinking about my senior year of college and process a lot of the reading that I was doing about my field of study, contemporary and postmodern Christian theology. It was also full of personal updates and the musings of a 21-year-old young woman. Through my Xanga blog, I got to connect with people online. Some were old friends from high school. Others were strangers from the internet. It was exactly the kind of online social interaction that I loved as a hardcore introvert. Back when I was writing my Xanga blog, we were blissfully ignorant of the possibility that the companies that we used to facilitate this kind of online social interaction could conspire to use our data and online activity to manipulate us. All most of us saw was the possibility of a connected online community. I’m Tara McMullin and this is What Works, the show that takes you behind the scenes of how small business owners are building stronger businesses through uncompromising commitment and decisive action. My little Xanga blog didn’t last more than a year. But when I did find my way back to what was now being called social media, it was like rekindling lost love. I fell head over heels for sharing my experiences and opinions while meeting new people and cultivating new relationships online. I happily admit that I spent loads of time on social media connecting with people—and, in the process, connected my way to a large audience and plenty of authority. But then, things started to get a little rocky. I started playing to the audience instead of connecting with people. The updates and emails I shared were less about connecting and more about broadcasting. I stopped writing for one person at a time and started writing for thousands. These relationships that felt so natural and genuine started to feel strained. My interactions started to be less about connection and more about transaction. Over the last few years, I’ve been working on things. I’ve been focused on prioritizing connection again and sharing more naturally again, instead of trying to work the system and grow my audience. And I like it. I’m back to meeting new people, having loads of side conversations, and sharing without some grand plan. That leads me to today’s guest. Suzanne Chadwick is so good at showing up and connecting with people. In fact, she does it every week day morning—a habit we talk about during this conversation. Suz is a bold branding, business, and speaker coach who helps women create businesses that fit their lifestyle. Her coaching helps female entrepreneurs show up in bold ways and share their messages online and on stages. I invited Suz onto the show to talk about how she cultivates the confidence and go-getterness that exudes from the way she speaks up. And I expected to have a conversation about going big—and we did—but my big takeaway from this conversation is in how much she prioritizes the small ways she can connect with people, the little things she does to make people feel seen and included. So I hope you listen for that and consider how that can apply to the way you speak up and show up, too. Now, let’s find out what works for Suz Chadwick! ★ Support this podcast ★

In This Episode: * How Tell Me A Story founder Hillary Rea realized that she’d let her message get watered down* Why trying to please people who weren’t really her ideal clients contributed to losing track of her voice* The concrete steps she took to take a stand and show up more completely* What she’s still wrestling with as she deliberately speaks up in more potent and powerful ways To quote the great Lin-Manuel Miranda: If you stand for nothing, what will you fall for? Whether you’re a Hamilfan or not, you get the gist: you have to be clear on your values and what you believe or else you risk getting caught up in what others what you to believe or how they want you to be. This applies in life, in politics, and—of course—in business too. And today, more than ever, people expect businesses and their leaders to speak up, to share what they stand for, to claim what makes them different, and to tell their stories without hesitation or equivocation. So this month, we’re looking at different ways that small business owners take a stand, show up, and speak up. Speaking up is—for sure—one of the things that business owners must do decisively and consistently to build a stronger business. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to shout. You don’t have to plaster social media channels with your messages or barrage your potential customers with emails. It’s more about finding your voice, being willing to show up, and creating a connection with the people you want to reach. Sometimes that happens on a very small and powerful scale—other times, it happens on a much bigger scale. When I talk about “speaking up” here, what I’m not necessarily talking about is growing your audience or building a personal brand. Instead, I’m talking about the system you create that allows you to communicate clearly and effectively with the people who matter most to you. And to go back to that line from Hamilton: it’s about taking a stand so that you don’t fall for all the suggestions of how you “should” be presenting yourself or your message in order to get noticed. The more you understand your own voice and your unique communication style, the more effectively you can design a system for being heard—whether that’s in your marketing, in your team communication, or in your customer communications. So I have 4 stories for you this month: one about speaking with confidence on stage & off, one about podcasting, one about newsletters, and—today’s story—one about taking a stand and its ripple effects on a business. My guest today is Hillary Rea, the founder of Tell Me A Story. Hillary helps entrepreneurs, leaders, and change makers identify that personal narratives that create powerful communication. Now, you might think Hillary had this whole speaking up and taking a stand thing under control. She did, too. In fact, in episode 226, Hillary shared how she’s found the confidence to stand on stage and share vulnerable personal experiences through storytelling. But earlier this year, just after Covid-19 upended her business, Hillary realized she had let herself, her story, and her stand get watered down. She was trying to squeeze into a mold that she assumed other people wa... ★ Support this podcast ★

This is our 300th episode of What Works! To celebrate, What Works host Tara McMullin and top podcasters, Emily Thompson (Being Boss), Elsie Escobar (The Feed, She Podcasts), and Jessica Kupferman (She Podcasts) came together for a live podcast recording. We looked back at 2020 and shared what we’ve learned about ourselves, our shows, and our businesses. Thank you so much for sharing this journey with us over the last 5 years! *** Emily Thompson, host of Being Boss, is a long-time business coach and creative warrior, helping retailers, makers, coaches, and designers develop an online business model and grow their creative business. She is also the founder of Almanac Supply Co., a retail business that makes and curates products that help people connect with nature. Elsie Escobar, co-host of The Feed and She Podcasts, is a die-hard podcast junkie who lives, breathes and works the medium, and has since 2006. She’s worked with hundreds of podcasters, sharing tools for better production, educating them in the fast-moving podcasting space, as well as cultivating a strongly engaged community through The Feed: The Official Libsyn podcast which I both co-host and produce. Jessica Kupferman, co-host of She Podcasts, is a marketing and sales expert with a history of being both the devil’s advocate and the first person to give someone the benefit of the doubt. Along with Elsie, she’s on a mission to grow the number of successful woman-hosted podcasts, thereby giving light and voice to the millions of messages that need to be shared with the world. Tara McMullin, host of What Works, is building stronger small businesses through her podcast and The What Works Network. She’s also the co-founder of YellowHouse.Media, a full-service podcast production agency that helps entrepreneurs create standout podcasts that grow their businesses. ★ Support this podcast ★

Very few small business owners start out as confident sales people. In fact, selling is quite often a new business owner’s #1 fear. Many avoid selling. Some stumble through it. And still others look to leaders and sales trainers to learn their methods and duplicate their models. In that process, they learn what works… but they often also learn that “what works” doesn’t necessarily work for them. All this month, we’ve been examining sales and selling–asking “what works?” when it comes to asking someone to buy what we’re selling. First, I talked with Autumn Witt Boyd who shared how she realized that she’d taken the trend toward sales automation a little too far–and has since developed a hybrid process that’s high touch without overwhelming her. Then, I talked with Katie Hunt who shared how she had a fabulous new offer launch without spending tons of money on advertising or recruiting an army of affiliates. Last week, I shared my conversation with Kate Strathmann where we both shared our reflections on building less harmful sales systems–systems that are less manipulative, less urgent, and more in line with our values. This week, I’ve got 4 more stories to share with you from small business owners who have intentionally done things their own way when it comes to sales and selling. They’ve found what truly works for them–even if it bucks the prevailing wisdom or would make a bro marketing expert role his or her eyes. Before we get there, though… I wanted to share some questions you can use to examine your own sales process. First, I want to say that I don’t think learning someone else’s sales system is a bad thing. And I don’t think every effective sales system being taught is inherently manipulative or harmful. Even if you plan to find your own version of what works, learning about effective sales systems can help you get creative with the way you do want to go about selling your offers. When it goes wrong is when we don’t take the time to carefully examine and analyze what’s going on in a sales system that we’re learning and, instead, just naively follow the instructions. So these questions–which I formulated from the conversations we’ve had this month–can help you take a closer look at a sales system that you’ve learned or one you’ve created and make sure that it’s creating the experience you want your customers to have. The first question is: Does this sales process mimic the experience I want customers to have after they buy? Both Kate and Autumn talked about how they want to align what was special about the type of experience they offered with the way sales conversations actually went down. For Autumn, that meant incorporating more personalized, human conversations into what had become a really automated experience. For Kate, it meant making sure that the collaborative, co-creative experience she was building also carried over into the content and conversations she was having around her program. Before you decide on what your sales process should look like, ★ Support this podcast ★

This show is called What Works for a reason. Sometimes it’s a declaration: this is what worked for this small business. And often, it’s a question, “What works?” Today’s episode is very much a question, many questions, really: * What works when it comes to selling when you want to avoid manipulative or exploitative practices?* What works when your values conflict with many of the best practices of selling online but you still want people to buy your stuff?* What works when it comes to sales in a business that is actively anti-racist and anti-capitalist? And even more bluntly: Can you even sell things without causing harm or perpetuating harmful systems? My friend Kate Strathmann is the founder of Wanderwell, a bookkeeping and consulting firm that grows thriving businesses while investigating new models for being in business. Recently, Kate took a bit of a detour from how she’s used to building her business, which is 90% referral based and fueled by deep relationship- and community-building. She decided to offer a small group program called the Equitable Business Incubator as a way of exploring anti-capitalist business practices and how they apply to the small businesses we’re building. To fill the program, Kate need to sell differently. Which led her to asking the question: Can you even sell things as a anti-capitalist? While that might not be your specific question, I have a feeling that you too have wondering how you can effectively sell your offers without causing harm, perpetuating harmful systems, or damaging relationships. And that’s why I knew Kate and I needed to explore this topic on the show. This is a conversation about what a kinder, less harmful sales process could look like—and it probably contains more questions than answers. But I’m confident those questions can help you find the answers that are right for you and the sales system that you want to build to make your business stronger. We start out by defining what we’re really talking about when we talk about capitalism and anti-capitalism. Then, Kate shares how the Equitable Business Incubator came to be and how she ended up selling it. And then we dig into what makes many of the sales formulas and best practices being taught today problematic—and how to think differently to create your own alternative practices. Now, let’s take a look at what works for creating less harmful sales systems! What Works Is Brought To You By Mighty Networks powers brands and businesses – like yours! – that bring people together.With a Mighty Network, online business owners just like you can bring together in one place: * Your website* Your content* Your courses* Your community* Your events online and in real life* And charge for them…all while building YOUR brand. Visit mightynetworks.com to see more examples of brands bringing people together and taking their businesses to the next level. ★ Support this podcast ★