The Great Unapologizing

You have to work really, really hard to have a profitable business. You have to work for a long time to optimize and figure out where your profit is coming from inside of your business. And if you keep jumping from niche to niche to business model to business model, offer to offer, it's really hard to optimize and find the profit in what was. So something that I wish more people talked about, instead of asking what's the best business model, Instead, I want people to ask themselves this question, which is, what's the best business model for the life that I want to live? Welcome back to the Start Tiny Show, and today's episode I am calling The Great Unapologizing. Now, I don't really know what that means, but it popped into my head this morning as a topic that I think a lot of us need to do less of, either to ourselves or to other people. We all need to stop apologizing for wanting what we want or wanting to build the business businesses that we feel like we should be building. So I think a lot of entrepreneurs have been apologizing for businesses that are already working, but might be working for you, might be working differently than someone else's business. And I think we can make ourselves wrong. We can make our business model less than kind of what I shared in the last comeback episode, if you will. I was talking about how I felt tiny. Talking about tiny offers and it made me want to shy away from building the business that I really wanted, which is this mass market type business that serves hundreds of thousands of people all at the same time, very attainable economically. And I kept being pushed into selling high ticket. High ticket is the way. High ticket is what you should be doing. Like all these shoulds that kept getting poured on me, whether they were my, my own shoulds or other people's shoulds. I think every year or even every few years, the internet decides, quote unquote, that there's a right way to build a business. I'm sure you've seen the ads that are like, courses are dead, memberships are dead, challenges are dead, webinars are dead, high ticket's dead, low ticket's dead, organic is dead, ads are dead, AI is replacing everyone. It's exhausting, right? If you listen long enough, eventually you're going to start believing that the only thing that still works is whatever it is that the hottest launch is currently selling, whatever someone happens to be selling, where they're using the whatever blank is dead as their hook. That's what we start believing. And I think that is a super dangerous way for us to be operating as business owners because it keeps us in this mode of chasing instead of building. Now I have a client named Valerie. She's amazing. She has this membership that she has been building since I want to say 2019, and she has had one singular focus on that membership since she started. So she has a tiny offer that leads to her membership. She has 2,500 members in there, I think paying between $19 to $47 a month. I have to double check with her on her pricing, but she's at, you know, $60,000 or $70,000 a month from this single membership. Now somebody else is going to say memberships are dead, right? So you go talk to Valerie. Valerie's been running the same place since 2019. She doesn't think memberships are dead. People who have gone all in on low ticket and are only selling low ticket, they don't think that low ticket's dead. People who sell high ticket and hate low ticket, they don't think high ticket's dead. So everybody can have their own business model and all of them can work. I think that's the biggest takeaway that I want people to realize is that if you can stick with it long enough, Every single one of those business models can work. It's when you jump from strategy to strategy, business model to business model, ask me how I know, and that's when you lose momentum. That's when your audience gets confused. That's when you get fatigued and you also start losing confidence because you're out of momentum. You're out of alignment, kind of spinning your wheels. That's what this episode is all about. So over the last couple of years, I found myself questioning everything. Like I said in the last episode, I was being invited into these amazing mastermind rooms, cooler people than I've ever met before in my life, doing really big things, changing people's lives. And I started wondering, are tiny offers too simple? Is my business model dumb? I'm not really working that hard. Should I be working harder? Should I be scaling? Should I be hustling? Should I be killing myself trying to get all this content created and be visible all the time and out of alignment? And yeah, I can learn all of those things, but I started feeling that I was only teaching a tactic, that I wasn't owning a category, that I should be talking about something bigger. Started wondering if I should pivot, expand, become known for AI instead, move into an agency model and do it for people because I was thinking tiny offers. If you have a higher ticket business or you're making a lot of money, you don't necessarily want to learn how to do it yourself. You just want to hire someone to do it for you, which, you know, may be true. But is that the way that I want to deliver my framework? My knowledge? Is the done for you agency what I want? Definitely not. So looking back, none of those questions ever came from my customers. It was coming from a point of comparison, right? When I got into those bigger rooms with bigger entrepreneurs, having those bigger conversations, instead of letting myself feel inspired, I started feeling like my thing wasn't enough. The grass started feeling greener. And let me know if you've ever felt like that. Send me a DM, comment, you know, leave a review telling me that you resonate with this episode, whatever. I know everyone that I've talked to in person has felt like that at some point. You get into these rooms and you go into comparison mode or you start feeling like, oh, their business model is so cool. Maybe I should try X. Maybe I should run a challenge. Maybe I should sell a high-ticket thing. Maybe I should launch a membership. So when you start feeling like that, which ironically for me, the message that I've always taught for years was to start before you're ready, stick with it, keep showing up. And that was the advice that I stopped taking myself. So what I want you to know is that everything can work no matter what you want. Like when you dream about what your ideal day looks like. And when I do VIP intensives with people, this is where I start. I always start with the end in mind. I always start with the ideal day. What do you love doing? What fills your bucket? Like when you get off of Zoom after being on Zoom all day, do you feel exhausted or do you feel energized? Figuring out the things that bring energy into your life. That's where I want to start. What does your dream day look like? And then reverse engineering from there, because almost every single business model can work memberships. Selling a course, selling coaching, an evergreen funnel, live launching, challenge funnels, communities, affiliates, agencies, consulting, software. The list goes on and on and on, right? Like it's, it's expansive. There's no limit to what you could build. There's no limit to the amount of ideas that you can have. But the amount of times that I see people sitting on something great and then coming to a strategy call with me and being like, well, I have this course that's selling really well. But I actually, I actually want to kill the course and I want to go into selling a high-ticket group coaching program. Usually when I can dig into it, it's not that they don't want to have a course. It's that they've built some belief around the course being enough, or they've built some belief into coaching being the cooler thing, or their ego gets involved and it feels like it's the next step. I'm all about pivoting and expanding when it's time. I'm not against that, but I also don't want people to walk away from something that's working in the seeking of a greener pasture, because usually that other type of business comes with its own challenges. Every type of business model is going to have things that suck about it, you know, whether it's managing a team, whether it is keeping up with making sure your ads are updated frequently enough to keep up with the ad algorithm and updates. There's, there's something in every single business that isn't ideal. So if you're going to jump from model to model or question your value or think that this one is better, it's going to have its hard points too. It's not going to be better or easier or, or, you know, that's, it's not going to be perfect. If you're chasing the perfect business model, usually you can work with what you've already got. So most of the time, the problem isn't the business model. The problem is that we're abandoning our original idea, abandoning our dream, before it's had time to compound. So when I think about Valerie and I think about her 2,500, probably more than that, members inside of her membership, had she given up at 100 and been like, wow, this is only, you know, say it's $19 and she's got 100 people in there. Wow. I'm not even making $2,000 a month from this. This is not really worth my time. That would have been terrible because here she is at 2,500 members. Total freedom in her schedule because she stuck with the same business model. She stuck with it long enough to be able to perfect her systems, long enough to be able to make it the best version she could make it, long enough to build the systems to be able to replace her time inside of the program. When you jump from business model to business model, it's really hard to be able to optimize and get it to a point where you're getting any level of consistency or the freedom that you're seeking from your business to begin with. So if every 6 months you're convincing yourself that success lives inside of someone else's strategy, instead of just making your own strategy better, it's going to make growth so much harder because business truly does reward consistency far more than novelty. There's this quote that I love that says, profit doesn't happen by accident. Businesses are not designed to be profitable, or they're— it's unnatural for a business to make profit. And I think it was Ray Dalio that said that. I have to look that up, but it's this concept that you have to work really, really hard to have a profitable business. You have to work for a long time to optimize and figure out where your profit is coming from inside of your business. And if you keep jumping from niche to niche, to business model, to business model, offer to offer, it's really hard to optimize and find the profit in what was. So something that I wish more people talked about, instead of asking what's the best business model, instead I want people to ask themselves this question, which is what's the best business model for the life that I want to live? Because every single model is going to have its trade-offs. So if we take high ticket coaching as an example, you could totally in any niche build an incredible business that's selling premium offers. And I do love high ticket, but if you're selling anything from what I've learned, over the last decade, if you're selling anything from $3K to $5K, $10K consistently, chances are that you're going to need to have a sales call involved, whether it's with you, there's some amount of Zoom or even phone call needed to sell that high-ticket program. Not because it's impossible to sell without those, but because that type of funnel requires a conversation that builds trust and improves the conversion by actually talking to someone face-to-face. So when you have a high-ticket business and you're the one doing the sales calls, your calendar fills up and now you're spending your days on Zoom and maybe eventually you hire closers, maybe eventually you hire setters, then you hire someone to manage the sales team, then you hire a customer success person. Maybe there's an operations person, maybe there's levels of leadership that are in your business. And before you know it, you're not even coaching anymore. You're running an organization, you're managing the humans inside of it. And that's the dream for some people, right? They want to be getting the, the Inc. 5000 awards or whatever. They want to have fast-growing companies. They want high numbers of revenue. They want to be managing a team, acting as CEO, directing, delegating. But the question is, if that's the business model that you're admiring in someone else, they're posting about, you know, $2 million months or whatever. The question that I would ask is, do you actually want that? Because what I had to learn over the last couple of years is just because I'm capable of learning something, like I'm capable of learning how to manage a huge team. I'm capable of learning how to run level 10 EOS meetings or whatever. And like having this huge team with 50 people on it that are all coming to me for the decision-making, I could totally learn how to do that. And I could learn how to be a great leader, manage that large team, run a multi, you know, $20 million a year company, but I don't want to anymore. I don't, I don't feel like it. Right? Like, that sounds very stubborn, but that's not how I'm wired naturally. Naturally, I am a creative. I like working directly with my clients. I like talking to my clients. And when I look back at the years that I felt the most disinterested in my business, which is a weird way to say it, the years that I felt the most disinterested in my business were my highest revenue years and I was the most detached from the clients that I had. I had coaches coaching in there. I had other, you know, I had one-on-one coaches inside of my high-ticket program that were coaching clients. I had all these layers between me and the clients. Clients were not allowed to talk to me. The phrase that they told me was, you need to have a velvet rope, Allie. You're the CEO. You need to have a velvet rope around you. The only people that even get to talk to you or have face to FaceTime with you are spending $100,000 or more. And it made me care a whole lot less about my business because I'm a marketer. I'm a strategist. When I get in the room and I actually listen to people's problems, I get ideas for more products. I get ideas for content. I get inspired and I see the change that I'm making for people instead of being in a separate room and not even realizing that the level of impact is being made, that I'm even helping people whatsoever because I'm roped off, right? The year that I had my first $400,000 month, I was the most depressed I've been, which sounds terrible, right? Oh, poor you. You were making all this money. Which brings me to my second point. Just because you see someone making a lot of money in business doesn't mean they're taking it all home. When you do the math, And you look at ad spend and you look at the cost of the team and you look at the cost of programs that people are investing in. The thing that people don't talk about nearly enough is that there has to be a better reason than just money making to build a business like that because you're not necessarily padding your pocket or bringing profit home from this big revenue company as you are, you're not, not necessarily making that much more. Than if you have a solo entrepreneur business where you're keeping 90% of your profit. Cash compared to cash, you could bring home the same amount from lots of different business models. So it's not really fair for people to say, oh, high ticket is the way, high ticket is how you make money. I want to, I want to learn about the money that goes into your personal bank account, the money that you can invest into real estate in the future, into your retirement, into whatever it is that you're interested, buy the things that you want to buy. I have seen businesses behind the scenes that did $20 million in top-line revenue and the owners didn't take a dime home. They were negative on $20 million. So let that be a level of awareness that maybe no one has told you before, that just because it looks shiny doesn't mean that it is what you want once you're inside of it. And if you get inside of it, you would probably see that and miss your old business model. So think about that when you're, when you are analyzing your business, when you're analyzing what kind of business you want long-term, we have to make sure that it is built around you and what you want for your ideal day, for your ideal life, for the amount of freedom that you have. Now, something that surprised me recently is that I surveyed my audience on Instagram And I asked them this question. I said, would you rather make $10,000 a month in take-home with a simple business, very little people management, lots of freedom, like no sales calls, no high ticket, or would you rather make $100,000 a month and have a large team, be hiring, creating content all the time, and have a more complex business? 90% of my audience said they would rather make $10K a month take home, only that, have a smaller, simpler business and more of a lifestyle than higher revenue business with more complexity. And it really made me think about here I was thinking I needed to have this high ticket business that I had to sell with salespeople and I had to really, you know, grow the way I saw other people growing this. I thought that was way sexier than how I was doing it. But my heart was like, no, tiny offer to membership, run that play all day long. Like when, and honestly, my client Valerie, I'll have to put her in the notes so you can check out her business. When I've talked to her and she's shared how her business has done, that's where I'm like, dang, that's awesome. I would love that business model. And then I, it just clicked. Okay, build that. Like, why are we building a high ticket machine and thinking I need a team of salespeople and closers and this weekly live webinar selling, you know, an $8,000 program. That's not necessarily what I want for my business. And I didn't realize that here I was kind of talking out of both sides of my mouth to my audience. They wanted the same thing that I want, and yet here I was thinking I had to have something different. So I was saying, yeah, I'll teach you how to sell low ticket into your memberships. And meanwhile, I'm building this low ticket to high ticket program, which isn't what 90% of my audience even wants. Right? So the overwhelming majority of people chose simple business, which is what I wanted all along. Now, I don't know if you guys know this story, but when I was first starting my tiny offers back in 2018, and they were wildly successful and people were like, teach me how to build a tiny offer funnel, teach me how to run the ads, teach me how to write the copy. I built a course and I built an evergreen webinar. I put it on my site and that's how I was going to sell the whole thing. I was going to sell evergreen tiny offer to this evergreen course from the beginning. I was never planning on having a group coaching program. I was never planning on having a high ticket business model, but I had a friend who came to me and he was like, I need you to do this live. Just test it once, see how it feels. And I, I fell so hard into the. The lure of high-ticket group coaching. And that's what I scaled super fast because yes, the first live webinar that I did, I went from making, you know, $3,000 a day to making $100,000 in a day. And I was like, okay, that was cool. I want to do that. I want to do that again. I want to do that every week. And that's what I started doing every single week. But when I got to COVID or COVID happened, unprecedented times happened, social distancing, all of that stuff. And all of a sudden, what did we do during COVID We sat around with our thoughts, right? We had a lot of time to think about what we really wanted because we were at home, we were with our families. And I was reminded that I never necessarily wanted the high-ticket business. I never, I didn't necessarily want to be in front of people every single week and selling high-ticket and convincing people to spend a huge amount of money on this coaching program. It wasn't what I wanted in the beginning. And I, I think a lot of this for me has been the unlearning of what other people tell me I should be doing, and just the realizing that for me, for my nervous system, for how I am wired as a creative, that I will take low-ticket sales, which I can do all day long, right? I'll take tiny offer sales into recurring revenue in, in a school membership, which by the way, I'll share about in a little bit, in a second. And let that run all day, add 10, 15 new members into school every single day for my tiny offers and just love the heck out of that group. And then that's my thing, right? How simple is that? It gets to be that simple. It gets to be that good. And I think we forget in the lure of all the other business models, that you can look at your business and be like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I am so grateful that I built this business. It doesn't have to be this constant cycle. And if you're a visionary and you have any level of ADHD, any level of being a driven entrepreneur, I know you feel this, that the horizon is always moving, right? You feel like you will never be satisfied, that it's always, there's always going to be more. There's always going to be something else that you want. And that's not a bad feeling, but it does get exhausting. So this is permission that it can feel simple. You can just allow your business to serve you in a way that makes you feel really good all the time and happy all the time. And so stinking grateful for your business instead of feeling like you're constantly spinning your wheels, trying to reinvent the wheel that is spinning. It doesn't have to feel like that. So some of it is a mindset shift. It does take time. It takes a heck of a lot of surrender, I guess, and just giving yourself permission to allow you to build the business that you actually want. So most people, and a lot of people that are listening to me probably resonate with my story, that you didn't necessarily build a business because you wanted to manage dozens of people. A lot of people that I work with one-on-one, they don't even want a team. They just want, you know, maybe a few AI agents, if that, and they just want a really simple business. And I kept seeing that pattern and wondering why I wasn't allowing myself to have that too. So if you're here and you want freedom, you want flexibility, you want ownership over your time, over your calendar, that's something worth trusting and knowing that that business model exists and it does work. It's not dead. None of the business models are dead, like I said. So there are rules of thumb and just to get a little into the tactical side, because I am a strategist, I can't not mention this part. It doesn't mean every business model is going to run exactly the same, right? There are practical realities that work with certain price points. So you do have to know what your core thing is. You have to have— the easiest way is with one signature thing that all the other roads lead to that thing. Yes, people can buy more after they buy that main thing. They can ascend into something else, but you have to at least have one offer that encompasses everything that you can do. And I have a worksheet that I'll drop in the comments that I've used with some of my one-on-one clients to help them map out their offers on paper. An offer is really just knowing what people are paying you for. How many calls are they getting? Are they group calls, one-on-one calls? Is there some type of curriculum involved? Is there a community? Are there any bonuses? Are there any in-person events? And the more that you add into the offer, the higher the price should be. So if you're offering an in-person retreat annually for everyone that joins this, you're gonna be looking at at least $8,000, $10,000, $12,000 a year or whatever the time period is of that program. So you can kind of pick and choose. Do you wanna run in-person stuff? No. Okay, cool. You're looking at a price that's probably gonna be $5,000 or less. Do you wanna have a community? Okay. If there's a community involved, we can bump that price up a little bit. If there's no community, there's no curriculum, it's just group coaching calls. Well, then it's going to be, we'll say, you know, $1,200 or less if they're just getting a couple coaching calls with you. There are certain principles that work with offers that help set the amount that you should be charging for it. There are also the return on investment that you need to keep in mind. If someone is paying $5,000 for a program, you probably want to 10x the result of ROI that they're expecting. To get from that program. So if someone spends $5K, will they reasonably be able to make $50K or get $50,000 worth of a result from joining that program? So I'll, I'll drop that document in the notes. It's just a Google Doc, but I think it can be helpful to start realizing if this is a lifestyle that I want, here's how many clients I want to work with. Here's how much money I want to make. Here's what I need to sell my program for. And then you can start backing into the mechanism. In which you're selling that offer. So if you're selling something that is $2,000 or more, do something live. Evergreen webinar, not evergreen web— live webinar, 5-day challenge, live workshops, stuff like that. You want to have some type of live connection with them. If you're selling $8,000 or more, oftentimes a 5-day challenge can work well. You can do it for a price. You can do, usually do it for either a small amount, like a tiny challenge, $27, you can do free challenges, but not as many people are going to show up. So there are certain recipes, if you will, to sell the price point that you want to be selling. So exceptions always exist. I've sold $30,000 programs from email only, no calls. Of course, some of those things can work one-off. Consistently with cold traffic, there are recipes that need to be followed. So we don't want to build an entire business model around the exceptions. We want to build something that is predictable, sustainable. Something that's in alignment with how you want to be showing up day to day, where you are most lit up, what you most enjoy doing. Because you can learn to do anything. All things are learnable, right? But if you're trying to build a certain revenue number and you're not looking at what actually looks into it, when I look at my friends who are running, you know, a million dollar month company, you know, they're making a million dollars every single month. The biggest difference that I see is the amount that they're spending on ads. They're spending a ton on ads to get a lot of fresh traffic volume, and then they have big teams to help them deliver what's inside of the program. It's really those two things. The, the, I know that sounds really simplistic, but the, the larger the revenue goal, the more you're going to be spending on ads to keep it going, the more you're going to be spending on people to deliver it. And if those are things that excite you, then by all means, that is the business model for you and you might really enjoy it. So the last thing that I want to say is that my challenge for you this week is to stop mentally apologizing to yourself if you've been doing that. If you've been feeling bad for the type of business that you want to be building, if you're looking at other people's business models and thinking, man, I should really do that instead. Or if you're downloading other people's sales pages and thinking, oh, I should design my sales page just like that, or my offer just like theirs, or run a 5-day challenge just like they are, take a minute and think about, does that really fit your life? When you think about running, you know, a 5-day challenge, for me, I get a little sick to my stomach because I don't actually want to show up 5 days in a row. I always assume a kid's going to get sick. Yeah, I'm capable of doing it, but I just don't really want to. So I think it's listening to that gut instinct more and honoring that and being okay with knowing that your business can work. It can grow to the numbers that you want to bring home to your family in lots and lots and lots of different ways. And just because someone is saying they're making X amount per month doesn't mean they're bringing home that much every single month. So build the business that fits your life. Focus on that. Build the business that honors your energy. Surrender into that being enough, into loving that business model, letting yourself just have fun with it, relax into it, not feel like you always have to be forcing the next thing. And then stay with it long enough to let consistency do its job. 'Cause just like investing, right? Just like investing, it doesn't seem like a lot's happening behind the scenes. And then a couple years later, You log in and you check your account. Like, I probably shouldn't admit this, but I had a 401k that I opened as a tax strategy and I forgot about it. And I, I invested, I think originally, I think I put $22,000 into it because that was the limit for the year. When I logged in 3 and a half years later, it was $70,000 that I totally forgot about. That is what happens. With investing. That's what's supposed to happen. It compounds, right? And that's what happens in your business too. You invest in yourself, you invest in trusting your gut, following your instincts, and that compounds too. And in 6 months from now, you'll be shocked. In a year from now, 3 years from now, you'll be like, holy crap, I did it. I stuck with the thing. I built my dream. I trust the process, trusted the process long enough for it to actually work. I stopped strategy hopping. I listened to what I knew I wanted, what I needed for my life, my goal, my business, what I wanted to build, and stop letting other people tell you that you're wrong. Stop apologizing for building the business that you actually want because it can work. So all of that to say, you got this. Very few people stick it out long enough to find out if it's going to work or not. So be one of those people that sticks. With it. If you enjoyed today's episode, I'd love if you would subscribe, share it with a friend. Every single week we're going to have conversations about building an online business. Some, you know, more mindset, some more strategic. I do have a community, as I mentioned, it is called the Start Tiny HQ, and it's all about building a business that starts with tiny offers, my, my low ticket framework, and then brings people into what that next level is for you. A lot of my clients are running low ticket into a membership, low ticket into an evergreen funnel, low ticket into a weekly webinar funnel, whatever you're building, I support all of those inside of my school group. It starts at $33 a month. If you go to the link that I'll put in the bio for the school community, you can get a 7-day free trial. You can choose the tier that works best for you. $33 is the community access and curriculum access, $33 a month, I should say. And then at the $297 a month level, we talk more about Meta ads at that level. And it's a little bit more advanced because it has coaching calls every single week with me on Zoom. So get in the room if you're enjoying this conversation, if you want more support, if you want to be growing alongside that, people are who are building full-time incomes out of sharing their passions, helping people with something that they learned themselves, you know, whether that's, in health, wealth, relationships, any niche that you're passionate about. I have people growing businesses about cookie making and sweets. I have a client in France who just launched a cookbook about having less sugar, like having cookies with less sugar for your clients or for their children. And really just goes to show that whatever your passion is, you can build a business around that passion. So if you're ready to stop chasing shiny object, syndrome and start building alongside entrepreneurs who are in this for the long haul, just like you are. Come join us inside of Tiny Offer HQ. Until next time, start tiny.