🏚️ 3 Cracks in Your Business Foundation — How to Align Your Model & Your Marketing with Jessica Lackey

Amelia [00:00:02]

[Music begins to play, overlapping with the introduction to the episode] Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients.

Amelia [00:00:08]

I'm Amelia Hruby, writer, speaker, and founder of Softer Sounds podcast studio. On this show, I share stories, strategies, and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty.

Amelia [00:00:22]

Download your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig and join us as we do it all Off the Grid [music jams and fades out].

Amelia Hruby [00:01:15]:

Hello and welcome or welcome back to Off the Grid, your soon to be favorite marketing podcast about leaving social media and doing business differently. Or if you're, like many of our listeners, not really leaving social media, but empowering yourself to implement more creative marketing practices in your business so that you can grow on your own terms and create the success that you're desiring with energetic sovereignty and radical generosity. That is what is in the mix here at Off the Grid.

I'm your host. Amelia Hruby. I am the founder of Softer Sounds Podcast Studio, the co-founder of the Lifestyle Business League, and your fellow explorer on this journey of building successful, sustainable businesses our way.

Amelia Hruby [00:02:06]:

We're currently in our late summer interview series here on the podcast, where I'm talking to some of my favorite creators, influencers, and small business owners about their favorite marketing tools and practices. And today's episode feels extra special to me because I've invited my business coach, Jessica Lackey, to come on the podcast and talk to us about some of the common mistakes that she sees business owners at all stages make and some of the signs that you might be getting caught in these traps, cracks, problems. I don't even know what to call them. But I'll just say that if you're feeling stuck or you can't figure out why something's not working in your business, it very well might be one of these three cracks in your business foundations.

I've been working with Jessica all summer, and she's been helping me see how I can better tend to and attune my business foundations to allow me to have the success that I want without feeling like I have to overwork or compromise to get it. So I've loved working with Jessica. I think you're going to love hearing from her and it really is just such a powerful episode.

Amelia Hruby [00:03:17]:

Before we dive in, let me make sure you know about the Leaving Social Media Toolkit. This is a free resource that includes three tools you're going to want. My five step plan for leaving social media, my list of 100 ways to share your work without social media and a database for planning quarterly creative marketing experiments.

If you haven't listened to the first three or four episodes of the podcast, head all the way back to the beginning friends, because those episodes unpack how to use these tools to help your business succeed with no or minimal social media presence. It's all there on the podfeed. You just got to take a step back into the past with me, get the toolkit and settle in for some free wisdom.

Amelia Hruby [00:04:02]:

So let me go ahead and tell you a little bit about Jessica before we dive into today's conversation. Jessica Lackey is a strategy and operations advisor who bridges the gap between traditional business practices and a thirst for creating sustainable businesses with a human centric approach. With a background in corporate leadership, McKinsey and company consulting, and a Harvard business degree, Jessica knows a thing or two about hustle, culture and what it feels like to judge success by the bottom line at all costs. Now she combines her deep experience in consulting, Fortune 500 operations leadership and coaching to help businesses grow without sacrificing the well being of their clients, team and community.

Amelia Hruby [00:04:45]:

I love working with Jessica because she brings so much business know how to me and my tiny operation. And not only does she bring all of that business knowledge, she also is so ready to meet me in the feelings and fears and mindsets that arise when I start to imagine implementing some of that knowledge in my business. She helps me slow down, reconnect with my business roots and just go really deep into the foundations so that my business can grow like the beautiful generations old oak tree I hope it becomes someday. In this episode, Jessica is going to walk us through how to align your business model, your marketing strategy and your audience's needs so that your business can achieve the success of your dreams.

Amelia Hruby [00:05:36]:

I'll give you a heads up in advance that Jessica also has a really fantastic small group program happening this fall where you can do all of this work with her and alongside a dozen or so other small business owners who share these values and this approach to growing a business. So you'll hear us talk about deeper foundations throughout the episode and if you're interested, I hope that you'll head to the show notes to learn more about that.

If you loved the refresh or you've got FOMO that you weren't able to join, this is definitely a program that's going to take that ethos and help you grow your business over the next six months at what I think is a really affordable price point. So head to the show notes to learn more about that and otherwise just keep on listening to hear me and Jessica talk about the three cracks in your business foundation and how to support yourself in fixing them so that you can find business success. Let's dive in. Hi, Jessica. Welcome to Off the Grid.

Jessica Lackey [00:06:38]:

Hello. I'm so happy to be here.

Amelia Hruby [00:06:40]:

Oh, I'm so excited to have you. So for listeners who are not, you know, behind the scenes in my business, knowing every second of what I do, I want to share up front with everyone that you are my current business coach and mentor and advisor and that we have been working together this summer on Softer Sounds business foundations and some exciting new plans for Off the Grid. And it's just been such a transformative time for me and my business and how I think of myself and my business and what comes next for my business. And I think that what I came to you with actually originally was like, I'm growing, but I don't know where it's going, some version of that. So all of that is coming into our conversation today, and I'm just really excited for everything you have to share. And I'm curious if you might share a little bit with listeners about who you are, what kind of work you do, and how that's transformed this summer.

Jessica Lackey [00:07:45]:

Yeah. By the way, I'm totally stealing the phrase I'm growing, but I don't know where I'm going. That's amazing. I'm totally taking that.

Amelia Hruby [00:07:52]:

It's yours.

Jessica Lackey [00:07:53]:

That's what I like to do. I like to work with business owners who are at a crossroads. So my background is I worked in big business for a long time, Harvard MBA, McKinsey and Company Consulting, Nike, so all the big names that allow you to have a growing career rife with financial stability. But I left that world a few years ago, and I realized that relentless pursuit of growth, both financial and also continuing to climb the corporate ladder, was destroying my body, destroying my soul. And when I leapt into entrepreneurship, I didn't know how to describe what I wanted to do, because the entire entrepreneurship complex is all about growth, and it's all about six figure this, seven figure that. You're not a CEO until you have a team. And I didn't have a language to describe that. That's not the only path, that's not the only model, that's not the only model of success for us in our business.

And it's only been over the past year that I have changed my languaging from helping people grow without the grind and some of that more growth oriented words to this examination of who we are and who our businesses are at a deeper level. And instead of trying to do more and be more, to continue growing, it's to go back to the foundations and ask some more fundamental questions about who you are, what's the type of business you want to run? Then are the aligned models and maybe metrics of success that are really tailored to you versus tailored to what we see as the traditional models of success in entrepreneurship.

Amelia Hruby [00:09:36]:

Yes. And that resonates so much with me personally. And I think with the whole ethos of Off the Grid. Earlier in this season, I shared an episode called The Three Traps of Instabay Businesses. And something that it wasn't really one of those traps, but something I've been thinking a lot about and I'm working on a new episode on is these kind of growth escalators we put ourselves on in our businesses. Like, things start going well, and we just keep moving the goalpost for ourselves. So it's like, oh, I got one client. Okay, well, now I need ten clients. Oh, I made $10,000. Okay, now I need to make $100,000. Now I need a six figure business. A seven figure business. For many of us who are listening, I'm sure myself especially, it sounds like you also, Jessica, we're achievers, and once we accomplish something, we just move on to the next big thing that we want to accomplish.

Amelia Hruby [00:10:29]:

What I love about your work is the way it has invited me, and it invites all of your clients to kind of slow down and go deeper, as you've said, and figure out, like, wait, what was the original goal in starting a business and being self employed? What's your deeper why?

And for so many of us, that has to do with - we want more time in our lives. We want to actually work less. We want space to do things outside of our business. We want to be financially resourced. But maybe that's not the only goal that we have for working for ourselves. And it can be so easy to get wrapped up in just like meeting revenue metrics or client goals and totally lose track of that.

So I love your work because it helps recenter the business in your deeper why, which is also super important for anyone who's stepping away from social media or trying to find a different way to do their marketing.

Jessica Lackey [00:11:25]:

We've been sold this model, this formula of success, but that formula is really predicated on having lots of people in your business, and it transforms your business from being a craft based, service based business to a marketing machine, which is not the business I want, it's not the business you probably want. It's probably not the business many of your listeners want. But because that's what we are seen and bombarded with all over the social media, that's what we think our businesses have to look like.

And those are the kind of practices and the methods we think we have to adopt. And I think that's what's so illuminating about your work with Off the Grid is that, well, these are what we are shown we're supposed to do to grow a business that looks like X. But what if you don't want a business that looks like X? What if you don't want to lead major amounts of groups because you want to do one on one work with people? Part of the replacement of social media is knowing what are the other ways to market, sell, deliver a business that don't rely on tactics that are not built for the business you want to run.

Amelia Hruby [00:12:32]:

Yeah, exactly. I encounter so many people through Off the Grid or through the refresh workshops, where they're really using these sorts of online business models. They've learned from social media influencers, and they're like, shocked and unhappy to discover that it means that their primary job is just getting so many followers. Or at a certain point, if you have a really lead magnet based strategy, your entire job is to try to funnel thousands of people through your lead magnet. And for most of us, that's not a very fun job. We didn't start doing this just to find people to download our lead magnet. That's not it.

Jessica Lackey [00:13:14]:

I saw someone post they had a formula strategy for how they had a million dollar coaching business. So I asked him, okay, well, do you deliver the coaching? He said, no, I have seven coaches that deliver the coaching. And so I'm like, so your job is marketing and sales and leading a team, not coaching. No, shame on that business model. But if you want to be a coach and coach clients versus if you want to be a marketer and lead a team of coaches; two totally different businesses. Part of what's missing in, I think, the online business discourse is deciding and knowing what types of businesses are out there in the mechanics of those businesses and really being thoughtful about what is actually the business they're running. That's really missing. I was like, well, I want to coach and consult, not be a marketer. I mean, that's part of my job, but that's not the primary business model I'm running.

Amelia Hruby [00:14:15]:

Yeah, exactly. And I think because so many of us who start businesses start by working by ourselves, where we're kind of doing a little bit of everything, we lose track of what it is we really want to be doing and not doing in our business, or it becomes really murky really fast. And that's exactly where I found myself when I started working with you, which was like, I'd grown this business. I had some contractors, but it's like, I didn't know what I wanted my job to be. I think sometimes when we start our business, it can be easy to say, like, I'm doing this because I love providing this service, but as it evolves because we're doing a little bit of everything, we just lose track of like, wait, what is my role? Why did I start this? What do I want from it? And that's the work of Deeper Foundations.

Amelia Hruby [00:15:02]:

So I want to take us into our topic for today, which is three common cracks in your business foundation. And you and I started having this conversation kind of as I was preparing for the refresh and as you were preparing to launch your Deeper Foundations program. I think because we both were encountering a lot of business owners who are not keen on social media and who want to do business differently and then were realizing that when they step away from social media, pretty quickly they realize their business is maybe not as much of a business as they thought it was. Or it's really missing some of these key components of clear offerings, clear positioning and marketing that actually reaches the people that you want to work with.

So today we're going to talk about these cracks in your business foundation and talk about where to focus your energy as you reassess and decide where you want to go when you grow. To quote myself from earlier, the reason.

Jessica Lackey [00:16:08]:

I like to talk about Deeper Foundations is like you're building a house, but if your foundation is on sand, you can only build so far before the house topples over. Or if you're building a tree and you're trying to make it grow as fast as possible. But as you grow, if you don't have those solid practices in place, it topples over. Either you're continuing to do all the things all the time. You're always really busy and you're not really sure where your time is going. You're not sure you're working on the right things. Practices that suited you at one stage of business no longer work for the new stage of business, just like yours. You were doing the editing and now you're transitioning to a different business model. So what does that mean for your time?

Continuing to do what worked for you to get those first handful of clients isn't necessarily what's going to work for you as you grow. And these are all the foundational elements that aren't sexy because they're back end and they're business fluency and fundamentals and that's not shiny. That's not something that's just like, “Download my free thing and learn the answers.” But I think it's really important because this is how business owners retain their own authority and agency versus outsourcing it to an online business expert.

Amelia Hruby [00:17:23]:

Yeah. So let's dive into our first common crack in your business foundation. So crack number one, in your words, is that you're pursuing methods that belong to the wrong business model. So can you unpack that for us? What does that mean?

Jessica Lackey [00:17:39]:

Yes. So I've got two different categories of business models. Those that are based on delivering a service and those that are based on delivering and teaching content or selling a product. So service based businesses are delivery based or creator based businesses. Those service-based businesses can be soloists, like you're a graphic designer, you're a podcast editor, you're a copywriter. They can be advisory: you're a coach, a consultant, a financial services agent or advisor. Or they can be agency businesses where you're still delivering a service. Social media, marketing agencies, a podcast editing company. Those are things where you're delivering a service.

On the other hand, you have what I call creator-based businesses. Maybe you're hoping to monetize a podcast. You're helping to teach a concept to a lot of people. You're hoping to gather a community. A lot of what you see as online business building programs where there's 50 to 2000 people in the program is they're not actually coaching, they're teaching. They're selling you a curriculum, they're selling you office hours, they're selling you maybe advice, but it's not advisory, it's teaching.

Jessica Lackey [00:19:00]:

If you've got a service based model, you don't need hundreds. You may not even need more than ten clients to have a sustainable business. Which means that it's about relationships, about referrals, about renewals, it's about making those connections.

But if you're running a creator based business where you're selling something potentially lower volume, lower cost, but higher volume, you need, quote unquote, leads, you need an audience, you need to grow by hundreds or thousands of people every year in order to have the 2% conversion rate on what you're trying to sell.

Wildly different business models but if you're trying to grow a service based business, which is what I see a lot of people do, the methods aren't have a lead magnet post all the time on social media, try to grow following. It's building relationships, making friends online, finding alternative service providers who you can work with. Those are all relationship based business models, not traffic based models. And what we see too often is people spending time on traffic methods and just not doing relationship building.

Amelia Hruby [00:20:13]:

Yeah, yeah. This reminds me so much of my conversation with Michelle Warner from earlier this season where she really unpacked traffic based marketing methods versus relationship marketing and really blew my mind in how I was thinking about my business and a lot of the things that I talk about on this show because I myself was so immersed in the sort of online business influencers running these, quote unquote, “insta-bae” businesses. And I started my business by building lead magnets and blog posts.

And I think that there's, again, we're not saying there's anything wrong with those strategies. It just wasn't the right fit for the type of business that I was starting. I will also see people launch creator based businesses or creator businesses with very small audiences and not realize how much time and energy and effort they will have to put in before those businesses become profitable. Unless they're seeking a sort of strategy where they go viral or something like that.

Jessica Lackey [00:21:25]:

But it goes beyond marketing. I see too many service based businesses be like, “I have to have proposal software that's hands off.” I'm like, Why? You have five to ten clients every year. That can be done with an email and all your onboarding can be handheld white glove. It doesn't have to have a long form sales page and email tags and a perfectly set up CRM system because you're only working with five to ten clients a year, some of them on retainer.

So I think a lot of us get tripped up in thinking that it has to be technically savvy and it has to be kind of, quote unquote, professional, because that's what we see our teachers do when they're trying to serve hundreds or thousands of people through a long form sales page and a cart click button. Different marketing, different sales strategies, different operational back end processes, different time allocations for things. But because we're watching someone else build a business that is meant for a different business model, we may spend our time doing the wrong things and neglecting parts of our business.

Amelia Hruby [00:22:35]:

Yeah.

Jessica Lackey [00:22:36]:

Again, you look at the big creator based businesses, they spent two to five years figuring it out and then they went viral.

Amelia Hruby [00:22:44]:

Yeah, exactly. That is the success story and/or their early adopters and so grew at a pace at which the rest of us can never keep up with or isn't a possibility for us anymore. So we have this first crack in your business foundation that you're pursuing methods, whether those be marketing methods or operational methods, that belong to the wrong business model.

Let's move on to crack number two that you might encounter in your business foundations. That your pricing and business model are misaligned with the audience or community you have. So can you unpack that one for us?

Jessica Lackey [00:23:22]:

Yeah. So there's a lot of talk right now about raising your prices because we are always over giving and undercharging, particularly if you're socialized out of a power position in society. But when you raise your prices, you may discover that no longer is your pricing, your business model aligned.

So let's say you're a web designer. You want to make $100,000 a year. You take deep pride in your craft and so it takes you a month to write all the sales copy for the website or all the back end design. And you can only work with one client at a time. Well, that means that each client is going to need to charge $8,000. But if you're working with newer business owners, that's going to be a huge investment for them. And so you might discover that the amount of clients you'll need to work with, that the price points don't actually work with what your audience is capable and or willing to pay without the use of a lot of manipulative marketing techniques.

Jessica Lackey [00:24:23]:

That's where we get in trouble with low priced offerings saying, I'm going to make my money on selling a $400 course. The amount of people you need to run through that course if you're serving a different population where they're going to find that valuable is thousands. So we tend to find that our pricing is misaligned and so what could feel like a sales problem or a marketing problem or an “I'm not good enough” problem or “I'm not worth this”… Actually the people that you're in community with can't or shouldn't pay that kind of price for the services because it's more than what they need, it's overkill. We're not usually taught to then rethink our positioning or our offer structure or our pricing in order to align those components; Your business model, your audience size, your positioning and then who you're in relationship with.

Amelia Hruby [00:25:16]:

Yeah, this is definitely something that I see a lot as well. And something I've noticed for myself and other business owners, friends and colleagues of mine, is that we'll often start our business and kind of just want to work with our friends, which I love. Of course I want to work with my friends. But over time, we might realize that our friends either aren't in the position, like aren't the right fit for our services or can't afford what we want to charge for our services. And then I see a lot of people, myself included, kind of end up at a loss of, like but wait, this is my community. And if I'm not selling to them, who am I selling to?

And I think that a big piece of this that kind of last piece you mentioned of the things that have to be aligned is that relationship piece. And sometimes if you want to radically change your offerings and particularly your pricing, it might have to start by doing a few months of community building with the people that you want to now sell to. Right?

Amelia Hruby [00:26:18]:

So if you've built a business, to use your example, if you're a web designer who built your business selling to new business owners, well, hopefully within a few years, those business owners aren't new anymore. And so they might grow with you. But it also just might mean that when you want to change your offerings, you have to spend some time networking with people who've been in business for longer so that you can then sell them these offerings.

And something I see happen a lot, and I'd be curious if you see this as well, is like people will do a lot of mindset work to believe they can raise their prices and then a lot of strategy work to come up with the new offerings and the new marketing, but they forget to go do that relationship building piece and you put the new business website out there and you feel like you open it for business and nobody comes to buy it. And then it feels like this huge failure. But it's just because you haven't built the audience or the community or the relationships yet for that new price point.

Jessica Lackey [00:27:15]:

That's exactly right. And I think that going out and doing 50 coffee conversations, I think this is what's interesting about kind of social media is we're sold the idea that just publish more frequently, have stronger marketing, quote, unquote, and I say, well, what if you go talk to 50 people who are in that target potentially revenue level or avatar for who you're working with?

And by the way, if you can't find 50 people, then you know that no matter how much work you do on your mindset and how much work that you do on the copy and strength of your website, that you're not going to have the audience to succeed with a new offer that doesn't say don't launch the offer. That says there may need to be a more structured plan of reaching out to those new people, new ways to get in front of those people you really want to work with, which may take more time.

But it's not about, quote unquote, marketing harder. It's about being much more thoughtful about and strategic in your networking, in your relationship, building to make friends and make inroads with that community. That's again, not really taught because it's not sexy and it's not something where you can just post on social media and then check in the next day. And that's kind of what we see as the way to build that business.

Jessica Lackey [00:28:33]:

We're also not really taught about rethinking our offer structure. For example, if you want to work with these newer business owners, for example the web designer, what about having a more, quote unquote, productized service? It's going to mean changing the business model to make it more templated and less effort, but that actually may be, one, what they need at that point in time in their business. It does lend itself to more of that teacher creator based model versus the high ticket service based model, but it actually may meet your clients more where they are. But we're taught raise our prices, not restructure our services.

Amelia Hruby [00:29:12]:

That last point, like snaps for that, because it really does feel, yeah, this sort of messaging of like just raise your prices I think is a really almost like really 2D business advice to me. But we run 3D businesses and I think that we can't always raise our prices because we might have hit kind of the ceiling for our current clients or we might have hit the ceiling for just our current ideal client avatar.

And so I hear you saying there are ways to reduce time spent, there are ways to, we can always find creative ways to serve the community we want to serve with the type of service that we want to offer. It's not always going to look like intensive one on one support and work together. We can back off from that and have creative ways to apply these things. And also not everybody wants or needs intensive one on one work together. There are different ways to offer support.

Jessica Lackey [00:30:17]:

I think not everyone should invest in, especially early on a business before you've had your first handful, ten to twelve clients. I don't think you should invest one on one because it takes a long time to get the marketing, especially if you're going off social media, get that marketing flywheel turning.

[music fades in]

Amelia Hruby [00:30:38]:

Hi, Off the Grid listeners. Amelia here interrupting our conversation today because I want to share with you one of my favorite marketing tools. When I left Instagram, I invited all of my followers to subscribe to my mailing list in order to keep in touch with me, and I promised to send them monthly-ish notes on a lot of the themes I used to talk about on social media. I've used many email service providers in my day, but my favorite of all of them is Flodesk.

Amelia Hruby [00:31:08]:

Flodesk is a gorgeous, easy to use email service provider. It helps you create beautiful, thoughtful emails. And even better, it's really set up to help you create easy to use landing pages so people can join your list and workflows so you can automate sending messages to folks who sign up through different pages. Flodesk is how I run all of the welcome sequences and lead magnets at Softer Sounds. It's also how I run the Leaving Social Media Toolkit that you might have downloaded after listening to this podcast. I'm surely not sending those emails out myself manually. Flodesk is doing all of that automagically.

Amelia Hruby [00:31:49]:

If you'd like to give Flodesk a try, please use my affiliate link below. In the show notes, you'll get a discount, I'll get a kickback, and we will all send more beautiful emails together. Again, check out the affiliate link in the show notes. For now, we're going to get back to this episode of Off the Grid.

[music fades out]

Amelia Hruby [00:32:11]:

So let's move to our third crack in your business foundation. So with crack number three, we're finding that you're missing or underinvesting in at least one step in the marketing and sales process. So unpack that process and which steps people are normally missing for us.

Jessica Lackey [00:32:29]:

There's typically three steps in a marketing and sales process. One is awareness and discovery. People who don't know about you find out about you. The second one is engagement or nurturing, where you're getting people that know you ready to work with you or getting it more invested in your process. And then the third part is invitation or sales, making them an offer and inviting them into the sales process.

Most people across the business ecosystem are missing one step or two, and it's typically awareness. New people aren't hearing about you and sales, you're not making an invitation or an offer. I'm of the firm camp that unless you're truly trying to play the engagement discovery game on Instagram. I don't even love it on Instagram unless you're on Reels. LinkedIn, TikTok. Maybe YouTube. I don't think social media is an awareness engine anymore because the algorithm is not designed to show you to new people. It's an effective, somewhat quasi, not really effective engagement nurture strategy if you're willing to play the game there. It's usually not a very good invitation mechanism. Again, unless you've got a huge audience, but that's what we're like, okay, I need to be on social media. I need to send my emails out. I love those things, but we're spending too much time on engagement and nurturing. And that's the easy, quote unquote, easy.

None of this is ever easy, but it's lower stakes because people who are on your social media or have subscribed to your podcast or are on your email list, they've already subscribed to hear from you. So they want to hear from you, but you're not actually making them an offer. And you're not having to be exposed to new people. And so it's easier on the nervous system to just nurture.

Jessica Lackey [00:34:24]:

It's pretty dysregulating in some cases, to go find new people and then to make offers. I'm in my program launch right now, and it's hard for me. I'm like, I know my program is amazing and I'm going to help every single person who's into it. But making the ask means that someone's going to say no. Someone's going to be like, no thanks, I'm not interested, or trying to reach new audiences. What works for the people that already like your work may not translate to the people who don't know about you yet. And it's hard. And I think we try to make social media be all these things. I'm going to find new people and I'm going to make softwares and stories, but that's not how it really works unless you have a preexisting audience already. Those are the typical things that are missing.

Amelia Hruby [00:35:07]:

Yeah, this really rings true for me. I like that you grounded it in our sort of, like, nervous system regulation and pointed to, I think, really openly and honestly, that a lot of this is about fear. You're right. It is scary to put ourselves in front of new people. It is scary to ask someone to buy something, because that's where we really open ourselves up to people saying no. Like, no, not interested in getting to know about your work. No, not interested in buying that from you. And it sucks. I don't have a more delicate way to say that it sucks when someone says no or it's like crickets and with no one saying anything, you feel it as a no, or it seems to be a no. And I think that that's really challenging, especially for those of us who are creators.

Whether we run a creator business model or not. Most of us here, we love our work. We do our work because we love it. And so to put it out there and have people not be interested is like the scariest thing I can really imagine. At the same time as business owners or as self employed creators, we have to build the skills to be resilient in the face of being told no or in the face of anything we perceive to be a failure, because there will be so many, quote unquote, failures in business. Like I always say, we will all launch an offer or a product that no one buys. It will happen to you eventually if it has not yet.

Jessica Lackey [00:36:47]:

And I think it's like the foundational aspects that I want to build are well, there are other ways to get awareness with a new audience besides constantly posting on social media. This is an example, is me getting exposure to a new audience. I'm going to put this in my newsletter and although I've already featured you a few times in my newsletter, more people are going to hear about the work. But it's not from a transactional basis. It's because you and I are genuinely fans of each other's work and we do complementary but different things.

And I think that's the part of the business building ecosystem that gets lost when you're focused on growth. Because this is not a relationship where we've built trust based on a couple of social media interactions. We've built trust over months of time getting to know one another and working together. And while it, quote unquote, takes more time up front, this is the deeper foundations that will support your business because it's not transactional. It is deeply relational.

And I'm still hitting all three of the aspects of the marketing and sales process, but I'm doing it in a way that is in alignment with my foundational values and my business model design, not just posting and ghosting on social media.

Amelia Hruby [00:38:08]:

Oh, yeah, exactly. I mean, obviously I completely agree with your analysis of social media and why it's not particularly good for any of these three stages of marketing. But I also think just there are a lot of other strategies we use that do exactly what you just said, like they're just nurturing the audience we already have.

And something I see a lot is business owners who just continue to provide free things for that audience, being convinced that if you just offer more and more and more free value, those people will eventually buy something from you in recognition of all this free value you put out there. And I find that to be the fastest path to resenting your community and burning yourself out on your business. To me, that's a perfect example of just continuing to nurture instead of working on the awareness or the sales stage of the marketing.

Jessica Lackey [00:39:02]:

Yeah, I'm still tweaking all the time, what's the best way? As much as I want to send out my 15 launch emails for my program, I know with certainty the way I'm going to fill my work is by reaching out to people I've had interactions with and being like you, I want you in my program because I know this will benefit you. And as much as I want it to work with launch emails, it doesn't. I

t works because I have personal relations people and I go out of my way to make a personal ask because they know they're also going to get personal value. As much as I wish it was different, it's not going to be that. Maybe in five years when I've run this program like three or four times and people are like waiting for me to open it, but I'm not there yet.

Amelia Hruby [00:39:42]:

Yeah, that's such a perfect example that bridges so much because something I see a lot, sort of something I've diagnosed on this show, is a lot of people like to use social media for their business because it gives them this sort of external thing to blame if something doesn't sell, right? It can be like, well, the algorithm didn't show it to anybody, so it's not on me. And I think you can do that in email too. It's like if you're selling through these impersonal methods, then you can just try to blame it on the platform or like, well, nobody read my emails.

It depersonalizes that “no” when nobody buys it or not enough people buy it. But that just is putting more barriers between us and the successful business we want. And we actually need to, again, be able to hear the no and just be okay with that and reset and adjust and rewrite it and figure it out and try again or go to the next person.

Amelia Hruby [00:40:39]:

And you're so right. Every time I have worked with a business coach or a business program that I have been happy with what happened in that program, I bought it on a personal recommendation or because they reached out to me and said they thought it would work for me for X, Y and Z reasons. Anytime I have bought business coaching or business advising in any way that I was sold through like a funnel, like an automated marketing sequence, I have never been thrilled with what happened at the end of it. That personal nature of it just brings so much.

Jessica Lackey [00:41:14]:

And it's hard. It is hard. It, quote unquote, takes more time. And to be fair, you're not going to achieve the kind of scale you need for that. Going back to the business model conversation, if you need to enroll 100 people in your program, a personal email is not going to do it. You need, quote unquote, the automation. But if you're trying to get ten, if you're trying to get those next five clients, it's probably going to come through again, relationships, referrals, that personal outreach and being willing to put yourself out there in a way that just “clench your butt cheeks and go” because it's so hard. Visibility is a risk, and yet the types of businesses we want to build, visibility is required.

Amelia Hruby [00:41:58]:

Yeah, it's very true. In my experience, there have been kind of two different types of listeners of this show. Off the Grid listeners shout out to you. I think there are a lot of us, I would put myself in this camp who have been on social media but never grew a really big following and are like I'd say, anybody who never got past that like 10k mark. We're all like doing our best and some of us really wanted to be influencers. Some of us never cared about that. And now we want to run a business that's not reliant on social media. That's like one group of listeners. Again, I put myself in that group.

But then I think there's another group of listeners who are the people who were successful influencers and did grow, had tens of thousands of followers and were selling to this larger audience. And something that I see as a challenge, like, when you're making that shift, if you're in that position and you want to step away from social media, is understanding this sort of scale question and this sort of like if you have 80,000 followers, you can't just go, like, email everybody to try to get them to join your course.

Amelia Hruby [00:43:03]:

But you have to find methods when you step away from social media where your marketing still feels personal and personable, because that's what people have grown accustomed to in your social media presence. And I think that I have learned a lot from the creators that I've watched step away from social media or that I've helped step away from social media in the ways that they stay personal in their marketing. And then I've also realized that I can't do those things because I'm not bringing tens of thousands of people over to my email list the way they do. It isn't going to work for me because I don't have the audience size and I've talked about on the show before. I just had to get honest with myself that that's never going to be my business. I'm not scaling. I'll just say it loud and proud. I am not scaling this business. There is no scale. It is me. It is growing. But to me, I think of scaling as that exponential growth and that's not happening for Softer Sounds or for Off the Grid or for me Amelia Hruby. And once I could get honest about that and feel good about that, I've been able to right size everything. Right size my offerings, right size my marketing, right size my sales techniques. And it's been such a relief, honestly.

Jessica Lackey [00:44:18]:

Yeah. And I think those are those larger businesses, those ones that did amass the social media following, even at that level, have to go back to the foundations and say, if I'm not using social media to attract new audiences, how am I building trust? You still have to go back to the fundamentals of, are the methods matching the model? Is my pricing now appropriate? And now do I have a way that's not social media dependent to meet new audiences, continue to build rapport, and decide whether or not they're going to work with me and then truly make invitations in a way that's right for the audience?

And I think it's too easy to drop one without replacing and rethinking the whole infrastructure and wondering why the result and the results will be different. They will be different. They just will. Sometimes that's different in a positive way. And sometimes that's different in a way where the metrics aren't necessarily what you want in your favor. And then you have to even go deeper in the business to say what else needs to change when I'm removing social media as a marketing tool.

Amelia Hruby [00:45:21]:

And I think what I want to point people to is those answers should come from your inner authority, not from what you see everybody else doing online. I think the more work you can do to recenter in yourself and your why of why you want to do this, then you can be creative to come up with offerings, marketing, community all these things that suit your why and not just be following in the footsteps of these creators you admire, or, again, on this sort of growth escalator of, “Well, I guess I need to have a six figure business, because that's what everybody wants these days.”

Jessica Lackey [00:45:57]:

Exactly.

Amelia Hruby [00:45:59]:

Jessica, I feel like we've made a pretty good case for how important these business fundamentals, business foundations are and why folks might want to work on them this fall. And I know you have a fantastic way they can do that with you. So can you tell us a little bit more about Deeper Foundations and what you'll be offering starting in September?

Jessica Lackey [00:46:21]:

Yes. Deeper Foundations is a six month program to help you build your business and your business building intuition. So every month we'll tackle one of the foundational aspects of your business. We start with your mission, then we go to your business model, offer structure and pricing. We go to the methods in your business, marketing and sales and delivery that align with that mission and the models. Then we look at how you're managing time, setting goals that are again tied back to that ultimate mission, and then defining the metrics that are right for you and your business. The reason I call it Deeper Foundations is that I'm not teaching you tactics. I'm helping to illustrate the structures and the skills you'll need at each level to tailor a business that's right for you.

Jessica Lackey [00:47:11]:

If you want to be a creator, let's talk about it. If you want to be an agency, let's talk about it. If you want to be a craftsman, service provider, let's talk about it. But how do we cover the gamut of how to think about your business so that you can decide on the activities in your business that you're going to do that is right for you? There's going to be two tiers. One's going to be a community tier and a coaching tier. If you want one on one support, that's available in the coaching tier. But even in the community tier, I'm keeping it 15 people because I wanted it to be a small, intimate group where if you have a question, it gets answered by me. Every person who joins gets a 30 minutes one on one to dive into their business model math. So, like I say no one should spreadsheet alone, especially if you're creative. Let's actually do the math. Let's run the numbers and make sure the offers and the marketing that you've set out to do are actually going to work for your needs. Not for my needs and not for a random six figure need, but for what you need from your business.

Amelia Hruby [00:48:12]:

Yes, I will say Jessica makes magical spreadsheets. I've experienced this firsthand. There was not a spreadsheet in my business until Jessica made us a spreadsheet. You know, just for the magical numbers consult alone, I feel like that's so valuable. I just I loved what you said at the very beginning about it's for building your business and your business intuitions.

Because what I've really been coming back to on Off the Grid so much this year especially and I think also, as I've been teaching this course, Living Systems with my collaborator, grace allerdice, we just keep coming back to this idea that other people's solutions won't work for you. Only you know how to creatively solve your problems.

And so seeking out programs like Deeper Foundations, where you will learn what are the things you need to know about and what are the skills you need to understand them for yourself in your own ways, that's what we want here. So everything about Deeper Foundations will be linked in the show notes, as well Jessica's fantastic newsletter that comes out every Sunday and is the only thing I open my work inbox for on Sundays. Jessica, is there anything you want to say before we wrap this up?

Jessica Lackey [00:49:30]:

The program starts September 18. I chose that it's around the fall equinox because that's the time where we can look back and harvest what is working and prepare ourselves and our souls for the deep work that comes in, kind of reimagining the business foundations.

Amelia Hruby [00:49:47]:

Well, thank you so much, Jessica. Thank you, listeners, for tuning in. I hope this episode is helping you all make sense of some of the places where you're like, my business is not working but I don't know why. Maybe it's one of these cracks in your business foundation that is the problem. Go explore Jessica's work and get her support through this program or one on one to grow your business and know where you're going as you grow. And until next time, friends, we will see you Off the Grid.

[music fades in]

Amelia Hruby [00:50:19]:

Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Find links and resources in the show notes and don't forget to grab your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig. That's softersounds dot studio slash b-y-e-i-g.

This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by Purple Planet and our logo is by n'atelier Studio.

If you'd like to make a podcast of your own, we'd love to help. Find more about our services at softersounds.studio. Until next time, we'll see you Off the Grid.