Exploitation All the Way Down
The Current State of Online Business and What Happens When Exploitative Systems, Multi-Industry Collapse, and Human Capacity Collide Amidst World Horrors
{Before I dive in it’s important to note that part of what I’ll be speaking about relates to world events, both current and recent. As food justice is near and dear to me, I’ve given what I can to World Central Kitchen to support their efforts right now; this comes directly from the “Giving Fund” in my business. Please care for yourself and your communities however you can.}
It’s no surprise that the landscape of business has shifted, but I tend to bristle when I hear people say, “Things are so weird right now.” To me “right now” sounds like this just suddenly happened, seemingly out of nowhere. And maybe that’s not what everyone means; perhaps I’m just being hyper sensitive.
But I’ve been talking about it for over a year now. That’s after seeing the first horrible glimmers of what was coming back in Q1 of 2022. This didn’t just happen. It’s been happening.
No, this isn’t another think-piece on how government funds during lockdown spurred business investing and now it’s dried up. This is a much deeper, and more pervasive issue in the online entrepreneurship space; specifically how it’s shifting in more permanent ways due to several converging phenomenon.
What I saw in my clients during the beginning of Q1 was the reality of what business requires, and how easy it becomes to exploit oneself in an attempt to be successful.
I could write thousands of words more about everything I’m going to say (and perhaps I will at some point), but I don’t want to make this excessively long. Just know that so much of this is merely scratching the surface.
How We Got Here
The “gig economy” and “side hustle” culture are both born out of one thing: the crushing inhumanity of capitalism.
If people were paid a living wage and had their fundamental needs met, how many do you think would spend their free time driving strangers around town? If childcare was affordable and jobs had more flexibility, how many people (usually women) would be so vulnerable to joining MLMs?
Add in a global pandemic where laborers are shown in the starkest of detail how profit reigns supreme over people, and you’ve got a perfect storm of folks primed to set up shop online with their talents to hopefully buy themselves some respite from the horrors.
Self-monetization as a way to not be swallowed whole by the systems they live in/under.
The beauty of this moment is that it really is easier than ever to start a business. You don’t need a robust business plan that you shop around to banks in order to (hopefully) get a loan on a costly storefront and other start-up costs. You don’t need many supplies or staff. Just a computer, an internet connection, and an idea.
But this is also the curse.
This makes it seem like anyone and everyone can (& should!) get a piece of that digital business pie.
It also means it’s really easy for people to sell you half-baked “solutions” that are unlikely to solve much of anything.
What a Business Actually Needs to Succeed
No it’s not a course, passive income, a scaled offer, or virality.
It’s an offering that people want and are willing to pay for, and the sales and marketing chops to get it in front of them, and influence them to purchase it.
If any of those conditions aren’t there or change (more on that in a moment), revenue falters.
To have continual, long term success you have to be both good at what you offer AND good at business.
At its essence, being “good at business” is to be good at sales. Because as long as you can bring revenue in, you can allocate portions of it for support in every other piece of your business.
Heck, once you get enough in you can even hire others to bring in more. But you’ve gotta get there first. Or have the means earlier on to make it happen. Which leads me to…
How to “Fuel” a Business for Growth (w/o Exploitation)
One of the things I talk about in some of my trainings and programs is “Business Fuel.” This is the combo of time, money, and energy needed at any given time to keep your business chugging along.
If you don’t have a lot of capital to invest in your business, you need to make up the difference with your own time and energy. The more capital you have, the more you can pay others to leverage their time and energy on your behalf. Or, in the case of paid ads, you leverage algorithms/robots, but you still either need to manage those ads yourself or pay someone else to do them for you.
The time and energy you spend marketing is free labor you’re offering up in the hopes you’ll secure paying clients/customers.
This is one of the reasons that it’s so easy to exploit yourself if you’re undercharging. You need to be compensated not just for the time you’re doing the client work, but for the time it takes to get each client.
And if what you need is more clients, you need to reallocate your “fuel” to bring them in. Typically for online entrepreneurs, this means time and energy. While some have paid ads budgets, most do not. Nor do they have the marketing skills/knowledge to run them effectively on their own.
Let’s say you have 30 hours a week to run your business. If 15 of those are taken up by existing clients, and 5 are administrative, you have 10 left. If you need/want more clients then those remaining hours should be spent on activities that lead to clients.
This varies person to person but this would generally look like: networking, following up with potential buyers, setting up coffee chats, pitching to places where you’d get in front of your potential clients, engaging on social media with intention, asking for referrals, creating really high-quality content/resources your people would love and could utilize right away, etc.
Does it make you feel tired just thinking about spending 10 hours a week on just that?
(Yeah, you’re not alone.)
Additionally, what if your audience or offers need to shift because the people who were buying before aren’t buying now?
That’s a decent amount of “business fuel” to be spending all at once when you’re already depleted.
Which brings me to my final points…because I know I left you hanging on the “canary in the coal mine” situation I was seeing in my clients early last year.
Collapse on All Sides & Within
We are living in a time of collapse. Not just climate collapse, but collapse of industries and institutions as well. Everywhere you look, something our culture relies upon is crumbling in its current state: healthcare, schools, infrastructure, food, etc.
Even in cases where the collapse is necessary, it often takes out the most vulnerable as it goes. And it’s really traumatic for nearly everyone.
So back to Q1 of 2022…
The members of my group program seemed to be running on fumes. Even if they had unlimited hours to work, they didn’t have the energy.
I decided to get curious.
(Marketing is really just about tracking human behavior. I don’t have an MBA, nor do I think they’re necessary for success. You can learn a lot about people and their purchasing habits if you get curious and pay attention.)
In my curiosity, wondering what was happening, a few things became abundantly clear…my clients, and others in my larger online business communities, were collapsing too.
At that moment we were coming up on 2 years of living through Covid and all of the stress that came with it. War in Ukraine began, and while I’m in America, I have many clients who live over in Europe who were much more directly impacted. Prices on essentials were high, straining household budgets, and changing spending habits.
People also began to realize the “new normal” we were hoping for, one where workplaces and other environments could be more accommodating and compassionate, were anything but. As corporations tried to resume “business as usual” (aka exploitation), online entrepreneurs were becoming more aware of the deeply serious problems in that landscapte too.
People started to reassess and reevaluate how and where they wanted to put their own labor. And buyers were reprioritizing their spending.
More than one of my clients admitted to having a “dark night of the soul” moment.
I knew this wasn’t something that would simply resolve itself in a few months. This was only the beginning.
Because even pivots take resources. You might have plenty of time but if you don’t have energy or cash flow, you stagnate.
This is made doubly worse if you don’t have foundational sales/marketing knowledge that allows you to be more effective with the time/energy/money you actually do have.
And you know something is truly fucked when the people you know with those skills, people who are pros at sales and marketing, tell you they know exactly how to use their work time, but don’t have the energy.
On top of that, pivoting can be really emotional. What if the people you get the most joy from serving can no longer afford you? What about the body of work you’ve already built for them? What about the pain of witnessing their collapse too, while you simultaneously try to figure out what’s next for you?
Businesses require resources. Lots of them. It’s a shame so many people were led to believe that’s not the case. And it’s even more sad that we have an online culture largely built not solely on people’s passions and talents, but because we lack viable alternatives to be able to exist without (self) exploitation.
And yeah— a lot of people who had capital to invest used it on “solutions” that were temporary at best.
In fact, I just did a training on the topic of self-exploitation in a business community and here’s the analogy I used regarding this phenomenon:
If you want to be a successful brain surgeon you know you need to get some really solid training and experience to do it right. You don’t just purchase the shiniest scalpel and cutest scrubs to #girlboss your way into the operating room. It takes a lot of resources to become good at it. But for a variety of reasons (too many for this particular post) we don’t treat building and running an online business with the same seriousness and legitimacy.
Thankfully, running a successful business is not as extreme as being a brain surgeon. But it can be complex, especially with how fast information on “best practices” can spread.
Adding to the difficulty is our penchant for assuming people with wealth are somehow smarter than us, and thus worthy of our investments.
(While I plan to write a whole separate piece on this, what I can say is more often than not (sadly), the folks selling business advice from 7 and 8-figure businesses typically didn’t get there because they are vastly smarter than you or I. It’s just our unfortunate, cultural bias that makes us believe they must be. Thus causing us to fork over a lot of our own business fuel to them, when it could be better spent elsewhere.)
No Answers, Just Noticings
There are too many variables to give broadly sweeping answers here. Instead, I want to end this with things I’ve noticed. Some are newer noticings, and others are things I’ve been aware of for years.
I trust you also have your own. The body is wise if we can get quiet enough to listen to it, and trust what it’s trying to tell us.
I think we have no real idea about the toll it takes on humans operating as personal brands to market on ever-more-exploitative social media platforms.
At the same time as buyer behavior is shifting, we are exposed to more information than ever before. Thus raising the bar on marketing output and quality, requiring more resources/ “business fuel.”
It’s a damn shame social media gets most of the spotlight when it comes to marketing, when other methods are typically far more effective for most service-providers, consultants, and coaches.
Businesses need resources. Ample amounts of them. Different types. All the time. I know we love a “rags to riches” business story, but that’s the exception, not the norm.
The only constant in business (and life) is change. Change can be hard, even when it’s necessary. It can also bring about a lot of grief. Sometimes change is required. Sometimes if we don’t change, we risk exploiting ourselves as we try to help. But often the help people need is tied more to policy than what any one person can give.
It’s deeply unfortunate that individuals have been burdened on a personal level with what should be solved with large scale policy change.
It’s intensely upsetting to see so many people blame themselves when they don’t find rapid, massive success when, honestly, most don’t.
It’s terrible that so many people are enticed to entrepreneurship to alleviate some of the exploitative systems they are forced to live and work in/under, and then are exploited even more when they’re there.
I dream of a world where people have better options. And one where people get to thrive while contributing their labor to something that feels purposeful and fulfilling.
But we cannot build it on our own self-exploitation.
That’s not culture change, just old systems in new costumes.
I trust the answers we seek are somewhere at the intersection of compassion, community, and creativity.
We need to be brave enough and vulnerable enough to play in that sandbox and get it wrong though.
Maybe you’ll join me. I hope you will.
Note: As I live in America, this is written from an American perspective. You may reside somewhere else with better social supports, or types of collapse that don’t perfectly align with what I wrote. As always, take what you need and leave the rest.
Whew! Erika this was so needed. I know you just scratched the surface but I look forward to deeper dives. Something has been shifting and too many of us have felt it but been hesitant to name it. Thank you for naming it. 💖
I felt this in my bones. Literally, all the big overarching reasons I'm closing a part of my business that I thought was my dream. I simply don't have the energy. This world is exhausting.