← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
968: Part 2 - What If You’re Building the Wrong Business?
00:18:57
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- [00:02]
Abigail Pumphrey
Welcome to the Strategy Hour Podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host Abigail Pumphrey and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way. One that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Settle in. It's time to talk strategy.
- [00:43]
Jack Welch
The Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from I know the way to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from make it happen to made it happen and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu Jack WelchMBA to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and has many campuses including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.
- [01:13]
Abigail Pumphrey
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Get FreshBooks now 60% off for six months@freshbooks.com that's freshbooks.com get started today and thank yourself tomorrow. Welcome back to the Accelerator series. If you caught Episode one, then you know we start by getting brutally honest about something that most people do not want to admit. Working harder isn't working. We unpacked. Why? The traditional business model that most entrepreneurs are using, one that rewards more output and will absolutely burn through your capacity. It depends entirely on how you are showing up and doing so constantly. It simply isn't sustainable. Not mentally, not physically, not even Financially. And I know if that hit home, then I am so glad you're here today, because today we're going to talk about taking that first real step toward building a business that actually works for you, instead of requiring you to always work harder just to survive it. I'm going to help you make the most important decisions in your business that potentially you ever make. And I'm going to make it very simple. This is the exact method I use before I make any major business decision, whether it's choosing my next offer, how I plan to deliver it, or restructuring my business entirely. This is the clarity filter that cuts through the noise, aligns with your energy, and helps you make decisions you won't regret later. I've seen business owners go from stuck and spinning to launch new and sustainable offers in a matter of days by going through this process, not because they worked harder, but because they slowed down enough and stopped making decisions from a place of pressure and started choosing alignment. It's so easy to feel like you're just spinning your wheels and getting nowhere. You look at your competitors and you instantly feel behind. I know that has happened to me so many times. Or you glance at friends who seem to have it, quote, unquote all together. Their Instagram looks so shiny and fun, and suddenly you feel broken. You're not lacking discipline or motivation or some secret formula. You're probably just stuck. And not stuck in a you're doing it wrong kind of way. You might just be stuck because you built something that doesn't align with the life that you actually want anymore. Or you said yes too many times and now you're buried in commitments you cannot sustain. Or you're so overwhelmed that you think the only option is to burn it all down and start fresh. But you don't need to rebuild everything from scratch. You just need to stop making decisions from a place of pressure and start making them from a place of clarity. You're not lacking direction. You're likely just overwhelmed by all of the possibilities you keep tacking on I don't know at the end of your sentences, not because you don't know, but because you can't imagine having enough time or space to figure it out. Frankly, most business owners will always have more ideas than they have capacity to execute, more directions to go, more possibilities than they have hours in the day. But this isn't a flaw. It's not something you need to fix. It's an opportunity. So what decisions, when made, will actually move you closer to your goals? What choices will get you living the life that you want showing up with the energy you you have. Let's get clear on that at this point in the journey. A lot of business owners do something super predictable. They try to fix their misalignment by changing everything that they offer. And I know that probably sounds familiar. You probably thought, maybe it's my pricing, or maybe it's my niche, or maybe I need a whole new product altogether. But I want you to consider, what if the problem isn't the offer itself, but the lens that you're choosing to use it from? Because you don't have clarity about what you want your business to support, you start making decisions that are from a place of desperation, comparison, overachievement instead of alignment. You build the business you think you're supposed to build, not the one that fits who you are and where you're going. So today I want to give you a simple way to filter your next decision before you commit to another offer, course, product, or pivot that isn't going to serve you. This is what I call the Clarity filter and it has three very simple questions. Question number one. What do I actually have capacity for? I mean right now, not in your fantasy future, not after the magical vacation that's supposed to solve everything for you, but you just come back more exhausted and needing another break. No, I mean today. What do you actually have time, energy, mental space and emotional bandwidth for right now? Because if you're building something that requires 10 hours a week of content creation and you barely have two to give, that offer is not going to scale and it's going to suffocate you. Scaling something that you can't sustain isn't growth. It's a fast track to resentment and burnout with a countdown timer. So let's get honest. What do you truly have capacity for in this season? And are you building with that reality in mind? What do you want to protect? This question is about values. Not what you think you should value, but what's actually important to you. It invites you to pause and get clear on your non negotiables. What do you want to protect while you grow? Maybe it's your health, or your ability to pick your kids up from school, or a creative practice that fuels you or your weekends. If the way you scale requires you to sacrifice something that deeply matters to you, it's not a scalable business. It's just a bigger trap. Sometimes facing this question brings up grief because you may have already traded away something important just to keep the business going. But the clarity starts here. You get to Decide what you won't need, give up this time. Any decision you've made in the past is rarely undoable. You can pivot, reverse decisions and go an entirely new direction now. I know enough of you to know that you're going to get here and you're going to start beating yourself up. Get enough clarity on what this is, and you start to realize that you have no idea how you're going to go from point A to point B. And then you just surrender to whatever mess you're already in the middle of. I need you to stop it right now. It may not be something you can realign overnight, but I promise you can get there. Just keep doing this in order and I got you. Okay. Now that you got the list of what you protect, let's move on to question number three. In my opinion, this is the fun part. You're going to start with a list of everything you're currently doing in your business to keep it running. And then you're going to separate it into two columns. What energizes me? What drains me. This one is super simple, but it changes everything. What fills you up when you do it? What makes you resent your work when you do it? What tasks, clients, formats, or platforms leave you feeling more alive? Which ones make you want to disappear or run away? If your business model is built entirely around things that drain you, then of course you're going to resist doing the work. You're not lazy or unmotivated. You're simply misaligned. We want to build something that pulls you forward, not something that pushes you into survival mode. This one filter alone could shift the entire direction of your next offer. And then you sit there thinking, cool, I've done this before. I have made this list before. I even hired that VA and somehow found all of this back on my plate. Yes, while sometimes the answer is delegating, for most of us, it's still just you at the center of this business. So you need to get super ruthless. What from the drains me list is truly necessary to keep through this next chapter? What can you let go of cold turkey without it harming the bottom line? And most importantly, before you build a system or train someone else, you need to ask yourself, does this even need to be done at all? Is there a bonus you're just giving away but your clients barely notice? Are you over complicating everything for no real gain? Could you get the same result in a simpler, saner way? Ask yourself, is it necessary to do that thing at all? Let's put this into practice. Take your current offer and the one you're considering building next, and I want you to run it through the clarity filter. You're going to ask, does this match my real capacity? Does it protect what matters most to me? Will it energize me or drain me? If it fails the filter, it's not the right fit. At least not right now. But before you start scrambling to come up with the next thing, I need you to realize that doesn't mean you have to start over. Sometimes a few shifts in delivery, scope or structure is all it takes. That's what we work on inside the co op, and it's exactly what we're going to do. Week one of my live accelerator helping you recenter before you rebuild. Now, I know some of you listening right now are going to have some feelings that start to come up. Let me acknowledge that those feelings are valid. You're allowed to feel anything that you're feeling. Anger, resentment, joy, excitement, stress, all of it. I know. For me, that feeling that often comes up and usually surprises me is grief. When we are evolving ourselves or even how our business operates, we have to say goodbye to the familiar. And you may have really liked who you are then, or how your business used to work. You get to feel all of it. However, I do want to dismantle a few assumptions that I often see pop up. Myth number one, I have to pick the perfect idea before I start. No, you do not. You have to pick the right idea for right now, the one that makes the most sense for you right now with what you know and what you've got. And then you're going to test it. You're going to put it out there, and you're going to let it evolve naturally. That is what's going to lead to real and sustainable growth, not perfection. Myth number two. I need a big audience to make this work. Nope. What you actually need is a really focused offer that matches what your people want and a way to deliver it that feels good for you and for them. I've seen members get real traction with less than 200 people on their list or in their community. You do not need to be Internet famous to start seeing results. But there is one thing, maybe the most stubborn myth of all. If I pivot, I've failed. False. If you change because you're clear about what you want, that is growth. The past served you in that season. Just because we change, that doesn't automatically mean we regret where we've been. The past has brought you to this moment, and you get to choose what you do next. Now, before you move on and decide you have it all figured out, I want you to reflect on what is perhaps the most important question of all. What do you want? Often, when I ask this question, people immediately start listing off what's expected of them, not their actual desires. They poke holes in their own plans and start to sabotage even the possibility that what they want is possible at all. But there's going to be a lot of you that genuinely have no clue what you want. You've lost touch with that so long ago that you and your intuition have lost communication. The first step to rebuilding that connection is being able to understand what your body is telling you. And if you can't answer what you want, I'm positive you can answer what you don't want. If you jot down an idea and your stomach starts doing flips, I want you to check in. Is it because it's a visceral hell no. Or are you uneasy because it's new and it provides a new set of challenges? We often run from the things we want the most because they come with a lot of fear of the unknown. Now, while I'm confident you'll walk away from this and my accelerator program super clear on your Scalable Offer Suite, I needed to understand it is so much more than that. The real win is finally building a business that fits you, one that won't break the second life throws something hard, one that honors your values, your energy and your goals. And sure, you can totally do this on your own, but I promise it will be so much easier with someone in your corner. And that's why we're doing it together inside this accelerator. You don't have to have it all figured out right now, but if you wait until you're fully ready, you might stay spinning for months longer than you need to. So let this be your signal to start. When you have this in place, everything gets easier because you're finally making decisions with clarity. Now, I need you to keep in mind that the accelerator officially kicks off Monday, but you only have until this Friday to get registered. You can find out more and see all the other pieces that are inside, which includes my entire course catalog and unlimited template downloads@creative templateshop.com.com membership in the next episode, we're going to walk through the Scalable Offer Suite. That's my framework I use to map out a business that earns more without requiring more of you. We'll talk about the three part structure behind every scalable business model and how to decide what belongs in yours. But first, run your current ideas through through the Clarity Filter. Does this match my real capacity? Does it protect what matters most to me? Will it energize me or drain me? Jot it down. Say it out loud. Let it guide your deck's decision. You're doing great and I would love to see you in our next accelerator cohort. Find out more@creativetemplateshop.com membership. I'll see you in the next one. Hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it, and post on social. You can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway, or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me, Abigail says and ossproject so we can share it. Okay? Second favor to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from bossproject. I'd love if you'd join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your comments, contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.