Real talk: What it really takes to make it in business (Models + Marketing Part 5)
If you’re reading this, you’ve made it to Part 5 of the “Models & Marketing” series—a comprehensive breakdown of the revenue models for service and creator/educator businesses, the math behind them, and what works best for marketing for service providers.
The point of this series is to provide insight and clarity where it’s often lacking or confusing so you can make smart decisions about how to grow your business.
In this final installment, I’m going into the mind behind the business—what it really takes to take action so you can grow and sustain a business that’s profitable, enjoyable, and on your terms.
These are the hard-hitting truths that supercede any model or strategy. And I'm not going to sugarcoat them either, so apologies in advance for a bit of rough language here and there.
Before we get into it, you may want to catch up on the earlier installments in the series:
Read Part 1: Marketing lies, omissions, and misunderstandings
Read Part 2: When the math of scale doesn't pencil out
Read Part 3: The marketing strategy everyone hates the most
Read Part 4: From random acts of marketing to reliable results
You may know exactly what type of business you’re running and which strategies will generate the visibility, connection, and conversions you need.
So why is it that you can know what to do and even how to do it—but you still don’t?
This is where business becomes less about its mechanics and much more about your mindset.
The longer I’m in business and the more business owners I work with, the more I understand that your success in business has everything to do with how you perceive yourself and the challenges you face.
While it’s true some of us benefit from access and systemic advantages that others don’t, even some of the most technically under-resourced people have had enormous success.
Conversely, I’ve seen people who had a seemingly endless supply of time and money fail to make any meaningful progress.
Being your version of a successful business owner comes down to who you are more than what you do.
When you start from ‘who,’ the ‘what’ naturally aligns to that version of self which then creates that version of the business you have.
Commitment is a Decision
Let’s start with the most obvious yet strangely overlooked first step:
Do you even want to BE in business in the first place?
At first blush you might think I’m joking, but I’m dead serious.
I’ve worked and talked with business owners over the years who claimed they wanted to land more clients only to do everything they could think of to avoid doing so or sabotage their own efforts. They often didn't realize that it was because deep down, they didn't want more business because they didn't actually want to be in business for themselves.
They liked the idea of running a business; visions of entrepreneurship felt good to the ego.
But the reality was not at all what they’d imagined—or been led to believe.
Our society loves to laud the freedom and unlimited income potential of entrepreneurship and downplay all the downsides because, as you can guess, the hard stuff doesn’t make for sexy selling.
Running a business is really hard work.
Entrepreneurship is the biggest journey of self-discovery you’ll ever go on, and while it can be an incredible experience of self-actualization, it’s also extremely challenging.
On top of this we’ve been going through a particularly tough time economically in the last several years which only adds to the pressure.
If you half-ass your decision to be in business, you’re essentially operating with less than 100% commitment. Consequently, you’ll get half-ass results.
So get real with yourself and decide if running a business is really what you want to do.
And let me be clear, business ownership is not better than working as employee for someone else. It’s simply different. There are pros and cons for both.
Decide what suits you best for where you’re at in your life and what you want moving forward.
You can be scared shitless about your decision and still be in alignment with your heart's desire.
Your Commitment Shifts Your Identity
I distinctly remember the day I became a copywriter.
It wasn’t when I graduated with my Journalism degree with a concentration in advertising and copywriting in 1998.
It wasn’t in 2005 when I ordered the “Make 6 Figures as a Copywriter” course from American Writers and Artists Institute (which came as a fat binder via snail mail).
By then I was already 6 years into my graphic design career, and I’d spend another decade running a design studio before copywriting came back into the picture.
The moment I became a copywriter was on an ordinary day in late 2016 when I sat at my desk and said out loud, to no one in the room, “I am a writer.”
I was in the second or third week of my new business, Paraphrase Communications, and I had a total of zero writing clients.
But I’ll never forget that moment because it was more than a verbal declaration. It was an identity shift which shaped how I showed up every day after.
It was the same for marketing.
I never thought I would become a marketer and teach other people how to market their businesses.
I grew up doing art and creative writing. I planned to be a designer of some sort (architecture, fashion, interior, etc.) and, if I was lucky, a famous novelist. (Still working on that second dream.)
Marketing was the last thing I WANTED to do when I was running my graphic design studio.
Never had time for it, felt so sales-y and awkward, blah, blah, blah.
But I gradually came to see how marketing wasn’t something that I had to do.
It was someone I needed to be if my business was going to be successful.
You don’t do marketing. You are the marketer.
As much as you might want to farm out all your marketing to someone else, the fact is you will always be the best marketer for your business.
When you see yourself as a marketer, you stop treating marketing like an optional chore that gets squeezed in when you’re “caught up.”
You start seeing marketing for what it is: the lifeline of your business.
You start to see how marketing is mostly about relationships.
For service providers, and honestly this is also true for content creators/eductors, your best people will be the ones who care about the connection they have with you and vice versa.
When you understand that marketing is really relationship building, it becomes less about posting on the socialz or sending some emails and more about the way you like to show up for people—from total strangers to your best clients and collaborators.
You might not ever be the greatest at pitching to be on podcasts or running email campaigns.
But you can do conversations, right?
One way to make this identity shift is to say “I’m a marketer who _____.”
I’m a marketer who builds websites for businesses.
I’m a marketer who coaches leaders to their next level.
I’m a marketer who writes case studies for consultants.
Kick Your Monsters to the Curb
Two of the biggest threats to your peace and progress in business are the Inner Critic and the Imposter Monster.
The Inner Critic tells you how shitty everything you’re doing is.
The Imposter Monster tells you what a giant fraud you are.
They are both liars who sing the tune of “Not Good Enough.”
This song gets so loud anytime you do something new or different; an earworm of the worst kind.
Well, guess what?
You will always be doing new and different things in your business, so you’ll be hearing this song often.
If you let it drown out the truth and your common sense, you’ll stall out in the space between “almost ready” and “done.”
The way to quiet the clamor of the Inner Critic and Imposter Monster is to acknowledge they’re there and move on anyway. “I see you, I hear you, but I’m not going to listen to you.”
Then you practice publishing/shipping imperfectly and often.
This is how you build confidence. It’s how you create evidence that what you do works.
Whatever you’re putting out there doesn’t need to be perfect.
It only needs to be true and good enough—for this moment in time.
Besides you’ll have no chance to perfect what doesn’t exist, and you’ll never earn dream clients if everything you know and can do remains a thought in your head.
Show me two business owners who do similar things but have wildly different business results, and I can almost guarantee it’s because one was okay with shipping things imperfectly and the other wasn’t.
Messaging As Your Mirror
To sell anything, you have to be sold yourself first.
This might seem like another obvious statement, but I’m telling you, so many people are trying to sell things they don’t believe in.
It’s not that they don’t think their services or products are good, rather it's that they are confused.
They lack clarity about the real benefits and outcomes of what they do, how they create value, and the problems they’re actually solving.
When you lack clarity, you can’t speak with conviction.
When people sense your lack of conviction (and they will), they're less likely to buy.
In my early days helping people with their brand messaging, I thought the whole point was to get to the words—the copywriting part—so we’d have text to put on their website and such.
But messaging is so much more than the words on your LinkedIn profile.
Messaging is a process of reaching clarity, conviction, and emotional connection to your ideas and your words—what you need people to know about what you do and why to hire you.
Messaging is first an internal job starting with how you think about your needs, desires, and fears—and of course those of your ideal client. Then it's organizing seemingly disparate thoughts into a cohesive narrative.
Copywriting is the external expression of the messaging work; the way your knowledge becomes the currency that buys your ideal client’s attention and trust.
Messaging is not what you say once you’ve figured your business out.
It’s how you figure it out.
Get Basic and Boring
Now we come to what some may view as the dry, uninteresting stuff: systems and accountability.
But systems are the backbone of your business, and the longer you're in business, the more deeply you'll come to appreciate this.
You will never find lasting peace and profitability without getting serious about setting up systems.
Businesses that one-off everything all the time; that resist structure because it impinges on freedom die. It’s really as simple as that.
Systems give you a measure of predictability which some might find boring.
But you want the kind of boring systemization brings.
Predictability is what allows you to grow sustainably and not burn out.
Finally, there’s a need to have someone hold your feet to the fire.
Surprisingly, the number one thing my clients and potential clients seek from me is accountability.
More than my guidance through the messaging process, my copywriting skills, or even my ability to help them design and build their websites, they want me to hold them accountable to do the things they know they need to be doing.
We all need this.
Even when you know exactly what to do, as I’ve laid it out here in this series, you’ve got an identity to shape, monsters to dodge, and systems to build.
Sometimes your fear and resistance will loom so large, you’ll just get thrashed into a corner or find yourself curled around your iPad bingeing season 3 of Succession.
You need people around you who are serious about making sure you get out of your own way and get your shit done.
This is why coaches, VAs, business managers, strategists, and colleagues that serve as true accountability buddies are critical.
You don’t need all these people all at once, but you need at least one person all the time who can lovingly yet strongly hold your feet to the fire.
At the risk of sounding rather harsh: your most beautiful dreams and intentions are worth little without action behind them.
…
If you take one thing from this entire Models & Marketing series, let it be this:
Your business isn’t built by strategy alone.
It’s built by stamina, self-trust, and a message that means something to you and to your audience.
Every business needs to grow to remain solvent, you as the business owner need to grow most of all.
But you don’t have to scale to grow.
You grow by showing up over and over even when—especially when—it’s uncomfortable, uncertain, or unglamorous.
Doing so gives you the feedback and confidence to adapt and take your next steps.
No matter what type of business you want to run, the goal is never about the size of your team, who you can name drop, or ever-increasing amounts of revenue.
The goal is to build a business that fits your version of success, that reflects who you are, how you work, and what you value.
Your business can be a powerful vehicle for creative self-expression where even the toughest challenges spur your deepest learning and most innovative ideas.
In fact, it’s this very potential that seeds my own ambition and is commonly true for my best clients.
You can build a business that fits you when you do it with patience, grace, and community.
You keep it going one message, one conversation, and one imperfect action at a time.
If this series has hit home, start where you need the most momentum:
For instant insight into the gaps in your messaging and marketing that are costing you clients → Get your Client Conversion Scorecard (takes 5 minutes and it's free)
For message essentials—the words you use everywhere you’re showing up → Check out Core Copy
For robust support with messaging, structure, and systems for your entire client journey → Message to Money