The Simplicity Lie: Why “One Offer” Isn’t the Point

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everyone, this is Julie. Welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. Today we're going to tackle a lie, a lie that I hear over and over, and it is this: simplicity in business means doing one thing. This is the cliché: one offer, one niche, one promise, one solution. Honestly, I'm guilty of this as well because I think the discussion of simplicity is nuanced, ironically, maybe not as simple as people think. And it's easy to just be like, hey, just focus on one thing. And in the world of entrepreneurship where people tend to be shiny object chasers, this isn't necessarily bad advice, but I think it's flattening what simplicity actually means. And when I, and when I really drill down the clients that are having success in my world right now and what's driving my success, simplicity is at the root of it, but it's not necessarily one offer, one promise, one solution all the time. Okay. I wanna like, I wanna like transition the definition of simplicity for the sake of this conversation today. So simplicity is about having one economic engine. Okay. Yes. You need one problem you're solving in each of your offers. Yes. You need one offer that's driving the bulk of your revenue, but simplicity in online business, and the reason why we care about simplicity is because it's what's driving success. It's one economic engine. Okay. Why do we resist this? And that, that's the first thing I want to tackle because when people get bristly around simplicity or narrowing down or focusing, they don't like it. And I think part of it is that it forces you to get really clear, and if you're not clear, then it can like drum up feelings of shame or worry. It also forces accountability. So if something isn't working, you're, you're forced to look at that. And so I think both of those things can really trigger people, and they would prefer to be busy and have everything everywhere, and they thrive in chaos, and simplicity kind of goes against that. But there's another reason why I think people don't choose simple, and it's has nothing to do— it's not moral or character. It's just that in the beginning of a business, it's more experimental. And this transition from like, I'm a beginner business and I'm experimenting to, hey, I know what my business is doing and now I have this one economic engine. If you don't make that transition, then you're not being simple. I mean, I think it's as simple as that. In the beginning, if you stay in your head too long, or if you stay in the closet building too long, you lose touch with the market. You don't know what works in the beginning. You're having to test, you're having to validate offers, you're having to get customer feedback. It's very much experimental. And in this case, you don't necessarily know what that economic engine is. You may think you know, or you may have an idea of what you want it to be. But you have to experiment first to make sure it's actually working. And most people don't ever leave experimentation mode, and that's why they don't get the benefits of the simplicity model, because they just stay in experimental, experimental mode forever. And when you find something that works or works well enough that it's like worth the time and energy, instead of scaling it, you start something new. Okay. And the concept of scale, you know, we throw that word around a lot and scale is usually meaning increasing revenue without increasing expenses. Growth is increasing revenue and increasing expenses. But really it's not, you know, scale is about concentrating, concentrating on that economic engine. Okay, so let's talk about that. Okay, you are maybe in the experimental phase of your business. You're not quite sure what's working. It's okay to try things. It's okay to not have all the answers, but at some point you're gonna have a signal from the market that says, hey, this works, or hey, this is going to sell. And then we have to transition into a more simple mindset so that we can get, extract the most revenue out of it as possible. What does simplicity mean? I'm going to give you 3 markers of achieving simplicity in your business. Number 1, you know where your money comes from. You understand where the dollars are coming from, what offer is truly driving your bottom line. Okay. Number 2. You know what activity drives that money. Okay. And number 3, what lever that you're going to pull this quarter. That is how you know if you are leveraging simplicity and the, the simple philosophy with your one economic engine. And I'm going to give you some examples here so that we take it out of theory and into practice. And The good news is, is that yeah, you can have multiple offers in a simple business. You can have multiple businesses, assuming you have the time and money resources allotted. But inside of every business, there is one economic engine. And that is how I have come to understand how I have run my businesses, because on the surface, I don't look very simple. And when I talk to people and I'm like, you need one offer and you need one webinar, and they're like, well, you don't do that. And I'm like, you're right, I don't. But for some reason, my concentration and my simplicity in each business produces an outcome that's different than someone who's scattered. And so this is why I'm trying to really dial in what does simplicity actually mean. You know where your money comes from, you know what activity drives that money, and you know what lever you're pulling. Okay, if you look at my private consultancy, Digital Insiders, it is one container, it is one offer. It has been 8 years. I mean, it is as simple as simple gets, and I know exactly where my money is coming from. It's coming from clients who join my program. What activity drives that money? I know the activities that I have to do to drive that revenue. I have to show up on podcasts. I have to be active on social media. I have to email my list regularly, right? I have to run ads to, you know, a lead magnet. Okay, I know the activity that drives that visibility. And then what lever you're pulling this quarter, right? So last year it was a lever I was pulling all year. I was like, I need to write a book because this is going to help, you know, get my visibility up. It's going to position me as an authority. And I ultimately help people get to $1 million. So this is what I have to do. And I knew that that was the lever I had to pull, but I also understood that the other activities I could not let up on. I still had to reach out to people on Instagram. I still had to email my list, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. And that is an example of a simple business. And is it tempting to change it and add to it? Of course. Okay. Now let's go to Funnel Gorgeous and Funnel Gorgeous is probably the poster child for not simple, if your definition of simple is just one offer. Okay. And I would say that the Funnel Gorgeous, uh, ecosystem, like that business had a long experimentation phase because when we started in 2018, we were selling templates. We had a course, you know, we both had other businesses. It was really more of a joint venture project. And then somewhere in like 2020, 2021, about 3 years in, that's when we realized that the economic engine of Funnel Gorgeous was going to be software and that all of the courses and tools would feed that. And that's really where it's landed. And we've actually gotten simpler and simpler as time goes on because we've moved, you know, out of the experimentation phase. We've also recognized that software is really where it's at for us, and everything that we're doing around it is feeding that engine, right? And we know where does our money come from. Right now we are at probably 70% of our revenue is in software signups, and you'll notice that in that we're doing less in the ways of like courses and products unless it's actively helping our customers in the software. We know what activity drives that, it's our weekly webinar, and what lever we're pulling, we also know that. And I would say Funnel Gorgeous finally has cracked the simplicity code. It's been a while, but I think I've learned what helps drive revenue. And instead of just like launching a bajillion things all the time, and we have an ecosystem we have to take care of, of course, so it's not as simple as some of the other businesses. And then I have a third business I'm starting, right? Which is my sheep business. And it is very, very simple. I know exactly where the money is going to come from. It is coming from lamb sales. I know what activity is going to drive that money, and I know what I have to pull. What lever I have to pull. And there you have it, right? 3 businesses, very simple. There is one clear core economic engine in each business. Okay, all right, so how do you shift from experimental to leverage focus? That's what I want to talk about now. At some point in your business when you're experimenting, you're going to have to decide this is the thing. And ideally it would be good if that thing has some market validation, right? Meaning like people have actually paid for it. If you don't have market validation yet, you really are in the experimentation phase. But then once you have that, it's going to have— you're going to need some self-discipline to not constantly create new offers. You want to look at the messaging, you want to look at the traffic, you want to look at what activity is going to drive those sales. And I just had a hot seat yesterday with a client, and she's not in the experimentation phase, but she tends to be the kind of person that likes to create new stuff and try new things because she gets bored. And she has basically 3 offers, and yesterday we had a hot seat and we were trying to decide, does she create a new offer? What's really the economic engine? And it became very obvious once we started digging into the numbers that her money was coming from one key offer, and she knew the exact activity that she had to do in order to get that money in the door. And so we ended up spending the majority of the time talking about traffic, which is perfect because that's exactly what most business owners need to be thinking about is traffic once their offer is dialed in. And it was really fun to see this person who has matured in such a way that she was like really dialed in on like, what's the traffic that I have to do here? Because this, this economic engine is working. And that is oftentimes some sort of webinar. Now, it doesn't have to be a webinar funnel, but I am telling you that the clarity that comes from being able to build a sales presentation and having a webinar is just like unmatched. There are some people who their primary economic engine is, um, like organic marketing, right? Instagram DMs, LinkedIn outreach, right? They're doing social media and it leads to an application because they're selling high ticket or they're selling done for you. To you. There are a few people who have an economic engine of low ticket. I'm thinking of a few clients that I have, and yeah, when you run low ticket, you need multiple offers usually because they fatigue. And so is that a simple business model? It is if you have that economic engine, you know what, where your money is coming from, right? You have like, let's say you have 3 or 4 different products that you cycle out, you know exactly what activities you have to do to drive that revenue. But even with the people that I'm thinking of that are ticket, they have one offer that is their core revenue, their core economic engine. Okay. And so the goal here of today is like, I want you to ask yourself, what offer is generating 60% of your revenue? And if you don't, if you're not able to answer that, it's one of two things. Either you're in an experimentation phase or you are busy and distracted and you're not actually moving into that simplicity mindset. That's the first question you want to ask is like, what offer generates 60% of your revenue? And then the second question is, what traffic source or what activity do you do that feeds that offer? Okay. So if you're like, okay, I know that 60% of my revenue comes from coaching clients and I'm a life coach. And then we say, hey, what traffic source consistently feeds that offer? And if you don't know, that's an area where you can drill down and start saying, okay, I need to try. One or two different traffic channels until I get results, and then that way I know. And then the, the, the sort of question I would ask to really get to the heart of that is, if you stopped everything else and you only did that one activity for 90 days, what would happen? It's really important to ask yourself that. Okay, the last thing I will say about, um, simplicity and experimentation is that I find that a lot of people don't give themselves the time to really get clean data, and this inherently makes things not simple, right? So if you're running a webinar funnel, uh, I'm just gonna use that example, and you don't have everything dialed in and you're only changing one variable, you're never gonna know if that variable was actually the variable that mattered. And in order to have a simple business, a leveraged business, a focused business, you have to understand what activities are driving you or what activities are driving conversion. And that requires time and it requires patience because you can only change one thing at a time to be able to truly measure it. And a lot of people don't like that and they're in panic mode and they're in, oh my gosh, I need money right now mode. And I get that, but you can't stay there forever. Okay. Anyway, my takeaway here is if you are in experimentation mode, give yourself permission to be a little messier. But if you've been in experimentation mode for too long, that could be avoidance and it's time to move into one economic engine so that your efforts can compound. All right. Talk to you soon. And there you have it, folks. Another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey. Journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.