Fine. Good. I guess...
The liminal space of trying to outrun the horrors of capitalism while shifting culture from inside of capitalism, while systems break apart and everything feels precarious.
This morning I had coffee in person with a friend who’s been a client that I’m also fortunate enough to live near. Even though she isn’t running her business currently, she’s very familiar with the landscape of online business.
“How’s business going?,” she asked.
“Fine. It’s good.” (Or maybe I said, “It’s good. It’s fine.”)
Before quickly launching into thoughts and feelings I’ve been having for the past year-ish.
The reality is that things are fine and they are good. I have great clients. I have money in my business savings account. I have a small, but mighty support team. I have the very best business buddies. I have plenty of time off this summer that my business can support. And I’m about to run my first business retreat that’s longer than a single day.
I am deeply grateful for what I’ve built. I’m often humbled I get to do this work. My clients inspire me constantly.
But I can’t say that things are great. You might think…”If you were making waaaaay more, then I bet it would be great, huh?” But the answer would be: no.
Because I’m beginning to have a lot of doubts. I think I’ve seen too much. Hell, I know too much. And for the past year I’ve had a lingering sense of dread. Sometimes it’s very faint, like a whisper from another room, and other times its staring me dead in the face.
How We Got Here (& what “Here” is)
Before I dive into the specifics of that I want to talk about our hopes, and how we got here.
I live in the US, and while I have lots of international clients, most of my clients also live in the US. Not only do we have capitalism (obviously) but we have zero social safety net.
Because of this it’s understandable that people here are consumed with thoughts of how to make more money. It’s why we are so susceptible to the claims of network marketing companies. For so many it’s not even that they are necessarily chasing wealth, but some semblance of safety.
Most of my clients are caregivers who have all of the demands that come with it, plus the financial strain that accompanies it when you don’t have things like subsidized childcare. Many struggle with mental illness and/or neurodivergence that makes traditional employment challenging. Plenty deal with chronic illness that also makes the standard 40-hour work week nearly impossible, and often have compounding expenses on top of it. And nearly all of my clients hold at least one identity that has been, and continues to be, subjected to systemic oppression.
It makes sooooo much sense that when you see it’s possible to now make money with just a laptop, around your own schedule, and that there’s seemingly no cap to the amount you can make…that we would cling to that like a moth to a flame.
I mean, who among us would say no to making money while we sleep!? To creating a digital product once that could be sold hundreds of thousands of times? To charging a premium for our time?
We know money can’t buy true happiness but it sure as hell can take something that could be an emergency and turn it into an inconvenience.
If you’re trans, having money can help you more easily move to a state where your rights are protected.
If you have health issues, money can help you pay for alternative care methods and additional support.
If you’re a parent, money can help you afford excellent childcare and education.
I could go on and on.
I myself started my first business in 2004 when I was pregnant, married to someone in the US military, and on government food assistance. (This is horrifyingly not an anomaly!) I was also working full time and going to school. It was the escape hatch of our financial struggle. Or at least that was the hope.
As the years went on and I ran more and more businesses I got better and better, as one does. I learned more and more about running a business successfully, especially in the realm of more traditional businesses. Eventually though I realized I’d run up against my own income ceiling.
In 2016 I was at a crossroads. My only option with my business at the time was to work more if I wanted to earn more. That wasn’t a mindset issue, it was very real. So I got curious.
I had friends who’d moved online and the flexibility and possibility of it really appealed to me. I started to wonder if people would pay me for my business knowledge. Turns out…they sure would!
Even with all of my knowledge and experience, when I moved fully online in 2017 it was like learning a new language. I hired a coach to help me shortcut the learning curve. After a slow initial 6 months I was finally starting to get traction as an expert in sleaze-free selling and then I started getting consistent clients.
As a lover of learning I kept investing in new coaches at each stage to help me grow strategically. I didn’t want to fumble with more trial-and-error than necessary. So I would hire people who’d already gotten where I wanted to be.
I also deepened my knowledge around various strategies and tactics so that I could be highly valuable to my clients. Especially since I’m big on custom strategy, I wanted to have a lot of tools in my tool belt to guide people with. I always want to help other people avoid as much frustration and overwhelm as possible.
I like helping my clients turn down the volume on the noise of all the “shoulds” in the online space. The problem is there is always increasingly more noise.
And in early 2022 I started to hear the din of another noise underneath the ever-present drone of marketing.
It was the sound of Defeat. Fear. Confusion. Exhaustion. Hopelessness.
I promise you I’m not exaggerating for the sake of good storytelling. This is not hyperbole, it’s the truth.
On the heels of 2 grueling pandemic years a new strain of Covid was on the rise, right as war in Ukraine broke out, the economy started slipping, and so many other global horrors were happening. Mixed with changes in algorithms and platforms which caused previous marketing efforts to become much less effective. It was a lot all converging at once.
I saw in my clients at the time what was happening. But people weren’t talking about it publicly much yet. Everyone tried to keep it “business as usual” lest their own sales tank.
But no amount of money in my own bank account felt consoling when people all around me were scrambling and scared. When in the back channels people were hiring experts to take their business skills and turn them into desirable resumes. When people had to make the horrible decision to let some or all of their teams go.
I ended up stepping away for much of last summer to reflect on it all and decide next steps. I put my energy into prepping my book for release that fall and tried to be as present as possible to my son’s last year living at home.
But that was after a few investments that really solidified for me what I feared might be true all along, but that I didn’t want to believe just yet.
And before I mention that, and jump back to the present, I want to be clear that not every business is struggling. I have many clients having their best months, putting together exciting projects, and growing their teams. This is not a binary of massive success vs. total failure. There’s a whole range in between and the world of business at large has always been one of ebb and flow.
The Epic Quest for “Ease”
However, today my friend told me about another business coach she knows of who works with service providers who provide a specific kind of work. As she began to sift through this person’s content she realized the way they were suggesting to “get to $250k” without working nonstop is by working with just a few high-paying clients. The “big dogs” if you will.
I nodded along with a deep understanding. Yet another reminder of what I’ve put together from years of conversations with coaches of my own, colleagues, and clients.
There really is no secret sauce. No magic formula. No newly discovered way of doing business that unlocks some level where the revenue is flowing steadily while you work minimally doing only what you love most and nothing else.
We are always somewhere on the spectrum of needing to find our personal combination of price points, offer types, people who’ll pay for them, that also resonate with our marketing. And as personal brands, by and large, we need to be present for a lot of our marketing. Not to mention we have to have enough energy to do this repeatedly, over time.
If we want something to sell, we have to be marketing it somehow. (Usually.)
If we want something to sell, it has to be the right thing for the right person.
If we want to hit a certain revenue goal, we have to be able to sell enough (and deliver enough) of that thing in a quantity relative to its price tag and our goal.
If we want to keep hitting that goal we need to have enough resources to do the marketing required of it.
If we want to do all of this again and again, over time, we almost certainly need to invest in some sort of support for ourselves.
And we have to keep modifying the combo because things change. We change. The landscape changes. It’s never static for very long.
It becomes easy to see how one could have a 7-figure business if what you sell is $50,000. It becomes easy to see how one could get to $250,000 if your contracts are $80,000/year. I could give loads of example on the lower-ticket/high-volume side too, but I think you get the point.
However, in order for all of that to work you have to have the right brand. You have to have the right persona. You have to speak really well to the right people again and again, and continually get your brand in front of new potential buyers.
And if you’re not white, culturally considered attractive, thin, able-bodied, and appear to be anything other than cis & straight it’s harder to “win” as a personal brand. It also helps a ton if you present an aura of having massive success already as you’re showing up. We like to believe that doesn’t work on us, but psychologically, it absolutely does.
None of this is new, of course. We’ve just come up with different ways to do it in the online space. And each time someone figures out a new way, and turns around to teach it, it adds to the sheer volume of “shoulds” that I mentioned before. But also…I don’t fault people for wanting to teach things they’ve found to work! Again, I’m not trying to dance inside a binary here.
Doesn’t this make you tired just reading it? Shit, I’m tired just regurgitating it all!
Designing the future…maybe? How?
I don’t have a tidy ending. I don’t have answers. I don’t know where we go from here.
It’s more that I want to have curious conversations about all of this.
How do we keep going as personal brands when the places we need to market increasingly ask more and more of us? What does that do to our psyche?
Where do we draw the line between telling people to have big, audacious goals and the pragmatism of what it actually takes? Especially when so many buyers deeply want to believe the big dream and are less likely to invest in less shiny “typical results”?
How can we truly shift the culture of business for the better when we live in a culture where having more resources means having more choices? Especially when choices and rights are being ripped away at an alarming rate for many.
Because amidst all of this bills still need to be paid. Groceries have to be purchased. People need to buy their medication. So whether the money comes from a business or a job, it still needs to come from somewhere.
There’s truly so much more I could say here, but it’ll have to wait for other posts. This is merely scratching the surface.
I’m not saying it’s all bad. This isn’t me sounding an alarm bell for everyone to abandon ship. Culture change is never without friction and messiness.
I just worry when I see people who are seemingly striving with everything they’ve got to “be at the level” of the people they admire, when far too many of the people they admire are silently struggling themselves.
But nobody talks about it publicly, because that would be bad for business.
Fine.
Fine.