Business is FULL of opportunities for compromise. Options. Bad advice. The kind that tells you it’s OK to sacrifice your values. And as business owners, we are often asked to bend, shift, stretch. Change what we KNOW to be true to fit “The Rules”. Today we explore the one thing to NEVER do this on.

Mentioned on this episode: fabeku.com

 

 

Episode Transcript: 

I’m Illana Burk, CEO of Your Life’s Workshop, coach to entrepreneurs and solopreneurs across dozens of industries and host of Good Business. With nearly 20 years experience helping hundreds of clients create profitable, ethically driven and sustainable businesses based on their life’s work, I’m here to teach you how to do great work, make great money, and make a positive impact without feeling like you need a shower afterwards.

Welcome to the Good Business podcast. Today’s episode is all about the one thing in your business and your leadership development that you absolutely can’t compromise on, and to elaborate on that a little bit. Today we’re going to talk about package development. We’re going to talk about how to deliver on your promises. We’re going to talk a little bit about pricing. Most of all, we’re going to talk about how to muster up the guts to not mess up the thing that matters the most, which is how you deliver what you offer. There are all kinds of things in your business that you can bend on and still succeed. You can compromise your ethics, and you can bend on social media, you can bend on design, you can bend on networking, they can all involve subtle shifts in how you think you want to do things versus how you need to do them.

You can follow all the directions, all the mandates, all the blog posts, all the lessons, all the everything. Some of those might feel really resonant for you, and some of them might not. There’s a lot of opportunity for deviation. From what you actually, at your core, feel like is the right thing. We make these subtle compromises all the time. Especially in our business and when we’re starting out,  we’re in that stage where we don’t know what we don’t know, which lasts a long time for a lot of people. If you’re good about what you do and want to keep learning, then you’re always going to feel that tension.

So today we want to talk about like the thing that is the most important thing, the thing that you can’t afford to bend on. It’s probably one of the hardest things to not. When I talk to clients, I work on this very same thing all the time. This comes up all the time. Even for my more experienced clients, it comes up for me sometimes.

For example, what we’re going to start off talking about is actually offer design. That’s the core of where we’re at today. We’re talking about how you deliver on the promises that you make to clients. When I say clients, that’s a generic term for your clients in this sense. They could be the people that work for you. They could be the people who are paying you. It could be the people who are your audience. If you’re a content producer, it’s saying, when you create a brand, you’re creating a promise. You’re saying, “I’ve promised that I can deliver on x.”  A lot of people don’t deliver on x. They over promise or they under deliver, one of the two. They make a promise that’s not what they want to be promising. It’s more like a marketing promise, where it says something like, “you can have anything you want, and I’ll show you how.” That is not an accurate promise. That is not a thing that anybody can give you. It’s not a promise that can be made and fulfilled by the service provider right there. There’s nobody who can do that. You can’t have anything you want.

I have news for you. You can’t have anything you want. There’s nobody who can show you how to have that. So notice that. When you’re creating your thing, whatever your thing is, you have to figure out a way to both come up with an accurate promise and deliver on it. There’s a couple of different ways to do this. When I say that, I don’t want to be flippant about it because there are two ways to develop what you offer, and only two. Let me back up for a second. Both of these things are based on something that you have to establish before you can get to the offer design. That is, “what’s the problem that you’re solving?”  We all know this. We think about how somebody needs something. How can I deliver it?

Most people’s approach to developing things is, “What am I good at? What do other people in my industry do? How do they deliver on it? How do they think about it?” We go through these mental gymnastics that everybody goes through. Approaching your product, your service, your business as, “What will the market bear?” You’re thinking about, “okay, so I’m a good writer. I’ll be a copywriter.” Well, what can I make money at? Copywriting? I can write websites, or I can go straight blog posts, or you think about it from the direction of the logistical output and based on what you think people will pay for what you think the rest of the industry is doing. We don’t often start with ourselves. That’s what I’m going to get to in a second here. So that’s where everybody starts; in that reactive headspace. It’s not very proactive.

The two ways that I was discussing; now you know what the problem is. Now you have a sense of it. Now you’re going to think about one of two things. You’re going to pick one of two lanes. The first lane is you base it on what people want. I’m going to figure out a problem, and I’m going to figure out how I can solve the problem, which is viable. Totally. Only it’s not sustainable long term for a number of reasons, and we’re going to get to that in a second.

The second way is based on how you deliver on your promise. You make a promise, and you design your offer around how you can best deliver on it. That’s the core of what we’re talking about today. Delivering on your promise is the most important thing you can do in your business. That’s something that is weirdly almost an afterthought in how people develop their offers these days, because we develop offers based on availability, on trends, on all these externalized factors that have not one fucking thing to do with doing something really well.

Obviously, you know the name of the podcast, Good Business. This is how you do business well; this is how you develop evangelists. This is how you do things that matter. This is how you find fulfillment. This is how your logistical work becomes your life’s work. This is the difference between having a few people who say, “Oh yeah, they were okay. I worked with them, and I guess what they did for me was fine.” Versus having people who go, “Oh my God, they did such an amazing job for me.” They tell everybody they know about you, which is the goal. We need people who talk about us. That’s the fundamental way that you’re going to get clients. It’s the fundamental way that you’re going to get promotion. It’s the fundamental way that you’re going to be seen as a leader. The core of this is beyond just delivering. It’s about how do you want to lead and do you have the guts to do that.

Let’s break this down a little bit. First, I want to go back before we get to the really juicy stuff, the fun stuff that I was just discussing. I want to go back to how people do this wrong. We’re going to talk about the ways in which people do this wrong, all the ways in which people develop businesses, develop service offerings, and develop leadership platforms incorrectly and ineffectively. Wome of these I want to point out, you can get very successful doing the wrong way. That’s well known. You can be unethical as shit. You can burn people. You can undercharge, overcharge, you can sell things you’re not good at. You can do all of those things and make great money. That’s the truth. I wish it wasn’t that way. I wish people saw through it. I wish doing things the wrong way meant that you weren’t going to be successful, but that’s not the reality we fucking live in. We live in a world where you can do everything wrong and still do okay.

The problem though is we’re in a new space of business. We’re in a democratized world where anybody can start a business, and that’s magical. It’s also really fucking dangerous. It means that there’s a lot of people doing this who don’t give two fucking shits about creating something better than what the business world has been before. It means that we still use words like “target marketing.” Think about that for a second. Think about the phrase “target marketing.” It means that you’re literally painting a target so that you can shoot something at something else. That’s what a target is for. It has this sort of inherent in-humanity to it, and it takes out the very idea that you are a human being selling something useful to another human being. It sterilizes it, makes you forget that you’ve made a promise. It makes you forget that there’s a real person on the other end. It makes you forget that you’re separating someone from their hard earned money they could probably use for something else. I never, ever talk about target marketing. We’ll definitely cover what I talk about instead on another episode.

Today, how that ties in here is in service offerings, in how you deliver what you deliver. We’re talking logistics. I’m going to break that down a little bit. When you think about delivering on your promise, it’s the adage of, when you fly you have to put your mask on first if there’s an emergency, before you put a mask on other people. I know that’s not a new idea. I’m not the first one to say that, for sure. It’s a really good analogy, so I’m sticking with it. To deliver well, to deliver anything well, you have to be standing on a solid foundation. That’s basically what that means. You can’t save someone while dangling from a tight rope. You can’t save someone or help someone while you don’t have your basic systems in place that allow you the time and energy and bandwidth to do the work that you most need to do. You can’t function that way, at least not sustainably. Now a lot of us, when we first start, that’s not even optional.  We have to dangle and try to help. At the same time, we have to fake it till we make it, and that’s okay.

This is not an episode where I want to beat up people who are hustling and doing the job of six people. That’s not it at all. We all have to do that. I did it. Sometimes I still do. There is a necessity to scramble. Sometimes there’s a necessity to both perform and be exhausted. That’s not what I’m talking about. This is not a self-care conversation at all. There’s plenty of podcasts out there to teach you how to take care of yourself. This isn’t one of them. I’m here to teach you how to take care of your business and take care of the people who pay you. What we’re talking about is the difference between letting your client dictate how many sessions they want with you versus telling them how many sessions they need with you.

Does the dog wag the tail or the tail wag the dog? This came up today by happenstance because I had a client call earlier today. This is a long-term client that I’ve worked with for many years, and she’s heard this a lot of times and is probably going to laugh and chuckle at this. She’s been developing a new offering based on a new skill that she worked very, very hard to get and is continuing to work at gaining and adding to her service offerings. She’s offering a workshop now. We talked a lot about how to frame her workshop and to figure out how to frame it. She was coming at it from the standpoint of, “well, how do people do in-person workshops?” We were comparing it to things like going to yoga classes. This is an in-person, a physical thing that she’s doing. I’m not going to give it away, because of privacy and all that good stuff. She wanted to fill the workshop with eight to 12 people and was trying to figure out how often she needed to have classes in order for it to stick. It’s a whole new skill. It’s something that people have not done before. It’s something that she’s introducing a new group of people to a modality that isn’t something anyone has ever done before.

The first question I always ask when somebody asks me about service design is, “What do you need to do to deliver on your promise?” That is the core of everything today. What do you need to do to deliver on your promise? How much time do you need? How much connection do you need? How much community do you need? How much money do you need? Everything should come from that one simple question. I’m going to say it one more time. Anytime you’re developing a service, anytime you’re developing anything, think about the promise that you’ve made to the people who sign up and then think about, “What are the conditions you need to deliver on that promise?” That’s the core of today’s lesson.

For her, she was thinking this is a habit based modality. It’s something that requires you to practice a lot. Not exactly something that in Western society, in big cities, we are accustomed to. Most human beings are not great at practice or patience or any of that stuff. So we determined two sessions a week she needed to get a bunch of people together in a space outside of their home, to leave their house and come to a location where she could teach them this twice a week, in order for it to stick.

We developed this months and months ago today we were chatting about her sign-up numbers because it’s about to start. She’s gone through the whole launching process, and it’s about to start. She made an off-handed comment of, “Well, you know, it’s all data. I have a few people signed up, and it’s all going really well, and people are complaining about not being able to make it to every single one and all of that. And you know, I’ve made that really okay for people, and it totally is, and you know, maybe next time I won’t do it twice a week.”  I said, “Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, whoa. You’ve got to do it twice a week, That’s what YOU represented; this material will not stick unless you have people there twice a week, so they’re getting a serious amount of regularity and connection with the other people in the group that that feels critical.”

She had this moment of hemming and hawing, a little bit of, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, wait, wait, but what if I don’t get as many sign-ups?”  I said, “Fine. Then you don’t get as many sign-ups. That’s okay. Because if you have ten people who can come once a week, but you end up with ten people who barely learned anything at the end, they’re never going to come back for the next session and they’re never going to tell anybody how transformative or wonderful it was. And they’re not going to create relationships with the people there, and they’re not going to come every time because there’s no impetus to do so because they’re not going to see the results that delivered on your original promise. Am I right?” She said, “yeah, probably.” I said, “So wouldn’t it be better if you only got three people who could come three days a week or who could come twice a week and who were super engaged and had life-altering results and had a deep and transformative experience? Not only are they going to sign up next time, they’re going to tell everybody they know that they had a transformative experience.”

This all feeds into the fact that numbers lie. The volume of the people that sign up for your thing is irrelevant. It really is. If you’re delivering, it doesn’t matter. If you’re delivering on your promise and creating something amazing, then the number of people that sign up matters less and less. It just means you’re on a longer road. It means you have to be a little bit more patient. It means you’re creating something that you deeply care about and the people who participate in will deeply care about. It means you are keeping your promise and wouldn’t that be an amazing thing? If people started keeping their marketing promises?

How many newsletters have you signed up for that were garbage? That promised you the moon and the stars and all the wonderful updates in the world and a transformative business experience. They were going to create clarity and confidence and cash flow and all these magical, wonderful words that we all see so often. Wouldn’t it be great if they actually did? Think about it for a second. I’ll wait. Can you think of one person, one newsletter, one offer that you felt delivered on the promise it offered, that made you sign up for the thing or buy the thing? Think about anything. It could be a bag of chips at the grocery store. It could be a new stereo system. It could be I don’t know, a new course that you took online. Pick a thing. Anything. Pick the last thing you bought. Think about it for a second. Did it deliver? Did it deliver on the thing it promised you it would? Was it the most delicious bag of chips that you’d ever had in your life? Was it the best cup of coffee in the entire world? Was it the most amazing course that taught you things you had never seen before? Did it help you sell? Did it teach you marketing? Did it show you how to open up the stars and get a million Pinterest followers? Whatever it was, did it deliver, or do you find yourself going, “Man, I learned a little? The chips were okay. The coffee was alright.” That’s way more common.

We live in mediocrity soup people. That is the way of the world right now. We live in a world where we’re lied to so often we don’t even notice anymore. We’re made promises constantly that we don’t even notice are promises. Every marketing message you read, that’s a promise. Nobody’s policing them. Nobody’s telling businesses, companies, brands that they need to be more honest. False advertising is not a thing. Everybody does false advertising. I promise you, buying a red Mazda is not going to help you get laid. It’s just not, but the promise is there. That’s the objective, correlative of their marketing. That’s the lie they tell you, and they want you to believe the lie because they can’t deliver on the truth.

Be the company that delivers on the truth. Be the business that delivers on the truth. Be the leader who delivers on the truth. Wouldn’t that be a trip? I can tell you pretty honestly that all of my clients, everybody I work with, has an experience of finding and exploring their life’s work.

I challenge listeners, I challenge clients, to call me on that. If you didn’t have an experience like that with me, say so. I’m sure there’s one or two out there who think I’m the devil. That’s probably totally the case. I’m sure that I probably shouldn’t say 100%. Let’s say I’ve got a 95% success rate because I only deliver on what I promise. I don’t color outside the lines. I make sure that I only promise what I know I can deliver. What a concept, right? I’m not here to toot my own horn because I think that should be the lowest bar anybody should set for themselves if you’re going to go into business. Especially if you want to help people, especially if you’re doing something that is not selling widgets.  If you’re selling widgets, you’re probably not listening to this podcast.

If you want to make a difference in the world, if you’re going to do a good job at life, at business, you have to do things completely differently. You have to turn the rules on their head, and you have to stop listening to shitty, craptastic advice from marketers because marketers are teaching you one thing – how to sell shit to people who don’t want it. That’s what marketing is. How do you trick people into buying something? How do you trick more people into buying something? How do you trick even more people into buying more things? What if instead, you focused all your energy and attention on doing excellent, excellent, excellent work and delivering on your promise and only making promises you can keep? Wouldn’t that change the face of business?

I think that’s possible. I think there’s a handful of people out there doing it. I think there are people out there that care so deeply about their work. They’re unwilling to compromise. I think there are people out there who are starting to pay attention to the fact that we make compromises we don’t even realize. What I mean by that, is when you’re learning marketing and when you’re learning how to, “do business,” you don’t even know what you don’t know. You don’t know that the advice you’re reading is going to create an unethical result. You don’t know yet that doing things in a certain way is going to end up being manipulative or cause shame.

I see good marketers who are good human beings who just flat don’t fucking think hard enough about what they’re advising people to do. They create scarcity. They create shame. They create a dynamic that sets people up for failure. I’ve fucking had it. I have friends that fall into that category that I think would listen to this and cringe because they would realize that they do those things. We’re never going to run out of e-books, people. The idea of creating urgency in marketing removes agency in marketing. Creating urgency, creating a situation where people feel like they have a gun to their head to buy your thing, means your thing isn’t delivering on its promise. Period.

If it was delivering on its promise, your conversion rates would be high enough just on the reputation of what you offer alone. I know this is true. I know this is true because my business has functioned on it for 11 years. I have a very small list, and someday somebody is going to listen to my archives and go, oh, how funny, how quaint, because I’m working on growth right now. I’ve spent 11 years not growing now. Isn’t that a funny idea? I focused on the person in front of me. I focus on the client that I know I can help. That’s created a thriving referral pipeline that’s kept my business stable, growing and a waitlist for most of that time. I don’t worry about list growth. I don’t worry about metrics. I don’t worry about SEO. I don’t worry about any of that. I’m not saying you shouldn’t, don’t get me wrong. Those aren’t bad things. This isn’t a judgment on that. I know for me, for the business I wanted to create, I’m more than willing to help one person at a time. That has been my way up until this point. Now I’ve started a podcast so that I can help more people. I have more experience, and I’m more interested now because I’ve watched over the past ten years.

I’ve watched the tide not change. I’ve watched it get worse. I’ve watched more people enter the marketing space, the business coaching space, the education space. All are doing permutations of the same crap, the same garbage, the same target marketing, the same develop your standard evergreen stuff, develop your sales funnel, develop this develop that. Everybody’s giving you the same rules, and they’re giving you the same tools to manipulate your audience into buying more stuff. I’ve seen brilliant people say things like, “make sure when you’re selling something that you always have something in your back pocket to sell them next.”

What a fucking terrible idea. Can you think about that for a second? Instead of focusing on delivering on what they’ve already bought from you, you’ve got this thing in the back of your mind that you’re looking for an opening to sell to them to pry more money out of their wallet.

Why not focus instead on doing a really, really good job?

To do a really good job, you have to throw the rule book out. This is where we’re going to talk about the actual physical service offering development a little bit. I have a handful of people that I think are really, really good at this now. One of them has a really interesting offer. He’s probably one of the most unique brands I’ve seen out there. I use it as an example a lot. I’m not going to name him because I don’t want to brutalize his name. I’ll put it in the show notes that you can read later cause I don’t know how to say it. This is somebody I’ve been connected to for years, but he has a long name, and I don’t know how to say it. I don’t want to mess it up.

We’ll say he has a fantastic and fascinating brand. He has an approach to marketing from a perspective of urban shamanism and mysticism, and I am Batman, thrown in there. He’s unique and entirely embodied as himself. I find that wildly compelling and so do a lot of other people. His core service offering is a day-long thing that when I’ve asked people who have done it, all they can say is, “I don’t know what we did, but it totally changed my fucking life.” That’s what I hear a lot. I’ve talked to probably, half a dozen people who’ve gone through it now. He’s like a businessy, Lifey, transformational coach kind of person.

Whatever it is that he does with people is affecting, and he promises people only that it will be affecting and it will shift your momentum. That’s my perception. This isn’t in his marketing. This is my perception of his core value proposition in that.  I have yet to see anybody who says he didn’t deliver on it. Now, his offer is different from anything that I’ve ever seen. He’s been offering this for a very long time, and it’s like a day-long thing for somewhere around two grand, something like that. I’ve watched people talk about scrimping and saving and putting money away, and he’s booked months and months and months in advance. I have no idea how many of these he does a week, but I bet it’s exactly the number that is sustainable for him. He’s one of the few people I’ve seen that does extremely well; that throws the rule book out and says, “this is how I can deliver on this one specific thing that I most want to deliver.”

Thinking about that model, think about what you offer and whether or not your service offerings are aligning with the promises that you’re making. Are you delivering? Do you even know? Do you know if you’re delivering? The answer to that for most people is, “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my people.” No, that’s not the right answer because they’ve already told you if they’re not sending you referrals, you’re not delivering. Period. If they’re not promoting you, you’re not delivering. If they’re not telling people how great you are, you’re not delivering. You don’t need to ask them. You don’t need to survey. You don’t need to do more market research. You don’t need to do another beta test. You need to know already. That’s the only way.  It’s that simple. I know this sounds out of left field or complicated or something, but it’s not. If people talk about you favorably, then you have delivered on the promise that you made to them.

If somebody says, I don’t feel satisfied, that isn’t the whole story either. Sometimes you deliver on your promise, and you scare the shit out of somebody to the degree that they want their money back because they weren’t ready for you to deliver on the promise you made. They want the outcome but not the work. This leads to the idea that the customer’s not always right. Maybe we’ll talk about that on another podcast too.

I want to focus your attention for just a second on the point I mentioned earlier; this is a pathway to fulfillment. I said I’d talk about that a little bit more. This is the reason why this is so important to work on, all the way through the duration of your business, and to approach your work this way. It’s one of the primary ways to avoid burning the fuck out.  Fundamentally, when you develop a service offering that you allow the tail to wag the dog, meaning you look for a problem out in the marketplace, and then you jerry-rig a concept to solve that problem out of your particular cocktail of skills. You’re not proactive about your work in the world or your place in the world. You’re letting the world tell you what to do, instead of the other way around. You’re letting potential clients tell you what to do before you’ve even met them. They’re going to tell you how they want you to deliver on their request rather than you telling them how you’re going to deliver on your promise. You do that for too long, and you’re going to get bored, and you’re going to get resentful of your customer base, and you’re going to find yourself bitching about your customers more than you are praising them and then you’re going to burn out and quit.

I’ve seen it again and again and again. The people who say, “I did all the right things, I got some clients, I never quite made enough money, I never got referrals. I just don’t know what happened. This stuff doesn’t work for me.” They throw in the towel and go get a job when if they would have just fundamentally stuck to, “This is how I want to deliver and solve a problem and make a promise that I know can solve a specific problem that people are willing to pay money for, and I’m going to do it in a way that I’m certain meets the conditions that I want to meet in order to deliver on those things.” If you do those things, then you get all the things that you want, and you create a sustainable business for yourself that will continue to challenge you and feed you at the same time.

When you do that, it affects everything. How many sessions, if you’re a coach or how much deliverables or how many edits if you’re a copywriter, or how much should it cost? It affects everything. It is the guiding light. When people ask me how to develop a service, I say, how do you deliver on a promise? What do you need? Start there. Then you find ways to make those two things match up. Doing this is the difference between creating a service offering and creating a leadership offering. This is where the leadership piece comes in. There are so many questions that people bring to me all the time, or that we hear. We hear them in Facebook groups, we hear them in business mixers. How do I position myself as a leader or an expert? How do I get referrals? How do I develop a service offering? How much should I charge?

All of those questions are answered in the same way. How do you deliver on your promise? Are you delivering on the promise that you’re making? If you are, you’d already have all of those things. If you want to be a leadership brand, meaning you want to be seen as a thought leader, or you want to write a book, or you want to have a podcast, whatever it is that you want to be able to stand out as a singular in your particular marketplace. Or you want to be respected as a leader. If you’re an employee, that’s possible, too. I don’t know how many employees are going to listen to this, but if you are an intra-prenuer, meaning you work inside a company, that’s this. The same rules apply. If you can say, I promise that I can make this happen for you. Make sure you’re only making promises you can deliver on and then deliver on them.  

Why is it so hard? When you have the guts to do things this way, a few things start to happen. People automatically see you as a leader when you do things differently than everyone else. It’s the outlier syndrome. It’s saying, “I am only willing to compromise on things that I’m 100% sure I can compromise on, but how I do my life’s work, how I give you what you’re paying for, that’s up to me. It’s not up to you. It’s up to me. It’s up to me to have strong opinions about your work. It’s up to me to voice them, and it’s up to me to disagree with you and have the guts to do that.

When I say you, I mean your client. Whoever’s sitting across from you paying the bills, they’re not paying you to meet with them twice a month on a biweekly basis for a 45-minute session to have you coach them through how to be more courageous in life. They’re not hiring you for that. They’re hiring you to learn how to be more courageous in life. If you can do that in a five-minute session four times a week, and that’s your magic, special cocktail of call cadence and duration, then that’s exactly what you should do. Your service offerings structure is every bit as important as your brand, your design, how you represent yourself in the world. One of the best things that can happen to your business is to have people talk about you.

Doing things differently means people will talk about you and they’ll do it organically, not because you sure looked pretty in your new photography. That’s not the talking about you that you want. You don’t want people talking about you because you have a mediocre Squarespace website and you are doing things the same as every other person in your industry does things. Nobody talks about that. Nobody goes, “Gosh, I just saw this new brewery, and they have a kind of meh brand.” That is not a conversation anyone in the history of the world except maybe brand designers were at. We noticed the mediocrity. Other people don’t notice the mediocrity.

If you want to stand out, and you want to be sustainable, you have to think about, “what are you doing?” Why does it matter? What do you want to promise people, and how can you rise to meet that no matter what? When you do meet it, how do you make sure that they know you met it? How do you follow through? How do you make sure they understand this is the endpoint that I’ve delivered on my promise. You have to plan for that. One of my biggest goals with any client is obsolescence. I look for ways in which they don’t need me anymore, and I’ve told clients, you don’t need me anymore. We don’t need to keep talking. You’re good. Come back when you want to do something new, and I’ll be here. There’s power in that. There’s loyalty in that. There are guts in that. When you have guts, when you have the confidence to say, “I can do only what I’m telling you I can do and no more,” and you stop worrying about what’s in your back pocket to sell them next, then all of a sudden you have a client who respects you, who thinks what you do is incredible and unique and special.

To do that you have to make choices. You have to make clear and confident choices. You have to get used to doing that again and again and again and again and again. To make choices, you have to know how to make decisions, and you have to have a filter in which to pass those decisions. You have to figure out what your magic is. You have to figure out what you know you can deliver on and what you can’t. That’s where beta-testing comes in. That’s the place you should begin. When you think about doing a beta-test, it’s not to see if people like it or to test your structure. It’s to see if you deliver on the promise that you make. That’s the only thing that matters. Nothing else matters.

I want to thank everybody for tuning in today.  This is a really, really big topic and one that I probably will touch on again and it’s something that I really, really care, about in case that wasn’t already evident. There’s nothing that makes me fucking crazier than watching people over promise and under deliver. It’s ruining the beauty of an industry. When I say an industry, I mean this ecosystem of diverse solopreneurs who are doing everything on their terms and trying to make a living at the same time, trying to make a difference, and trying to do things differently. To do things differently, we have to do things differently. We have to rethink the rules. We have to approach how we connect as human beings. We have to be willing to stand up for our convictions, and we have to be willing to stand up for our work and respect our work enough to design offers that make it shine instead of designing offers that hide it underneath the shine. That hides it underneath gloss. That hides it underneath manipulative language.

We have to be better. We have to be better at this. Otherwise, we’re creating an ecosystem of people who have created mediocre jobs for ourselves. Instead of having one boss, we have ten clients that become our bosses because we’re not taking the reins. Figure out whether or not you’re delivering on your promise. Ask yourself these hard questions. It matters. With a few small tweaks, it’s not that difficult to change how you offer what you offer. To make sure that you’re not operating outside your wheelhouse and that you’re only giving people exactly what they need and nothing more. No fluff, no garbage. Don’t worry about selling them the next thing. Worry about delivering on this one. Thanks for joining me, everybody. I hope you had a really good day. I hope you have a great week.

Thanks so much for hanging out with me today. For more information, visit www.thegoodbusiness.co or www.lifesworksdev.wpengine.com.