← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
969: Part 3 - How I Stopped Being the Product
00:14:40
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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.
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Get FreshBooks now 60% off for 6 months@freshbooks.com that's freshbooks.com get started today and thank yourself tomorrow. Hey friend. Welcome back to the Accelerator series. So far we've tackled two of the biggest roadblocks keeping entrepreneurs stuck. In episode one, we got brilliant brutally honest about a truth most people are too scared to say out loud. Working harder isn't working. We unpacked by the traditional business model, one that rewards endless output, burns through your capacity, and depends entirely on you showing up constantly. It's just not sustainable. Then in episode two, we took the first real step to reclaim your business and your energy. I introduced you to my Clarity Filter, the three part tool I use before making any major decision in my business. Because you don't need to burn it all down, but you do need to make decisions based on what works for your life, not just your bank account. And now it's time to talk about the shift that changed everything for me and for so many business owners I worked with. I stopped being the product. This one realization became the dividing line between an inevitable burnout and sustainable growth. Between me being stuck at the center of everything and building a business that could run with or without me. And today, I want to help you make that shift, too. Somewhere along the way, you started to believe a lie. That in order for your business to succeed, it had to revolve around you. That you needed to be at the center of every process, every delivery, every dollar earned. And it makes sense, right? Especially if you're a coach or a consultant or a service provider. The business started because of you. Your knowledge, your expertise, your care. But over time, that model creates the super dangerous dynamic. You are the product. You are the delivery system. You are the brand, the bottleneck, the liability, and the asset. Which means the moment you get sick, need a break, or you have to step away, the business stops, the revenue halts, and the pressure just increases. And whether you realize it or not, it creates a super fragile business model. One that's constantly on the verge of collapse. You're not building a business, you're building dependency. But there's a reason so many of us cling to being at the center. Sure, some of it's habit, but some of it is fear. But the thing that I think people aren't being honest about is that some of it is ego. When the business depends on you, your wins feel like your wins. You feel needed, important, validated. But that also means that every failure feels personal. Every dip in revenue feels like a reflection of your own worth. Every client issue feels like an attack on your character. This dynamic is exhausting, and it's not scalable. You are inherently valuable. You were born that way. But your business shouldn't be built on your availability. That's not freedom. That's a very expensive job. Many of us tie our identity to our business success. And we don't mean to. It just sort of happens. The late nights, the winds, the risks, the vulnerability of putting yourself out into the world in a way that feels like you. It blurs the line between what you do and who you are. You stop seeing the business as an entity and you start treating it like an extension of yourself. We build our sense of worth around our client results, our revenue, our Visibility. But you have to accept that the business is not you and you are not your business. The goal here is to externalize the value, to take everything you know, everything you're great at, and build offers, assets and systems that can deliver that value without needing you in the middle all of the time. The moment I realized I need to stop being the product, everything changed. I started asking better questions. How can I deliver results without being the one to deliver them? How can I turn what I know into something someone can experience without me needing to be there in real time? How can I stop selling access to me and start selling access to transformation? This is where the entire business model starts to evolve. Instead of selling your time, you sell outcomes. Instead of trading hours, you build systems. Instead of performing a service, you become the strategist. The business becomes something that runs because of your ideas, not your constant presence. This isn't just about delegation or automation. This is about seeing your knowledge as an asset separate from yourself. It's about treating your business as a system, not your sidekick. Now, there are three phases to this shift, and they're all about letting go of what's been holding you back so you can build something that's far more sustainable. The first step, the first one is your identity shift. I am not my business. You are not your last client win. You are not your slowest month. You are not your testimonials. You are you are you. So we're going to use a psychological strategy to help separate this. It's called cognitive diffusion. We start to separate our thoughts from our identity. So instead of saying something like, I'm failing, say, this launch didn't perform how I expected. That subtle shift helps your brain detach your self worth from, from business outcomes. So try this practice. The next time something comes up and you start to feel like you're going to blame yourself for it, say, I'm noticing that thought and I'm noticing the thought that I'm not good at this. Okay, but are you not good at this? Are you just having a bad day? And maybe there's something that made you feel that way because there's things that you didn't have set up or processes you didn't have in place or, you know, ways to keep the business having your level of support even when you're not there. There's so many things, why you might start saying, I'm not good at this, but if you let go of that fact and say, instead of I'm not good at this, oh, well, I think this issue might be A big reason I'm feeling this way. And then you start to address the issue that's separate from you. And even just noticing it, even if you don't go fix it. You don't always have to be in fix it mode, by the way. But you noticing allows you to create space between you and the story. The second shift is an ownership shift. The transformation I create doesn't require my presence. This is the moment you realize your knowledge can be delivered in ways that don't depend on your availability. Now we're going to use a psychological strategy to create an emotional detachment and it's called self distanced reflection. So ask yourself, if I were advising someone else in my exact situation, what would I tell them to do? When we zoom out, when we give ourselves more compassion, we get a clearer perspective. Your clients don't need you. They need your wisdom, your structure, your transformation, your ideas, your input. Okay? And you can deliver that in a thousand different ways. It could be curriculum or templates or systems or coaching containers or scalable offers. You can hire a team to deliver the same results. There are so many ways to do that, but the delivery doesn't always have to be you. Now the third shift, I think may feel like the easiest, but if you haven't done the other two, then this is just gonna not work. So the third one is an operational shift. There are other ways to deliver this value, and I think most of you have already accepted that or you wouldn't still be listening to this. Like, you acknowledge that as true and you're just like, I don't know how to get there. But I agree with you. This is where detachment becomes visible in your business model. But like I said, if you didn't do the first two shifts, then this one is not going to stick. You're going to like undo all of that goodness. You have to stop being the sole delivery mechanism. Now this last psychological strategy is a behavioral detachment and it's called progressive exposure and systemization. You're going to start by replacing one piece of your real time involvement and turn a repeated explanation into something like a loom video, or turn a client process into a template, or record one coaching call and turn that into a training. Progressively you begin to externalize your value and you stop equating access with worth. Now this one is not an overnight leap. It's a process of letting go. And every piece you externalize. That's capacity and time that you get back. But I encourage you to go back to the first two steps first before you start making these changes. Otherwise those repeat behaviors are just going to creep back in and make this less effective. Scaling is not just about more sales. It's more value delivered with less of you in the middle. You don't need to be the access point. You don't need to be the delivery method. You just need to own the system. Your knowledge is an asset. Your experience is the value. Your ideas are the offer. Your job isn't to be the business, it's to build the business. And that starts with letting go of the belief that everything valuable about your work requires your real time presence. The business you want, the one that creates impact, freedom, income and space, starts with this shift. You are not the offer. You are not the delivery. You are the visionary, the guide, the system builder. And you're not behind. You're ready for this. That's why you're here. Inside the Co op, we're walking our members through this exact shift. We're helping them redesign their offers to reduce their hours. We're helping them systemize their delivery. We're helping them build scalable transformation so their businesses can serve more people with less of them at the middle. And we kick off our live Accelerator experience on Monday. But enrollment closes this Friday at 11:11pm Central. So if you're tired of feeling like you are the bottleneck, the delivery, and the product, let us show you a better way. Join us@creativetemplateshop.com membership. You do not have to be the one holding this all together. Let the business do its job. Your future self, the one that finally has margin, clarity and income that doesn't depend on your hustle, is already cheering you on. And I am too. And I'm ready to walk you through every step. So join us at creativetemplateshop.com membership and I'll see you in the next and final episode of the Accelerator series. 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 ossprojects so we can share it. Okay, Second favor to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from Boss Project. I'd love if you'd join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your 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.