🧗🏻♀️ Getting Off the Online Business Growth Escalator
Amelia [00:00:01] [Sparky synth 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.
Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [00:00:08] [Music continues to play as Melissa Kaitlyn Carter begins to sing] Let's go, off the grid. Okay! Let's go, off the grid. Okay! I know that you really want to put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go, off the grid.
Amelia [00:00:24] [Singing fades out but synthy sounds continue] Have you ever wish that you could have a successful business without social media? Well, you're in luck. I'm Amelia Hruby, writer, speaker, and founder of Softer Sounds Podcast Studio.
Amelia [00:00:34] On this show, I share stories, strategies and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty. Download the free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig. That's b-y-e-i-g and join us in doing it all Off the Grid.
Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [00:00:56] [Music gets louder as Melissa Kaitlyn Carter sings again] Let's go, off the grid. Okay! Let's go, off the grid. Okay! I know that you really want to put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go, off the grid [music fades out].
Amelia [00:01:15]
Hello, hello, my friends. Welcome or welcome back to Off The Grid. I am your host, Amelia Hruby. I am the founder of Softer Sounds podcast studio. I'm the cofounder of the Lifestyle Business League. And I am the proprietor the gatherer, the facilitator, the mentor, the space holder of the recently launched Interweb membership.
I want to take a sec at the top of this episode to give a shout out to all of my new Interwebbers, as I like to think of you. I am so thrilled that so many of you wonderful listeners have joined and I hope that more of you will come on in during our founding membership period, or before the end of the year. There is an on-demand course portal waiting for you full of wonderful goodies like my Business Success Without Social Media course, like a Clearing the Fear of Leaving Social Media visualization from my dear friend grace, and North Star Metrics workshop from pod friend Taylor Elyse Morrison, and a Deeper Business Design workshop from my business coach, Jessica Lackey. All of that's in there, as well as my list of recommended online business tools. And if you join us before next year, we're also going to have four live events next year that are going to be really fantastic. I cannot wait to gather with the amazing Interwebbers that we have gathered so far. So come on in while the water's still warm, as they say. I'd love to have you.
So today, I do have some good news for you. And that good news is that I have decided to extend season two by one more episode! Basically what happened was I have this final episode all planned, the one you're gonna hear today, and I was super excited about it. And then I got like another download that was like, No, you need to make this one more. So there will be today's episode and then one more episode. And then we will take a break until Season Three launches in spring 2024.
In the meantime, make sure you get the free Leaving Social Media Toolkit. Make sure you check out the new Off the Grid website. And of course, you can join the Interweb you'll find all of that at offthegrid.fun. And that said I think I'm ready to go ahead and dive on into this episode. What do you think? Should we have some real talk about growth? Let's dive in.
[splash sound]
As we get started, I'm curious what images arrive in your mind when I say business growth.
I'll tell you what comes up for me. So I see graphs, all with upward trajectories like the stock market, although the stock market often goes down, but in my mind, they're all going up up kind of like that emoji. It's like everything is up and to the right, we are improving. That's something I think of when I hear business growth. I also think of those sort of quick hit offers that will teach you how to make six figures in your business, how to make seven figures in your business. I've started to see how to make eight figures in your business and even how to make a billion dollars in your business as a creator.
And then my mind starts swirling with question marks and then I get really overwhelmed and overloaded and exhausted and I shut down and I stop wanting to think about growth ever again.
So if that also happens for you rest assured that today's episode is not about trying to figure out how you can grow, grow grow, more and more and more faster, faster, faster. In fact, it's about quite the opposite. So in this episode, we're going to talk about what I've started thinking of as getting off the growth escalator. I'm going to talk about what the online business growth escalator is for me. And I'm going to share a pretty like open and vulnerable story about how business growth got out of my control this year a little bit, and how I struggled to manage that and what I ended up doing and how it benefited and perhaps negatively impacted my business.
And then I'm going to offer some advice, some prompts, some frameworks for how you might think about growth in your work and what you are growing toward, and how much growth is enough for you. So that's what we're going to chart together. And I'll start by telling you about the online business growth escalator.
So in our lives, as we grow up and are socialized in our societies, we are taught that there are certain paths toward being successful. Often, if you grew up in a middle class household like I did, that path look something like get good grades in school, go to college, get your degree, get a job, climb the corporate ladder, save for retirement, retire, have some money to do what you want, and then die. That's like the life ladder that I was taught, the life escalator, the path that I was on. And some of us take those paths and feel fulfilled and excited by them. And others of us, like myself, and perhaps like you listening, find those paths to be unsatisfactory, or like they just don't fit us.
I found myself on that path. And after college, as I was trying to fit myself into the corporate world. As I was thinking about or working on getting a job, I was like, this is so constricting, and not for me. And I ended up going to grad school, which is a different path. For some people a very acceptable exciting path. For my family, a confusing and perhaps disappointing path. But that's a story for another day. And I think that for many of us, we can start to find the moments where we have strayed from that version of the path towards success.
One of the reasons that so many of us find ourselves on that path is that it's the path that we're socialized into. And often, if we don't actively step off of it, we might just get sort of carried along from one job to the next from one retirement savings account to the next, you know, we can keep going. And there might be these sort of ruptures where maybe we get laid off or we do something else, or we have a kid and we take leave or whatever it might be. But we find ourselves on this sort of escalator and it's just going and going and going, and maybe it's feels more like a moving sidewalk at times but it's just going and we're just on the path.
And well, I've often heard that experience referred to as the path or the expectation or many other things. I learned the metaphor of the escalator from the polyamory community. And there the relationship escalator describes the way that relationships are expected to evolve in our society. And so often the traditional view of relationships this escalator goes from relatively like fun and flirty, to like we're married, we have a house and kids. And if you stay in a relationship long enough, you might find yourself just on that path through the force of socialization.
So here's one example of what that escalator might look like. You flirt, you date, you have sex, you become a couple, you move in together. Eventually you get married, you buy a house, you have children, you stay married, your kids grow up, you retire together, you spend your life cruising around wherever people cruise, you die together. Like that is a relationship escalator again, it could get disrupted by divorce, by loss. It doesn't mean that everyone's path works this way. But the reason it's called the escalator is because of the force of the societal expectation that if you stay in a relationship long-term, it keeps evolving in this way from less serious to more serious, right? If you've ever tried to just like casually date someone for like years, you've experienced this. Because people are like, are you guys official? Are you exclusive? Like are you going to move in together? Even if you tried to date someone and not move in with them right you can sometimes get these questions. That's all happening because of the relationship escalator.
So earlier this year, I was thinking about this sort of life path that many of us are encouraged to go down. I was thinking about the relationship escalator that many of us find ourselves on. And I was thinking about those moments of disruption, those moments that we step off the escalators. And I was thinking about this, because I feel like I stepped off those escalators at different points. Like I mentioned, I stepped off the life path escalator when I decided that I never wanted to have a traditional nine to five job, which I never have... for better or for worse. My happiness will tell you for better, my retirement savings might tell you for worse, but you know what, it's a decision that I needed to make for myself and one that has been nourishing and supportive of me my unique path.
So I stepped off that path there. And then with the relationship escalator, I'm stepping off that path before having children. My partner and I have made a mutual decision that we don't desire to have kids and that we won't be having kids. And that's the decision that's right for us. We got married, we're working on buying a house, but we're not going to have children. And so that has been a big part of my life, to share quite personally, over the past year or so. And thinking in the context of stepping off of that escalator, I was like, wow, these are really liberatory experiences, also really challenging ones in some ways. But they helped me find my path, instead of just staying on this escalator, kind of going down the prescribed like, "this is how we do things"-ness of society.
And reflecting on all of that is how I realized that I was accidentally on another escalator that I didn't quite realize I was even on. So this is what I've started thinking of as the online business growth escalator. And this one is a little more fluid, maybe it's a little more challenging to kind of pin down like, what is each step of the escalator, like, what's each floor that we're kind of escalating to. But earlier this summer, I found myself at this point in Softer Sounds where I had grown the business to achieve all of my initial goals. My initial goals for Softer Sounds were to have enough clients to consistently be making around $10,000 a month. That's the number I needed to cover all my expenses and pay myself what I want to pay myself. And then to have a team of contract editors that I work with, so that I'm not the only person editing in my business. So those are my two goals. 10k months, I know it's trendy, but it was a meaningful metric for me, and a team.
And I accomplished both of those things. And I found myself just like chasing more growth. And I was kind of riding this escalator up and I kind of turned to look back and I was like, oh shit, I didn't get off at the floor. I wanted to get off at. And now I'm overwhelmed. I'm overworked. And I don't know where I'm going. Because I meant to get off there and I'm way up here.
So I had this realization. And I started thinking about like, Okay, what is the online business growth escalator. So here's what I've started mapping for myself. I think it goes something like this.
It starts with like having some fun ideas. You get interested in something, maybe it's podcasting, maybe it's knitting, maybe it's energy work, maybe it's consulting for marketing companies, maybe it's... whatever it might be for you. But you have these fun ideas, and you start doing them and then you probably make an Instagram account for them. Let's be real, even though we're critical of social media, here at off the grid, most people are still on it. So you've got your cool fun idea and you probably make an Instagram account for it or you start pivoting your Instagram account into being about that. Then you grow your audience trying to get more followers more more more more followers. And once you have whatever feels like enough for you, you start to figure out how your fun idea could be a thing that makes money I like capitalized this in my notes. Thing That Makes Money. TTMM. So you figure that out, then you start to sell that thing that makes money to your new audience. Normally, that's going to be a workshop. Maybe it's an online course or ebook. It could be a coaching session, like a small group program. You're selling that thing that makes money. You sell it. Goes great. You use that money that you made to buy a course, hire a coach, maybe you get brand photos, maybe you build a website. You reinvest it in this newfound business/project/art practice... we're not really sure what it is yet, but you're putting the money back into it.
Next, you work on growing your list. Maybe that means you're still growing on social media. Maybe you switch to trying to grow on email, but you're still trying to get a bigger following. Then you sell your thing that makes money again. But this time, it's more expensive or it's in a different format. Maybe you go from solo coaching to group coaching or group coaching to solo coaching. You're trying to make more money. If that goes well, you do make more money. And you hire a copywriter, an SEO specialist, a marketing professional. You're investing the big bucks and reaching more people. Over time you keep selling and iterating on your thing that makes money. It keeps growing. So you hire a VA, you hire contractors, you get support, you grow your team, as everyone teaches us to do.
And eventually, if all that's going well, you go Meta. So you create a coaching package, a signature course, or an expensive product that teaches other people your way to make money doing your Thing That Makes Money. So you go from doing the thing itself, to teaching people how to do the thing. That's going meta means to me, or at least as I learned it from Tara McMullin. So now you're selling that meta thing that makes money, your MTTMM. (It is a horrible acronym.) You sell that. And eventually you shift that into a model that doesn't require you. So if it's coaching, you might bring on more coaches who are delivering the coaching, or if it's a course it probably goes evergreen and self-guided, or if it's a product, you've hired people who are doing all the delivery of that product for you. So at this stage, your business probably looks like maybe there's a team who's selling the Thing That Makes Money, there's a team that's selling the Meta Thing That Makes Money. And you now shift into speaking, consulting, and evergreen offers only. So you're getting paid the big bucks to speak one to many, to advise rich people or companies, or to churn out digital products. And a lot of that is going to be determined by how big you got your audience, right. So if you're churning out digital products, it'll only work if you've amassed an audience of probably hundreds of thousands of people. So if you haven't done that, at this point, probably what you're doing is high touch consulting, or keynote speeches and speaking.
So this online business growth escalator has taken us from a fun thing that we like doing to a world where we are on stages, or advising rich people, or just churning out stuff on the internet that we're not actually delivering at all. This is the promise of online business, right? That you can like doing something, you can do it for a while. And then you can get so successful that you don't actually have to do it anymore.
And I think that the reason that's so appealing to people, I think the reason that if you put the phrase "passive income" on anything, it will sell a whole lot, probably. It's because we're all so fucking tired. Like, we're exhausted. And we want to put in the work now, so that we don't have to work at some point in the future. And what the online business growth escalator sells us, is this world where eventually we won't have to work because we're just kind of running these companies where everybody else is working. And we just have like the big ideas. And I think it's like this mix of like, magical thinking and some type of like FIRE mindset like financial independence, retire early mindset for the online business set. And it's all happening somehow through these like promises of evergreen digital products.
And I want to pause here and say like, there's nothing wrong with having this dream. There's nothing wrong with wanting to build a business that starts as like a one on one offer, and moves to a course and then develops an online community. I didn't even mention... oh my gosh, I totally forgot to even mention online community. That's definitely a part of the online business growth escalator. That sweet sweet MRR, or monthly recurring revenue as everyone says. And if I mentioned I MRR, I should probably also mention paid content. That's often another pillar or increasingly becoming a pillar of the online business growth escalator.
There's nothing wrong with growing a business in these ways. There's nothing wrong with wanting to grow a business in these ways. But I think that what is tricky, and the place I found myself in so many times as my business has grown, is pausing and asking if I actually want that next thing. Or if the force of you know the online business community or the narratives there is just so strong that that's where I'm going next.
So let me give you a couple examples that have come up for me recently. I do not have a VA. But I feel like there's this cultural cache of online business owners that one way you can like project success is to have a VA and have them like in your inbox sending emails for you. And I make these assumptions too. Like if someone emails me and they're like, "Oh, my assistant, so and so's handling this," I'm like, wow, they must be so successful. But like, I don't know, they can be paying that VA $5 an hour because they live in a different part of the world than I do. Or their VA could be totally fake and they just like made it up. And that's okay. Again, I'm not judging people who do this. But I don't have to think less of myself because I haven't hired a VA. And because I don't really need one of my business, and that's okay. But hiring a VA is a step on this online business growth escalator. And so if I'm not achieving that, I feel like I'm failing in some sense. Having just mentioned paid content, another example would be that I don't have a paid newsletter or podcast. I feel like there's a certain point in success in your business that you're supposed to have a sort of paid content offer. And quite frankly, I'm just not interested in doing that. Like, I love teaching and gathering. That's what I want to sell, I don't want to sell my writing, I don't want to sell my podcasts. That's where the radical generosity lives in my practice, that's where I am offering to the community. And then I hope that you'll come in for the other shop and pay for the other stuff. But sometimes I feel like I am not a quote unquote, "successful business owner" because I have not monetized any of my content.
And again, no one I know is saying that to me, but it's just what I take in from all of the content and media I consume around online business and how to be successful in online business. Those narratives are forceful, like they propel me up this online business growth escalator. And there's kind of two different experiences of this. One is that you know the narrative and how it's supposed to go and your experience is not going that way. And so you feel like shit about yourself and your business, right? You're like, I've been in business for two years, and I've never made more than $500 a month in my business. Wow I must be a failure, because everyone else is having $10,000 months, like, we're judging ourselves against the escalator, when we're not moving up it. You're like my escalator is broken. These are in fact, stairs, I am on a moving sidewalk, I am on a non-moving sidewalk, nothing is happening, right? Like, the metaphor breaks down for us if we're not moving up and up and up and up and up. That's one experience.
Or you might find yourself where I found myself with Softer Sounds this summer. And the business was moving up and up and up and up and up. But let me tell you, I had like fallen over and was sliding backwards down the escalator personally, like my capacity was not growing at the same rate that the business was growing. And that was really hard. And it became a sort of moment of deep struggle for me. And this sort of reckoning about what do I actually want? And what role do I want my work to play in my life? And how much of my energy do I want to give to this business?
And at the same time, I'm just riding the growth escalator being like, oh, I should grow my team. Guess I better put out the apps now. Like, I'm really just like following the force of the advice that I'm getting, sometimes from people I know and admire and sometimes from people I've literally never met, but I just like they're on every single podcast I listened to that week. So I apparently now do what they say. Right?
What the advice is, and what the path is, will look a little different for everyone. There is a normative Online Business Growth Escalator. But we've all got our little remix or we're all on our own little escalator, too. But the purpose of me like really driving home this metaphor is that I think that so many people come to online business because they want a clear ten-step path to how to be successful. And because people will sell you that, people will sell you the escalator, and if you do this, this, this and that, then you will get where you want to go, you will get a six figure business, or you only have to work five hours a week, right? Like people will sell you that escalator. But that escalator is broken, like it doesn't work. We come to online business sometimes because we want that. But just doing those things will not make us successful. And I want us all myself included, to be forging our own paths. I want us to be stepping off the online business growth escalator, doing things that feel deeply resonant and powerful, and fun and pleasurable for ourselves, for our customers, for our clients, for our communities, for our peers, for our mentors, and I want us to be building in these new ways together.
So at this point in the episode, you're probably feeling one of two ways. You're either like, Amelia, my escalator never worked. So please just like get me on a working escalator, so I can even consider these problems, which you know, I feel you. Before Softer Sounds was a successful business. I tried to grow so many other projects into businesses, and it just didn't work. And that was tough. So if you're in that place I feel for you.
Or you might be in a place where you're like, oh thank God you're talking about this Amelia because I am really tired and I do need to scale back and I don't know what to do about that.
And here's what I have have to offer no matter which place that you are in. I think that the most important thing we can do is get really clear on what we want from our business or our work. And when I say really clear on what we want, I mean really clear on every aspect of what we're desiring this provide for us. So really clear about how much money we want it to make, really clear about how we want to feel in the process, really clear about the type of people we want to work with along the way. I think that we need to get in touch with those things. So that we can create our own paths toward growth. And so that we can check in along the way, and recalibrate the path as needed. Change directions, shift, focus, go at a different pace, you know, sometimes the path might be right, but we're galloping down at way too fast. Or we might be headed in the wrong direction, and we need to go somewhere else. But if we've never stopped to chart our own course, we will end up on one of these escalators, or feeling like a failure because we're not going up the escalator. The more clear we can be on what path we want to take. And then taking that path or getting support to move down that path. I think the more fulfilled, we can be in our businesses and in our lives.
And so this fall, I got off the growth escalator. And I'll be honest, I don't know if I did that so gracefully. I took a three week sabbatical in July, and really pumped the brakes on the business growth. I communicated to my clients about it, we all worked together to make plans for their summer. But now that I'm on the other side of that sabbatical, I can see the way that pumping the brakes that hard, really threw all of us off. And I did it because I needed it. I was galloping toward burnout, I was exhausted, I was going to hit that burn it down point, if I didn't give myself some real time away, not like a weekend here or there not like a week where I'm still sort of looking at my email. But I took three weeks of no producing episodes, no editing, no responding to emails, three weeks off the business. And it was necessary. So I do not at all feel guilt or shame or bad or weird, I feel great about that.
But I can also reflect that, now on the other side of it, our roster of Softer Sounds is half the size that was in the spring. In the spring, I think we were producing 26 shows and right now we're working on 12. And the business is still fine financially, like we're still profitable, I've still got the same team. We're not maybe making as much money as we were during those really busy seasons. But the ecosystem is still sustained and supported. And because I've stepped back from that, I've been able to turn my attention more toward Off the Grid. I was able to develop The Interweb, which so many of you have joined, and which I really designed to be sustainable for all of us. I've talked about this in the last bonus episode. It's why it's priced affordably for all of you. It's why the meetings are quarterly so I can really show up in my full self but not feel like I'm constantly sort of being pulled away from my other work. These are ways that I'm trying to continue growing, but not overextend myself, not go beyond my limits so much. And like stoke my personal creative fire and lifeforce so that I can keep doing this work for a long time, in different forms in different ways. And I'm sure what it looks like in 10 years will be nothing like how it looks now. But I still want to be showing up in 10 years. I don't want to be so high up the escalator that I never do the work anymore. And I don't want to be so exhausted that I just like quit altogether and abandon this path.
So if you want to be really intentional about how you're growing, I want to point you toward two resources in The Interweb. I think one place that intentionality comes in is in choosing your business model. Inside The Interweb my business coach Jessica Lackey has created a workshop for us called Deeper Business Design. And she walks through a number of different business models, particularly for online business owners, and talks about how they get started how they make money and the sort of types of work that happened in the process. Now, business models are not the most sexy part of business, I know that. But they are literally the foundation, the structure of your business. And in my opinion, when we started a business, we need to know if we're building this like cozy little cabin, or a giant mansion, right. And something I see way too often is that people who want to build a cozy cabin are using all of these giant mansion strategies, and all of a sudden, you've got your cozy cabin, and then also you order like 1000 square feet of marble, and you're like, my cabin is only 400 square feet, what is happening. To take it out of metaphor world, for instance, like, I see a lot of people who have no desire to grow an audience starting businesses that require massive audience growth to make money. So they're building a giant mansion, when they literally only want to invite like two people over at a time, right? That's a mismatch, right? The business model there is not probably going to work in the way that you want it to. You might try to get on the escalator and it doesn't go anywhere, it just stops. Right. So all of that gets kind of talked through and explained in the Deeper Business Design workshop in the Interweb. And I think it's especially helpful for new folks who are just starting out or for people who are kind of hitting this point in their business where they're like I am growing, but I don't know where I'm going with this. That's a moment to like reassess your business model, and if it is fitting your goals.
And then another workshop in The Interweb that will be really helpful for you in this process is my dear friend and co-founder Taylor Elyse Morrison's workshop on North Star Metrics. Because so often, the way that we get propelled up this growth escalator is by chasing metrics that aren't actually connected to our goals. So you may get propelled up this escalator by chasing a revenue metric of five figure months, one that I talked about here, right, like, maybe making $10,000 a month matters to you, maybe it doesn't. But if all you're doing is working toward that, you might end up somewhere you didn't intend to go. And so in Taylor's North Star Metrics workshop, she helps us find the metric or metrics that are really aligned with our personal definition of success, not the definitions that are kind of these escalators are rising toward.
So this was definitely one of my think-ier episodes. If you stuck around, thanks for listening. Thanks for joining me. Here at Off the Grid, I like to offer a lot of like five step plans to do the thing. But sometimes, I also like to take time to think more about why we're even doing these things to begin with. And to step deeper into things that are hard to talk about. Because it's hard to talk about growth. It's hard to recognize that we are not growing when we want to grow, or that we are growing too fast, or that we have grown in a random direction we didn't want to go. These are all kind of challenging moments in a business. And I think especially if you're listening to this live, it's fall 2023. And fall, you know, is the season of pulling back in, right? Spring, we're getting started. Summer we are growing. And in the fall, we're kind of putting ourselves back to bed for the winter. And I think that this is a really good season for us to pause and to reflect on: where we have grown this year? Where that has taken us? And if we are on any paths, any growth escalators that we might want to step off of? You could do that in every area of your life. On this podcast, we are talking about business and marketing, so we're going to do that in our businesses.
And in my next episode, in the final episode of season two, we're actually going to talk about if we even want to be on the business growth escalator at all. And I'm going to kind of pose and unpack this question of "do you have a business or a project or an art practice?" Is your art practice a business? Do you want it to be, should it be, can it be? Do you want it to not be all of these things?
So I can't wait to dive into that with you next week. In the meantime, I hope that you will go grab the Leaving Social Media Toolkit at offthegrid.fun. If you've already got the Toolkit come on over and join us in The Interweb. I'd love to have you when we get started with our live events next year. Those will be perfect places to chart these paths forward, to make our own business maps, so that we can get off these escalators broken or not. So until then, my friends I will see you off the grid and on the Interweb.
Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [00:35:04] [Melissa Kaitlyn Carter begins to sing over sparkly synthy sounds] Let's go off the grid. Okay! Let's go off the grid. Okay! I know that you really want to put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go off the grid.
Amelia [00:21:23] [Music continues to play softly] 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.
Amelia [00:21:35] This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter and our logo is by n'atelier Studio.
Amelia [00:21:42] 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.
Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [00:22:07] [Melissa Kaitlyn Carter sings the new theme song again] Let's go off the grid. Okay! Let's go off the grid. Okay! I know that you really wanna put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go off the grid [sparkly synthy sounds fade out].
Creators and Guests
