263: Finding Product-Market-Founder Fit and Launching Downhill Sales Snowballs ☃️ through Relationship-Marketing with Michelle Warner

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What I do in my one on one work is I fix broken business models. And the vast majority of them are founders coming to me saying I have this thing and I hate it. I hate my customer base and it's okay if you need to say that right, that happens or I really despise my products and I don't know how I got here. And they're just chasing that profit success or the margin success and they're not taking the time to look at that sales stage as a okay, I found something that is predictable and repeatable in terms of my marketing and sales. But do I like it? Do I want this to be it? And when you're not intentional about that, it can get ugly. And listen, that's one picture. If it's a big corporation, can kind of hide from it. But when it's just you or you and up to like 10 people, you better like what you're doing.

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Welcome back free timers. You are in for a treat today because I have someone who so many mutual friends including Jay Akunzo, Pamela Slim, Skp have said you and Michelle Warner must connect. And so finally we met at an IRL event at the end of last year. And now as you all know, the best way that I make friends is a podcast conversation like this one. So this is our first time really catching up in earnest. Michelle is an amazing business owner and business strategist. She designs tiny companies that are built to last. With an MBA from one of the world's top business schools and 15 plus years of experience growing small businesses, she focuses on layering real world experience on top of classic business fundamentals to help you design a business that's sustainable and scalable. I love the way she's just a diagnostic. Like I've heard her on a couple podcasts and I just know that this is her genius. She grew her first business to over seven figures. And these methods that we'll talk about today are what she's used to help over 300 CEOs create businesses that work for the important stuff, profit, energy, passion, and time. She's the creator of Networking that Pays, the introvert friendly, always awkward free connection system to bring in reliable leads, consistent referrals, and meaningful connections for your business in just five minutes a day. Michelle, welcome to the show.

Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to catch up properly.

Me too. Okay. I actually want to start with Networking that Pays because I went to your site and there's so many things from that course that I love and I saw that it was priced at 497 and I thought to myself, I know Michelle had a good reason for that pricing, because a lot of people you might have a little freebie and then you might have a mini course that's $20. But I feel like there's something strategic about how you set this up. So maybe we could just start in that random place.

Absolutely. Networking that Pays. It's a passion piece of my business in that it's something that I had to learn in my first startup and I had to learn it very painfully because I'm an introvert. I do not love networking. And then as I was working with one on one clients in this business, I realized they all needed those skills. And then fast forward, I was training some folks in some of my friends courses to do some of this work as well before I ever thought about creating it as a course. And my friend said, you need to make this as a course. All of my people desperately need it. And if you don't make it, I'm going to start stealing it. And I heard that from a couple of friends who I was just training all of this material on. So I got it into a course and it's a little bit again of a passion project and something that I want to have accessible so that people who are taking other business courses are learning how to grow their business in other places can have this skill set because it is going to make all of the strategies that they learn either from me or from my friends and collaborators work so much better. So it's kind of an add on skill that you wanted and I wanted it to be accessible.

I love that. And within the realm of Accessibility. I mean this is putting the cart way before the horse. Yeah, but how did you decide to create a kind of starter course that was what I think is a sweet spot of pricing, let's say 497 rather than even something I've experimented with in the past, like $27.

Oh, fair question. So I wanted it to be complete information and also my business is not set up to sell courses, to be completely honest with you. And we can get into that in terms of how I market and how I build my business. And so frankly, I don't have the systems, I don't have the ability to have something that would be a little bit of a teaser course and then upgrade you maybe to the more complete information. So I just wanted the complete information out there in a way that we can insert it. I license it to a lot of folks. So the way that it's kind of easily insertable but also it's a one off and you can get in there. I'm going to support you in that networking. And also I don't have to build the rest of my business model around making sure that that funnel quote unquote works.

That is music to my ears. I, I love that. Like it's not A leading to B and C of a digital course universe. This is it. You want it to be quality and complete. And I love what you just said, that you license it. Tell me more about that.

Well, again, what I found is that this is a skillset that makes all of your other strategies work much better in marketing. I am a firm believer that if you have a proper network and that you've been intentional about how to build that thing and you've gone through kind of networking science and you understand how to think about a network, that your business is going to be the average of your network. And I want that to be accessible. But also if you are learning how to build your business in any other kind of course, right. We have so many small group coaching programs, so many other programs. They don't touch networking because it's difficult and it's hard to teach and it takes them off of the path of everything else that they're doing. But if you insert this course into that curriculum and folks can have it as supplementary information, it makes the results of all those other courses go much better and look way better. And so it's kind of fun to be able to insert this as a licensing again supplement where the leader of those courses can say, hey, if you also get into networking, that pays or I'm adding networking that pays to your curriculum, all of the core stuff that we are learning, it is going to be so much easier to be successful.

And how does that work on the back end? Are they pointing people to you and then getting a referral commission or are they actually baking it into their own material and then they're paying you a fee? Anytime someone goes through their larger body of work that includes that.

Yeah, we actually have both options. So some folks want to offer it but don't want to do the maintenance. So then we just have more of a traditional commission fee, affiliate fee if you will. They put their folks into the course and I support them from there. Others do bake it into their curriculum and we have a separate licensing deal where they can get the content into their courses directly.

One of the things you shared in your fantastic conversation for the off the Grid podcast, I'll put this in the show notes on leaving social media without losing all your clients, you referenced an HBR article on the five stages of small business growth and you said this is fundamental to your practice and that a lot of business owners are trying could be interesting strategies but at the completely wrong stage of their business. And so this morning preparing to chat with you, I went and looked at that article and it is indeed so epic. I'm going to put that in the show notes too, but I would love to hear how maybe you could give us a little overview of the five stages and where you think most small business owners like with delightfully tiny teams, where do they go wrong in terms of misaligning with one of those five stages?

Oh, this is one of my favorite topics so I'm happy to get into it. This was seminal research from Harvard in the early 80s. And so at that time when they defined these five stages it was for very traditional, maybe family owned manufacturing. So I've adapted it to the tiny businesses we have today, probably online based, service based. And I think of the stages in a very similar way. I've just kind of given them different names for what people are experiencing now. And I'll talk about the first three stages because that's where most folks are who have solo small businesses or small businesses, let's say up to like 10 million in revenue. And those three stages as I define them are validate is the first stage, are you providing value to people? Are you useful? And then you have the sell stage where you are looking to build repeatable and predictable marketing and sales. And then you have the foundation stage where you are doubling down, you're building Your systems and processes, starting to look at culture, starting to look at team more seriously. So those are the three. Where I see people screwing up is either they stay invalidate for way too long and they think that everything has to be perfect in their business before they're really allowed to dive into the very messy job of really figuring out how to consistently market in sales. So they think that they have to have a perfect product mix. They think they have to know everything. Exactly. They think they have to have the product at its absolute final point. And as you know, Jenny, those points never exist. You're never going to be final. And so validate is really about just, am I generally useful to the people who I want to provide value to? And then you need to get into a sales and marketing mindset really quickly. And I'll talk about that in a second why you need to do that. Other mistake I see people make is they go to foundation way too quickly, whereas they figure out one thing that's working in marketing and sales. They have some luck with a launch, they have some luck early on and then they immediately double down on that model and they start building a full team, start building full processes around it. And of course maybe then something in the second round or third time through goes wrong, but now they've committed to a model and it takes a lot to turn that train around. And so I love seeing people spend a lot of time in the stage two, that sales stage, because what it really is, it is a stage of finding product market, founder fit. Right? As you build repeatable and predictable marketing and sales, what you're also doing is you're figuring out do I like how I am presenting my product suite, Do I want to do one on one work, do I want to do a program, do I want to have a course, do I want to build an agency? You're figuring all that out as you market and meet different customers. And at the same time as you market, you meet different customer bases and you might decide you don't like some of them and that's okay. So people tend to spend a lot of time or the most stable businesses, I should say, spend a lot of time during that sales stage. And that's correct. You can be profitable and have a wildly successful business that actually never gets past the sales stage. But you're just looking for that product market founder fit during that in a very steady way instead of kind of catapulting yourself between, oh, this worked once. So I'm going to completely double down on it and then realize I Hate it and have to come backwards and start all over again.

Did you add the founder in product market founder fit?

I did.

It's so genius. I've never heard that.

And it's so crucial I have to throw some credit in Margot Aaron's way as well. She and I talk about this a lot, so I would say that we.

Jointly added that Margot Aaron is amazing. I'll link to her in the show notes too.

Yeah, I love it.

I love it because I just ranted about this in a rolling in dope post called Climbing down the Entrepreneurial Ladder. And I was saying how a lot of the business advice, even for small businesses like ours, is all about how to scale and how to climb the ladder, even the entrepreneurial ladder. But nowhere does it address. You might not enjoy this, you might be miserable doing it, you might not be very good at it. You might never be able to get good at those types of things or that level of complexity. And that's okay. And so you're the first person that I've heard this term product market founder fit as all three being crucial to that validate stage.

Oh, it's critical because most of the businesses I get and what I do in my one on one work is I fix broken business models. And the vast majority of them are founders coming to me saying, I have this thing and I hate it. I hate my customer base and it's okay if you need to say that. Right, that happens. Or I really despise my products and I don't know how I got here. And they're just chasing that profit success or the margin success and they're not taking the time to look at that sales stage as okay, I found something that is predictable and repeatable in terms of my marketing and sales. But do I like it? Do I want this to be it? And when you're not intentional about that, it can get ugly. And listen, that's one picture. If it's a big corporation, can kind of hide from it, but when it's just you or you and up to like 10 people, you better like what you're doing.

I find that that's also always evolving. Like, I don't know, maybe I just do this in a really backwards way, but I'll kind of get ideas about what I think I might like and then I'll do it and then I'll do it for a certain amount of time and then I go, okay, no thanks, you know, and just climb back down again, climb back down the ladder and regroup. And so it seems like those of us, at least you've been in business over a decade. Me too, almost 13 years. We probably do cycle through and need to go back to square one a little bit in different phases of the business.

A hundred percent. And that's why I say I see thriving, profitable, wonderful businesses who never leave Stage two. Now you're going to struggle with that if you want to be a $50 million company with a huge team. But if you're going to keep it small, which is completely your choice. I see million dollar companies on the regular who never leave Stage two because the founder fit piece of it dictates that they want to try new things. And I think that that's absolutely fantastic.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Let's talk about an activity within Stage two. This actually just came up in a conversation I had with Ann Samoylov, who helps people with launching, and we talked about borrowed audiences, which might be a term you made up. You'll have to let me know. But you said if you're going to go, quote, borrow an audience, go present for someone else. Blow their mind. You gotta blow their mind. Okay, I hate doing this, but I have a two part question.

Yeah, do it, because then you can.

Answer in any order. I'm so curious what your blow their mind topics are when you speak to a borrowed audience. And the other thing that fascinated me was that you said even borrowing a group of five to 10 people if they're very aligned, that sometimes those are the most successful for you. So it's not that you need to go find your friend with the biggest platform and go do a webinar for a thousand of their people. It's even a very small audience that's very aligned can do great things. And that was surprising to me.

Yeah. Well, let's back it up for a second and talk about something I call relationship versus Traffic marketing. Because that will answer part of the question. I think of marketing as living on a continuum with what I call relationship marketing on one end of that continuum and traffic marketing on the other end. Relationship marketing is stuff that's very relational, usually that is aligned with you selling products that are custom high end services. Right. So you don't want a lot of leads necessarily, but you want really high conversion. On the other side, traffic are activities where it's more designed for mass market. It's going to be lower cost products where you're playing a numbers game, your conversion is going to be much lower, maybe more of our traditional launch formulas. And the marketing of those two things works in completely opposite directions from what I've found. Meaning I break marketing into three stages and I think I made this up, but I call it awareness, engagement, sales. People need to meet you and that's awareness. Then they need to engage with you and we can talk about what that means if it makes sense. And then they need to buy something from you when you're on the relationship side of things. So when you're trying to sell high end services, what you need to try to create is the visual of a snowball running downhill. Meaning at that awareness stage, people need to have a really big moment with you. You need to work really hard. And I don't mean work really hard by hustle, but I mean you need to have a massive impact. And I want you to have made like 80% of the sale by the time that awareness moment is over. So let's use the example you had. If you go and borrow an audience of your aligned audience, you need to say something to them that just makes them sit up and say, oh my gosh, I am all in. And then after that it's just kind of a snowball running downhill where you're just kind of confirming that you're a match to work together. But that sale is created at that awareness stage. Again, if you are a service based business who operates on more of the quality over quantity marketing model, traffic is the opposite. Because traffic relies on numbers. You need as many bodies as possible. And so you're actually not trying very hard at awareness. You are putting out what I call like relatively generic content that is going to bring in a ton of people and then you have to get them boulder uphill. And that's where we see maybe more pressured sales. We see more things happening because you're trying to get them over the finish line. And so our dynamics of the two funnels are completely opposite. Relationship snowball Running downhill traffic, you're pushing the boulder up. And neither of those approaches is wrong. The only thing that's wrong about them is if you are trying to sell a product that is better aligned with a relationship sale through a traffic funnel, that's going to look really painful. That's where we start seeing people say, oh, these sales are so gross. I feel so pressured. It's probably because they didn't have enough of an experience with you at awareness. And the same way if you're trying to sell traffic, good luck getting on the phone. If you need to sell thousands of products, you're not gonna have time to do a sales call with every single person. So they're not wrong approaches. It's just what you're trying to sell and what's in alignment. And so when I talk about having that huge impact, when you go borrow an audience, I'm talking about a relationship sale. Because in my one on one business, I maybe work with 12 people a year. I don't need many leads and my conversion is 90% and that happens to a lot of people if they're running a proper relationship funnel.

That makes so much sense. Yeah, I just wanted to say like if we think about it, the traffic based strategies for selling a VIP day, or in your case, the profit tonic, you know, your signature one on one service, you would not want to badger them like have some evergreen automated webinar that then pressures them with kind of false urgency. I love what you're saying about the snowball approach would be that they're actually so blown away by you already that they're just racing of where can I find the signup page?

Yeah, exactly. And how many people do we see try to sell it in the opposite way? Right. They are trying to sell one on one services via webinars because traffic marketing is what's easy to teach. If you Google marketing, you're going to only hear about traffic strategies because that's all of our social media, it's all the stuff we see. Whereas the relationship marketing is a little bit more of the simple but not easy side of things, that it requires a lot of nuance, like figuring out what am I going to say to have a huge impact. So to answer your original question, what do I say? I've already told you both of them. Number one is depending on the audience, I will go in and I'll train them on the five stages of small business. So if I get in front of a group of business owners who are struggling and can't figure out why their Business isn't growing or can't figure out what to do because they're so frustrated by it and they've created this monster they don't like. I go up and I put the five stages in front of them and I say, hey, you have all skipped ahead to foundation and you need to back up to sales. And their eyes light up and it's again the simple but not easy. It's such a relief to them because all they've been doing is throwing strategies against the wall. Assuming like if I start dancing on TikTok, it's gonna solve my problems. It's never gonna solve your problems if you are doing things in the wrong order. And that's where talk about it's more important to do things in the right order than to do them.

Well, frankly, the dancing on TikTok cracks me up. Talk about cringe. If you saw me dancing on TikTok to have anything to do with my business, just forget it. I'll just business before I have to do that. Forget it. And yet it is. I call it sailing the sea of shiny shs. Yeah, everybody will say, well, you should be on TikTok. Oh, have you heard about book talk? You could go viral if you get on book talk and it's like, sorry, it's just not gonna work for me. Can't do it, can't do it.

You know, if you're frustrated by your business and you don't kind of understand all the different levers that you have at your availability, you start doing those things and assuming that, oh, there's just some strategy out there that I'm missing, you start beating yourself up about it. And I think that's really a vicious cycle folks can get into when all we're really talking about is, you know, what do you need to focus on at the right time and making sure those things are in alignment. And that's the other talk that I take is this relationship versus traffic marketing talk. Because again, traffic marketing is the only thing that people really understand and really hear about. And so if you are a service based business or any kind of business, who should be in that high conversion world and you are dancing on TikTok, you're just going to get increasingly, increasingly frustrated. And so if I show up and I say, hey, did you realize there's a other entire half of the continuum called relationship marketing that you could be playing in? Let's talk about what that looks like. Again, just relief and gratitude and so excited to continue the conversation. I'm not showing up with here's 10 tips to do this again, that's not wrong if you're on a traffic side, but when you're on that relationship side, you want to give people a moment that they can't unsee and can't unhear.

You also mention in these two arenas, relationship and traffic. Relationship based sales marketing business. Traffic based sales marketing business that there are metrics as well that sometimes people get confused. So they're actually looking at traffic based metrics for a relationship based business model. Can you just share what some of the metrics mishaps are around these two categories?

Yeah, I think primarily it's around conversion and conversion expectations. When I'm hanging out on the relationship side of things, I expect you to be converting at least 50% of your leads, if not 80 to 85%. Once we get 90% and above, you're probably not bringing in enough leads, frankly. So that is drastically different than the traffic side of things where you're probably converting at an extreme at like 0.5%. Right. Or if you're Old Navy, I don't know, I shouldn't name drop. But I would assume that some of those retailers who are emailing us all day have very low conversion because they're playing a numbers game. They're just throwing so many numbers through to make up for really low conversion. And so where we see again missteps is if you are trying to sell a high end service and you're hanging out at 20 or 30% conversion because you're using a lot of traffic tactics, that's going to be really painful on your time. Because when we add up the number of sales calls that that means and the number of activities you're doing to try to get those people across the finish line is taking up a lot of your time. And the same way if you are trying to sell something that is a traffic product through more relationship tactics, you know, through doing more things in person, spending more time with people, that's also going to be really painful because you just such a numbers game that now you're at an extreme example. You're on the phone with somebody for 15 minutes to sell a book, right? And you can't sustain either of those models.

Another thing you do that I love as it relates to relationship based business is you have a free monthly Q and A. And this is something that I saw Pamela Slim do back in the day and I always thought it was such a good idea that let's say somebody loves this podcast episode that they listen to or they do buy Your networking course, you have this kind of catch all moment once a month where people can show up, engage with you, ask you questions. It's called tiny and Strong Tabletop. So I'll put that link in the show notes. I would love to hear how long you've been doing this and what you think are the biggest benefits or just what you've learned in doing these.

Absolutely, I've been doing them. Don't quote me on this, but I think it's been about two years now. And again, this kind of comes back to how I create my relationship funnel where I go and speak, I borrow audiences, and that's my awareness. I go speak to other people's audiences. And so I need a way to invite them into my world. And I know that when I go borrow an audience and blow their mind with one of these models that they need a little bit of time to process that. And they are going to start questioning, am I the special snowflake? Does this really apply to me? How does it apply to me? Right. They're trying to wrap their brains around this new reality they have been encountered with. And so I invite them once a month, like, come, let's talk about this. Let me review the model again. Let's answer some questions. And it just helps them wrap their brain around the fact of what I shared in that original talk. So if I got them to 80% of the sale in the original talk, now they can come to that and they can really get in the weeds with me, understand how it applies to their business. I call it helping them define their reality. I think that's really important. And then they feel really assured that, yeah, okay, what she said not only blew my mind, but it does really apply to me because now she has looked at my individual business. We've kind of talked about it after I've had a few weeks to process this, and now I see the vision. So let's go do it.

Not that the goal is converting people on these, even that word is sometimes cringe inducing, but you must also then if you get, let's say, 80% of the way there when you're speaking to other audiences, I would imagine that These Q&As do help you kind of get people more involved in the services and products that you offer in your business. Kind of get the next 80% of the way there.

Yeah, exactly. That's what they do. It is a marketing technique. Right. And I don't apologize for that. And at the same time, there's a lot of people who come to Those who will never buy from me. And that's okay. But I know that it's critical for the people who do want to work with me to have that experience. So it's fun for me because I try to have my information accessible, but it's not always. I don't have tons and tons of courses. So if you can't invest in working with me one on one, this is a great way to come and understand a little bit more and get more information and start to learn how to kind of apply it yourself. And if you are considering working with me one on one, then it's a great way to understand really specifically how that applies. And it's just the fun way for me to talk through things because we can get into the weeds of it. I don't do well at keeping it up at a really high level. Like, I want to hear your exact issue and let's really get into the weeds and talk it through. And I know that that helps the rest of the audience because they're all experiencing the same thing.

Do you have any particular way that you structure these, or is it just whatever people show up with? And also, do you have any particular. Here's how to work with me or closing. So I'm curious about your opening, middle and end of these Q and A calls. If you have any set things, set.

Elements, sometimes they are just open Q and A. And sometimes if I see somebody struggling with a concept or if I've been talking about a specific concept a lot, and I know a lot of people, it's probably on their mind. We'll do maybe a 10 minute quick overview of the model and I'll do a little bit of a teaching moment with a couple of slides. Right? Not webinar style at all, but just like, hey, let's review what relationship marketing means, and let's review that dynamic of the snowball running downhill, something like that, for 10 or 15 minutes. And then we'll get into a discussion about that and any kind of questions. So I kind of alternate between the two, just depending on where I've been, what I've been talking about, what I know my audience is thinking about at the moment. And occasionally we'll bring in guest speakers as well. And then at the end, I very rarely pitch anything. Again, it's kind of taking care of itself. Although a couple times a year I do teach a bootcamp on these concepts. Again, if you can't invest with me one on one, I just love to try to find an accessible way to get information out So I do teach a relationship marketing bootcamp again like two or three times a year. So if that is coming up, of course I will mention that the wait list is opening. It's not really a hard sell, it's more of a hey, boot camp's coming up, so watch out because those tend to sell out really quickly.

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Do you ever have days where no one shows up or it's crickets?

Really quiet group in the early days? Yeah, of course, I was terrified of it. And when those situations come up for clients who are maybe just getting started on these, I always say it doesn't have to be on a monthly schedule. It can be where if you land a borrowed audience, then you can quickly schedule one of these for two weeks later. And then when you're in front of the audience, you can say, oh, you know, what luck. I have an event coming up in two weeks that I'd love to see you at. Or you can start quarterly or something like that. Right. You don't have to put that monthly pressure on yourself. And also, we're back in the situation of a relationship funnel, man. Five people show up. Great, because three of them might be real interested in working with you. And at this point for mine, I'll just be real transparent about that. I usually have about 200 people sign up and maybe 50 show up every month. So again, like, we're not talking traffic webinars with thousands of people on them. It's a relatively small crowd, maybe in what people's expectations are for what these things should be.

I had a community paused at the moment for almost nine years, and in the early days, sometimes there was one person and we would have the best.

Call.

And then we would record. Some days there were four people and then sometimes 24. It was always valuable and interesting. I can say that for sure.

Yeah. This actually happened to me yesterday. I run a monthly call for my networking the PACE course. So this is more inside of a paid program. But again, usually 15 people are there. And yesterday it's getting started and there was only one person in the waiting room and I didn't know the person. I was like, ooh, this will be a different call. And I don't know why that happened still. I was quickly checking my email. I was like, did the reminders go out? But we ended up having like five people by the end, but that can still happen. And same deal, you know, we got on there and we just started chatting about whatever and it ended up being a great call.

With all that you know and have just discovered and categorized and systematized, what are the things that you still struggle with at this juncture in running your business?

You know, my theme for this year is a lesson that I think a lot of people still need to learn is just being resourced. I'm not good at it. I run a really lean business and so I can get away with just having maybe one assistant. And that's not good for me and it's not what I desire anymore. And so I'm really leaning into looking at what does it mean to have a lot more support than I am used to.

And when you say one assistant isn't good for you, tell me more.

Oh, there's just a lot of things that I'm doing that I don't need to be doing and I don't perceive them. And they haven't maybe affected my bottom line ROI in terms of like, they've not distracted me from client work, but it has certainly distracted me from having other time. And so it's just time to bring in more support. Time to start moving into my own level three, because I think I'm pretty well situated. My stage two sales. I'm pretty content with what my model is right now. And so looking at how to double down on that and just make it work a little bit better, we might.

Have already covered it. But being that you are a business model genius, why do you think it is so hard for tiny business owners to land on the right model for them? Like that product market, founder fit. Why is this so elusive? I don't know. Just the biggest themes that you see.

Yeah, I will keep this as short as I can because I love this topic, but to me it comes down to maturity level. And I'm not talking intelligence or anything, but just what you learn as you build a business. When you are a small business, you grow up so much as a founder every single time you do something. And so your products inherently get a little smarter. Your interests change because you're figuring stuff out. You're not Apple who is going to settle into something right away and then just be content because you're just evolving, you're figuring things out. You have natural curiosity and as you do that, that's then going to affect, you know, if your product grows up a little bit. I see this actually all the time in business models that get broken is that the owner, the business owner makes a smarter product, but they don't change how they market. And so they're bringing in their same customer base that probably is not ready for the smarter product. This product got too smart for them and then all of a sudden the business stalls out. And so those are some of the reasons I think a, that models get screwed up, but also that we're always evolving. Is that just naturally when it's just a couple people working in a business or you're working in it on your own, you're going to follow your interests. And when you follow your interests, that is going to force changes to how you market, to who you're marketing to. It just impacts your model.

Have you ever grown your business, let's say in terms of team bigger than was a fit for you, where you then scaled it back down?

I haven't in this business, but that's part of gonna be my journey this year is I may go too far in my startup. So my first business was a traditional tech startup and we did grow a very big team very quickly. And I have all of the founder whiplash from that still 10 years later. And so I have always been very, very hesitant to do it again. And that's why that's exactly how I've gotten to this point where it's not so much of an oh, I can do it myself. But I'm looking at it and knowing the implications of bringing on support and saying, hey, if this isn't hitting my roi, I'm just going to continue to keep it in house because I did not enjoy that process of growing a team. We grew way too quickly, which is the story of a lot of startups. Right. And I know I learned a lot of lessons from that. I'm still a little gun shy from It. I'm going down that route again this year. So let's talk this time next year. Hopefully I won't have a story of that. Hopefully, I will have pulled it off.

Founder whiplash. Such a good term. It's like, been there, done that, got burned, don't want to do it again.

Oh, I just closed my eyes and I have visions of people in my office crying and fighting over lunch hours and HR guidelines. And I know I'm not going to grow that big again. But, yeah, there's the whiplash there of just. It wasn't for me. I am great in the early, messy days, and I know that about myself, and that's why I work with businesses. Right. I've engineered this business to be in with you in those early, messy days, but I have to learn those own lessons myself to get some support and be able to show up in the way that I want to show up in all aspects of life.

I love that you just said that. I can relate so much. I'm great in the early, messy days. Yeah, that is so true for me, too. And I feel like I must even subconsciously just keep myself in an early, messy stage of my business. Because even with Pivot Licensing, I've written some DOE articles and I did a podcast of why I stopped trying to sell the Pivot part of the business. I'll put them in the show notes. But long story short, I reached this point where the logical next thing was to, like, create a sales function to do outbound sales for corporate licensing clients, and I couldn't do it. I just could not. Talk about Founder Unfit.

Oh, I'm sitting here shaking just thinking about it. Yeah.

Yeah. I was like, I built this beautiful ip. I'm so proud of it. It's done great things. It has blue chip clients. And yet just imagining taking it to that next level, what it needed was somebody other than me. And I would've needed to bring in an outside CEO or sell that part of the business. It just, all of it made me cringe. So I just kind of set it aside. I don't mind inbound sales and requests, but I realized I need to stop pretending that that business is going to work for me, even though it's very lucrative once those contracts do come in.

I love that you said that, because actually, the event we were at together, irl, I don't know if you remember that I had this experience because I know that I have scaled a business before, so I have always put myself in this position of saying, like, oh, when I'M ready. I will do it again because I've been there. I can do it. That's what I should do. And it was that event that we were at that I finally said, I don't want to. I know what enough is for me. And so we'll find out if I know what appropriate support for that looks like of just this version of the business that keeps me very happy. It doesn't need to scale into a quote unquote like company again. It's great as it is. And just even making that decision unlocked four years of me shaming myself as to, oh, when are you going to get around and do this again?

Totally. And it's easy at events like those. This is a business kind of Mastermind meetup with 40 epic business owners.

Ooh.

It's hard not to look over at other people's paper and go, oh, they've built gajillion dollar businesses with huge teams. And I have to remind myself in those moments, like, not for me. It's just not for me. And that's okay. It's like sometimes at those, I just feel like I snuck in the side door and I don't belong because I don't even have those ambitions to get there anymore. Even if at one time I thought I did.

Yeah, I remember when I had the clarity, I was actually in a small little breakout that we were just talking about building teams and everyone was talking about their team. And it was in that moment where I just said, nope. So at the end, we were going around, oh, what was your takeaway? And everyone's sharing their very valid takeaways. And mine was, I'm absolutely not doing this. Everybody was really supportive of that. And that's why I love those events where people appreciate and understand everyone's vision. But I had that moment as well.

So with that aha moment and your founder whifflash from before, as you do grow in the tiniest way this year with your team, what will you keep in mind? What are you going to remind yourself? Or how are you going to expand your team in a way that feels like that Goldilocks just right approach?

I'm starting with an executive assistant. Really redefining what a virtual assistant might be. When I had my startup, I had the absolute dream of an executive assistant. And so I have that vision. I know who that person is, and I've spent a lot of years saying, oh, I could never recreate her. And this year I'm determined to understand that there's more than one person in this world who can fill that role and find that role for me because I know that that is the support that I want, that's a little bit more supportive of me and can show up and be of help and be a little bit of a vision partner for me and frankly, start understanding how my brain works and meet me where my brain is at and help me in that way.

All right, well, we'll have to do a follow up and hear how it's going. If you could give fellow delightfully tiny business owners a permission slip to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

I'm going to go back to what I talked about earlier in terms of do something differently sequence over strategy, my friends. You can execute strategies perfectly and if you're doing them in the wrong order, it's not going to do a thing for you. So please take a minute and understand what you should be focused on in terms of your business before you launch into perfecting your webinar delivery or your podcast launch or whatever it may be. Because you can do those perfectly and if it's not at the right time, you're just not going to get the impact.

So well said. And of course you know where to go if you want help with that. You can start with Michelle's monthly Q and A.

You can, you can. And that wasn't even meant as a pitch. I just honestly think that is the most important thing that people need to know and the permission slip that they need.

I love it. Is there anywhere else that you want to send people to learn more or keep in touch?

You can always hang out with me and come over and find me on Instagram or LinkedIn. I'm going to be a terrible social media person and not even know my handles. But you can find those for the show notes. I will be honest with you, you're only going to find me in the dms. I don't post, but I love to connect with people in those ways. You're always welcome to send me an email off of my website, but if you are a social media person, come and drop me a note either on Instagram or LinkedIn and I'm happy to start a conversation there as well.

Amazing. Well Michelle, it's such a joy to get to finally connect with you. And big thanks to Jay and friends who have always been saying connect with Michelle. So I'm just really grateful that we could do that today. Thank you for being here and big thanks to everybody who's here listening.

Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for having me and I echo all of the same comments and the friends who put us together because I'm so grateful for that.

Me too.

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