Welcome back to Good Business. I’m your host, Illana Burk. Today, we’re talking about the most central parts of your work. The things that always feel true. The things that consistently make money. The things that people always seem to respond well to. The things that pay the bills while you look to create the bigger, riskier, more experimental offers.

Today, we’re talking about your bread and butter.

Bread and butter offers are like the unsung heroes of small business. They are the things we almost forget to appreciate while they just keep chugging along making money. 

For some, it’s the service offers they keep doing while they build their bigger vision.

For others, it’s a simple offer that carries their whole business.

For me, my bread and butter has always been 1:1 coaching. Over the last fifteen plus years, it’s changed shapes more than a few times, but the actual delivery is pretty much the same. Clients show up (usually in some level of disarray or crisis or stuckness) and together, we work it out. Over time, triage becomes strategy, and strategy becomes support. There are tears and trust-building and resistance and breakthroughs and progress. 

Some clients work with me for six months, some a year… and some for years on end as I often become less of a coach and more of a thought partner.

It’s why I call it Partnership Coaching. 

Honestly, the name is probably the only constant in the entire lifecycle of my business. When I was first starting out, I remember fretting like mad over what to call my new coaching service. I did what most new entrepreneurs do – I burned a stupid amount of time brainstorming floofy and imaginative names to try to differentiate myself. 

And nothing felt right, so I landed on ‘Partnership Coaching’ as a stopgap while I figured out something better. 

That was in 2009. So I guess it’s safe to say that nothing better ever emerged.

That’s how it often is with bread and butter offers. They tend to just keep on thanklessly  grinding for you while you create big dreams and experiments. 

Ironically, Partnership Coaching wasn’t always my bread and butter. When I started, web design was the thing that got me by. It was the easiest money when I was getting things up and running. Everyone who started a business back then knew they needed one thing – a website. And while coaching and consulting was what I was aiming at, web design was my way in. 

When clients weren’t sure what they wanted their website to look like – usually because they didn’t know what they really wanted their business to look like, THAT’s when I got to really do my thing. 

So over time, I started building coaching sessions into my web design packages. And once their websites were done, they generally stayed with me for more coaching because I had really become a partner in their business growth. 

It took me years to move from web design and coaching to just coaching. Mostly because, as it turns out, I was pretty solid at both. I built a thriving design agency that supported a bunch of other designers, writers, and VAs. 

Design was my bread and butter while I built my coaching practice. 

Then about seven years ago, I successfully wound down my design agency to make way for coaching being my whole offer. It was exciting. Clients were happy, my time was my own, and my business felt simple and nourishing.

And it still does. But over time, coaching became my bread and butter while I contemplated how to take all that I’ve learned and all that I know to a broader audience. 

And that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? Create something sustainable, then grow it. Scale up. Expand. 

Shoot for six figures, then seven, and on and on.

But what if that wasn’t how it had to be?

What if simple and sustainable is actually the right goal? 

What if we recalibrated our ideas around success and expansion to honor our bread and butter offers as not just what keeps us going, but what gives our work stability and meaning?

Jacques Pepin – world renowned French chef, arguably one of the godfathers of really complicated gourmet cooking – once said: “If you have extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter, it’s hard to beat bread and butter.”

What I have learned so far is that the things that are truly central to what you do tend to evolve really really slowly. 

But each time they expand and push up against the constraints of past decisions, whatever comes next tends to be stronger – more well formed. 

…Like learning to make better and better bread from the same humble ingredients.

Ok, that’s it for me today. Thank you for honoring me with your time and attention. Now go find your very best bread and put it together with some very good butter, and enjoy every single bite.