✨ June Biz Forecast — Slowing Down, Sliding Scales & Sponsor Love
Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients. Hello and welcome or welcome back to Off the Grid. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby And on this show, I share stories, strategies, and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity, energetic sovereignty, and no or minimal social media presence. Today, you have tuned in to our June forecast episode, which typically comes out on the 1st Friday of every month.
Amelia Hruby:This one's coming out a little early. If you're listening live, it's May 31st. Congrats. Surprise. We're early.
Amelia Hruby:Thanks for being here. These forecast episodes are an opportunity for me to share a few marketing trends that I'm into right now that maybe don't merit a full episode yet, but that I want to pop into the feed and into your brains for the month ahead. I also share biz care tasks on my radar for this month, what's coming up next on Off the Grid, and sometimes I give you a few financial updates about my business, which come at the end of each quarter. And when we have it, we do a listener q and a. So these are typically pretty short, pretty sweet, very fun, and meant to just be a moment of connection Before we dive into today's forecast episode, I want to remind you that the Off the Grid Clubhouse is coming later this month , And while the public show is on break during the summer, I will be in the clubhouse sharing weekly episodes on the private feed.
Amelia Hruby:And I will just let you know here at the outset that going forward, these biz forecasts will move into the Clubhouse. So there will be a brief preview of them here on the main feed, but most of it will go behind the scenes. So July August forecast will be there while we're off season, but even when we come back in September, October, November, these will be Clubhouse exclusives. So if you like these ups, head to the show notes, get yourself on the Substack, and now let's dive in. So we begin with 2 marketing trends that I am into for the month of June.
Amelia Hruby:The first marketing trend that I think everybody is up to right now is slowing down. Let me tell you, I am seeing everyone that I talk to or follow on the Internet or read their newsletter talking about going slower this summer, and it's interesting to see the different ways that people are discussing this. So for some people, they are going slow by not taking any new clients for the summer, just working with their existing clients. Some people are slowing down their content schedule for the summer, putting out less frequent content or just no content for the season. I'm seeing some people slowing down by canceling launches and being like, I'm not launching this again until the fall, not doing any launches this summer.
Amelia Hruby:I'm seeing some people slow down by changing their work schedule, so taking Fridays off or taking Thursdays and Fridays off or not doing meetings or live calls, but I've been really fascinated to notice this slowdown trend. And I think that it feels kind of specific to summer, but it's really a broader trend that I'm noticing where, like, over the past year, we've really all gotten on board with bashing hustle culture, with stepping away from the grind of business as usual, whether you work on your own business full time or you have a day job and work on your business part time. I feel like there's been this big call to stop hustling, stop grinding, and slow down. And what I feel like I'm finally seeing this summer is more concrete ways that people are actually slowing down and saying that they're slowing down, and I find it really inspiring. I love seeing more people talk about slowing down in the summer, talk about seasonal approaches to doing business, and talk about why we can't keep up with the relentless pace of capitalism.
Amelia Hruby:Our business or to our personal finances, and that can activate just a lot of stuff in our nervous system around feeling safe. And I just finished the amazing Trauma Informed Business Foundations course with Jess of Soft Path Healing, and we talked a lot about the power of slowing down and how to support ourselves in doing that even when it feels challenging. And so I'm just thinking about slowing down in all of these different ways. I'm thinking about the ways that we can slow down in our businesses and our lives in the summer, or perhaps the way that we slow down our business in the summer so that our life can become full and exciting and in bloom with the world around us. Part of the reason I slow down in the summer is because I travel more in the summer.
Amelia Hruby:I go see my friends. I do things. My life is very fast, so I want my business to be a little slower. So with this trend, I invite you to consider if there are places in your life or your business that you want to slow down this summer, if there are ways that you can support yourself in slowing down, and to reflect more concretely on, like, what does slowing down mean to you? Does it mean working less?
Amelia Hruby:Does it mean sharing less? Does it mean creating less? Does it mean creating more and sharing less? Does it mean sharing more and creating less? You know, there are a lot of different ways we can think about slowing down.
Amelia Hruby:And I think this is gonna be one of my Clubhouse episodes for the summer, because I'm realizing I just have a lot to say about it, and I'd love to unpack that a little bit more and to hear from you. Like, are you slowing down this summer? How are you slowing down this summer? Head to the show notes and send me a voice message about it because I'd love to be in conversation about these different ways that we slow down and if this is a trend that we're into right now. I'm into it.
Amelia Hruby:Are you into it? Let me know. My second marketing trend that I'm into right now for the month of June is sliding scales. So I have plenty of business peers who've been offering their work on a sliding scale for years years, but when I launched softer sounds, I decided that was not for me. I created no fee payment plans for most of our services and I offered different payment options and even some scholarship pricing for our courses, but I never worked with a sliding scale before.
Amelia Hruby:I always liked the clarity of a single price. Like, this is what it costs and I could tell you exactly what that is. And I think that in the first two and a half years of my business, that really served me to build strong boundaries around pricing and to help me just stand in what I think my work is worth, which is something that I struggled with when I started. You know, I was a freelance audio editor for 5 plus years before I launched Doctor Sounds, and in that freelance work, I found that I often had people negotiating down the price. Like I would give them a price and they'd want it to be cheaper, they'd wanna take off certain services to get the costs lower, and I really struggled to stand in my pricing and to kind of demand my value to a certain extent.
Amelia Hruby:And I understand that pricing is challenging and that people may not be able to afford a certain service, but I also, for me, I ended up working for lower rates that made me very resentful of the work, and it was just a bad pattern that I had fallen into in freelancing. And so when I started softer sounds, I was like, this is the price. Like, I am putting the price out there. That is the price. It's gotta be the price.
Amelia Hruby:And that was really supportive for me. It really helped me build that boundary, build that resilience, and it worked. Like, now I feel very good about my pricing and I feel very good about when I'm willing to look at a lower price with people and when I am not, and I've said no so many times around that. And so this spring, when I, again, was taking the trauma informed foundations class with SoftPath Healing, just had a whole section on financial accessibility, and I just started to think about, like, Could I soften some of these boundaries around pricing? Like, I created them to really support me in building up my, like, resilience around maintaining my pricing, but does that still feel good, and are there ways that I could implement some new degrees of financial accessibility in my pricing?
Amelia Hruby:And for me, that really came up in a desire to create a sliding scale for the courses at Softer Sounds. So what I decided was that I'm not interested in putting my services on a sliding scale because podcast editing is a really process intensive, time intensive thing. And I think that the rate that I'm currently doing it at is actually, it's supportive, but I'm not willing to do it for any less, And I am not sure the market can hold doing it for much more with the clientele that I really want to work with for my ideal clients. And so I couldn't come up with a way that it felt good to do a sliding scale for services, and so I was like, okay, I'm not doing that. We're sticking with this consistent pricing that I've developed.
Amelia Hruby:I love that there. But when I went to look at the courses that we offer at softer sounds, I was like, oh, like with these courses, they're all created. Like someone buys them from the website, it's all automated. I don't have to do anything about that. And I really would love for more people to have access to them because the material here is so good and I feel like it could really support people, and I've already put in the work to set it up and create it.
Amelia Hruby:So sometimes making any money from that feels like a bonus. And so that's a place where I was like, I think a sliding scale could fit really well here. And so using Jess' recommendation, I read this really wonderful blog post called the sliding scale, a tool of economic justice from Alexis Cunninghamfolk on the Wirtz and Cunning Apothecary website. And I pretty quickly implemented a sliding scale for softer sounds courses. So it used to be that our Your Podcast is a Portal course was 222 just to buy the course, and you could have a payment plan for 2 parts or not.
Amelia Hruby:But now I've put a sliding scale where you can purchase it for $111, $222, or $333. So now we have a broader sliding scale, and I explained that on the website, and I linked to this post from Alexis if people need support kind of thinking through how to select what they would pay. And I did the same for our DIY Podcast Marketing and Monetization course. I basically took the price that it was and made that the middle of my sliding scale and then added a lower and higher end of the pricing, and now these sliding scales exist. I did that like 2 weeks ago, so no one's bought anything yet.
Amelia Hruby:I haven't even told anyone I did it until right now. But I have always admired the way that some of the people that I admire, like Nick Antoinette or Cody Cook Parrot, use sliding skills in their pricing, and I was feeling called to follow in their footsteps, to implement what I was learning in this course with Jess, to really use the resources created by Alexis and make this happen in my business. So I'm not really sure this is a marketing trend, but it's something that I'm experimenting with this summer and will eventually report back on how it goes and let you know if I think it was a good experiment. So our marketing trends for June were slowing down and sliding scales, and I would love to hear if you are experimenting with or have experimented with either of these as well. Just head to the show notes.
Amelia Hruby:You'll find my email address if you want to email me, as well as my SpeakPipe link if you want to send me a voice message. I would love to chat with you about it and potentially feature you on a future episode. So those are our marketing trends for the month. Next up is biz care tasks on my radar for June. Keeping in theme with sliding scale and financial accessibility, one thing that I'm doing this month is refreshing my redistribution commitments.
Amelia Hruby:So at Doctor Sounds, we redistribute 1% of our revenue. So That's 1% of all money that comes into the business after payment processing fees. And I want to think more about what I'm doing with that money. Is that amount still the right amount? It's been higher in the past, but I had lowered it when I raised the rates for my contractors, for my team, because I wanted to redistribute the money to them and make sure they were getting paid a little bit more.
Amelia Hruby:And so that I'd have just helping with my profit margin around that. But I'm really trying to think about what feels important to me in redistribution. Because I've also noticed that you know, I'm kind of redistributing that money to the same 2 organizations. I've been donating it to Black and Pink, which is an organization for LGBTQIA plus folks who are incarcerated. I have a Black and Pink pen pal who I've been friends with and writing with for years, and so I love to support that organization.
Amelia Hruby:They're also headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, which is very close to where I live, and so I like to support their work in my local community. And then I also have been sending money to Out Nebraska, which is an organization that does a lot of legislative lobbying around LGBTQIA plus issues in Nebraska where they're definitely under attack. And so I really admire the work that that organization is doing and I really value it as supporting my community here. And so I've been sending money to those organizations and redistributing 1% of Softr Sound's revenue, but I just want to spend some time in June thinking about, again, is that enough? Are those the orgs I want to support?
Amelia Hruby:Do I want to shift the money to be a little more far reaching? Do I feel good about it staying in my local community? And then I also want to add in a piece around supporting other indie podcasters. So Softer Sounds is a podcast studio, and we support independent podcasters. And I just see so many amazing shows out there asking for listener support, and I think a really cool thing that Softr Sounds could do is support those shows.
Amelia Hruby:Right? Like, I could join the Patreons, I can get on the Substacks, I can use some of the money coming into softer sounds to feed back into the ecosystem that I am a part of. I can very actively use the money that my business is making to support the world that I wanna see, And that's what the redistribution commitments are all about for me, but I'm thinking about I just wanna broaden it a little bit from sort of here's the money I'm giving to nonprofits to like, what are the other ways that I can support this ecosystem, support this world that I want to live in? And so that's my 1st biz care task for the month is just refreshing my redistribution commitments, thinking about how I want this money to flow through my business and back into the world. My second best care task for June is to go through my books and, like, cancel all the subscriptions I'm not using.
Amelia Hruby:So I find that in the spring, I sign up for a bunch of stuff. Like spring comes, I get excited, and I'm buying courses and classes and apps and programs and all these things, and then summer comes around and I want to slow down, like that trend I started with, and I just don't need all that stuff. So one of my biz care tasks for June is just to go through my QuickBooks, look at everything that I've paid for in the spring and anything especially that's a recurring payment, and just check-in of do I want and need this? Can I cancel this? And so I'm kind of clearing out my finances before I slow down in the summer and also before business slows down in the summer.
Amelia Hruby:So in the last forecast episode, I talked about preparing our businesses for a summer slump, if that's something we experience. And so there I was talking about, like, planning your sales and offering schedule, but this month, what I'm doing is kind of looking at all of my costs, the expenses in my business, and kind of pairing back as I head into the summer. I mean, this can also help me in my 1st bus care task, right, because if I have fewer expenses, I can redistribute more money potentially. So I guess this month is all about the money, and my biz care tasks for June are refreshing my redistribution commitments. I invite you to do the same or to think about redistribution in your business at all.
Amelia Hruby:It could be a great month to start to ponder that for yourself, and then also to review and clear out your expenses and get anything extraneous off the books before we head into summer. So next month, this is the point in the episode where I will share a financial update from Softer Sounds. This will be exclusively for Clubhouse members, but I will give you my q two financials. I'll tell you our revenue, our expenses. I also think I'll pop in, like, how many Interweb memberships did we get, how many Clubhouse memberships have we had, and tell you a little bit about the progress I am or am not making toward my revenue goal for this year, which I talked about in the April forecast episode and the first episode of the year on overcoming under earning.
Amelia Hruby:So if you wanna hear more about money and my business, head back to those episodes. If you wanna keep updated on money and my business, join the Clubhouse so that you get those real numbers that I share very transparently and I talk about what's working, what's not working, what I will continue doing, what I want to do differently. That's all coming soon. I can give you a slight preview that spring has been okay at softer sounds. I feel like we've made some money.
Amelia Hruby:I'm not sure if I'm gonna hit my financial goal for the quarter. Looks like probably not, but I am feeling really good about the money that's come into the business and the ways that I've spent it with our team and with other things. So I'll talk more about that in our next forecast episode. I hope to see you in the clubhouse so that you can hear it. And for now, let's head toward the end of this June forecast and I'm going to tell you what's coming up on Off the Grid this month.
Amelia Hruby:In June, we will wrap season 3 of the show and we're gonna reach 75 episodes of Off the Grid, which is super exciting. Up next week, you're gonna hear from Cody Cook Parent. Cody has been a super fan of the show and really supportive to me in growing the audience, and it was just a joy to have them on and have a conversation about their relationship with social media, particularly how they grew their creative business through Instagram, and then moved to Substack and what that has meant for their income and creative practice over the years. After that, I'll share a conversation with Kinning Zhu, who is an amazing artist and web designer, and also has been my friend since high school. So one of my nearest and dearest friends who is also a creative business owner and who is honestly very different than me in our approach to creative business, And in that episode, we really talk about how we create our work, how we think about money, and what's worked for us to grow our businesses over the past 3 to 5 years.
Amelia Hruby:So that might be one of my favorite conversations I've ever had for the show. It's certainly one of the most personal conversations I've ever had for the show, and I'm really excited for you to hear And then we will end the June and season 3 with 2 solo episodes that are so good. I've already recorded them. I'm super pumped. As I recorded them, I was like, these are keynote speeches that I'm just giving to everyone off the grid.
Amelia Hruby:Like, I'm really out here doing all this research, scripting, drafting, recording and re recording, and making it so great because I love all of you. Those episodes are going to be called Success is a Cycle, where I'm going to unpack how to redefine success on our own terms. And then the last episode of the season will be called how to feel seen off social media, and that will be in conversation with the episode I just shared with Becca Piastrelli on social media for the anxiously attached, but I really go deeper into this question of what it means to feel seen, how we try to get seen on social media, what feels good about that, what feels really bad about that, and then ways we can feel seen without social media and what that looks like in our personal lives and in our businesses. So that's what's coming up this month on Off the Grid. It's gonna be an extra great month, if I say so myself.
Amelia Hruby:It's gonna be a really high level way to end the season, and I'm so excited for all of you to hear it. As I wrap up this episode, I also wanna give a quick shout out to many of our season 3 sponsors of the show, and I'm gonna link them in the show notes so that you can check them out if you haven't already. So first things first, let me shout out our very first paying sponsor, Will Wassner and the future you portraits. Will made one for me, and I literally printed it out and have it framed and hanging in my office. So if you want to hear about that magic, head to the show notes and check it out.
Amelia Hruby:After that, we heard from Nicole Cloutier. So shout out to Nicole who shared an amazing intuitive journaling resource with listeners that you can still grab for free in the show notes. We also heard from Jessica Lackey and her program, deeper foundations, which is not open anymore, but you should definitely subscribe to Jessica's newsletter if you're not on there already. Another one of our sponsors for this season was Casia Manolis and the feminist thriller club. This season was also sponsored by Chelsea Tams of Lettering Works, and we did an amazing trade that we talked about in the Grow Through Generosity and Collaboration episode.
Amelia Hruby:So I would highly recommend heading to the show notes to learn more about that trade and the stickers we created together and get yourself some off the grid merch. Other sponsors for the season included Cody Cook Parrot and Flexible Office, Jess Jackson of Soft Path Healing and Trauma Informed Foundations. We heard from Sarah McCall and Summer Camp, which starts very soon. And then more recently we heard from Neets about her spring fling branding program, which you will hear more about in June as well. And coming up, you will hear from Holly Wilkosevski about her Send It marketing support program and her Write A Winning welcome email mini course.
Amelia Hruby:So I'm going to link to all of those sponsors in the show notes because honestly, they just create really cool stuff. And if you love this show, they are great people to know about and pay attention to. And as a brief moment of reflection, I will just say that I have really appreciated working with these amazing people to support the show this season, and I love sharing their work with all of you. And I just love that the way that sponsorship has worked on off the grid is not courting big brands or getting these like big name product or SaaS app sponsorships. It's been just sharing the stuff that our community is actually up to and doing, and the amazing offerings and free and paid support that you have.
Amelia Hruby:So I love our sponsors, and if you would like to become a sponsor for season 4, I will say that our spots are already filling up for the fall, so head to the show notes and reach out to me soon if you're interested in partnering with an ad on season 4. The other great part of working with me is like I help you write the ads. I do make sure that things are really set up to be successful for you. I make recommendations around what I think will work the best. So even if you're curious, you're not quite sure how it might work or if it's a good fit, I encourage you to reach out via the link in the form in the show notes, and we can chat about it over the summer for a partnership in the fall.
Amelia Hruby:All right, my friends. That is it for our June forecast episode. Happy June, happy almost summer, happy last month of season 3 of Off the Grid. Again, if you wanna make sure you join the clubhouse as soon as it opens, head to the show notes. The link is already there for you to hop on the list.
Amelia Hruby:And then if you want to be in community with me this summer, like going coming to our live calls, hanging out, getting that, like, IRL via Zoom time, you can join the interweb. I would love to see you in there. Membership is still only $129 a year, which is a steal. And if you have any thoughts on this episode, if you have thoughts about slowing down for summer or implementing sliding skills in your business or how you redistribute money through your work, I would love to hear from you either via email or with a voice message. You can find those links in the show notes as well.
Amelia Hruby:I will be back in your pod feed on Wednesday with my amazing conversation with Cody Cook Parrott, And until then, I will see you off the grid and on the interweb. Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Don't forget to grab your free leaving social media toolkit at off the grid dot fun slash toolkit. This podcast is a softer sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Caitlin Carter of Making Audio Magic, and our logo is by Natalia Studio.
Amelia Hruby:I'm your host, Emilia Frooby, and until next time, I'll see you off the grid and on the interweb. Really wanna put your phone away. Yeah. Let's go off the grid.
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