The 3-Step Plan Most Solopreneurs Never Do

Alright, so let's go ahead and get started. Welcome to Creative on Purpose Live. This is a show dedicated to helping purpose-driven difference makers, solopreneurs, freelancers, and creatives make a better living by making a bigger difference doing work that matters with people they care about. Today is New Year's Day. And so I thought I would just pop on Substack Live here today to talk a little bit about 3 simple steps that you can take to help make 2026 the best year ever in your solopreneur endeavor. And so what I think I want to start with is the— why is it that I— so first of all, I'm not a huge New Year's resolutions person. I'm also not like a big, big into long-term goals. I don't do 10-year plans or 5-year plans or even 3-year plans or annual plans. Um, I'll talk a little bit about how I am closing the gap between where I want to be and where I am in terms of developing a business that fully funds and fits the actual life I started my business to fund and fit in the first place. But I am a big fan of 90-day objectives, and I'm going to share today process I've been using for at least 3 or 4 years now that has really helped me succeed in building a business that does fully fund and fit around my vision, my ideal lifestyle vision of what lifestyle freedom looks like and feels like and means to me. One of the things that I think prevents most purpose-driven solopreneurs from building that business where they spend most of their time doing work they love with people they care about, making a difference, making a decent living, is that they haven't actually really clarified, specified, defined what their vision of lifestyle freedom is. It's not enough to say, I need to make more money, or I want to have more time for my family, or I want a house on the beach or a Ferrari in the driveway. Those, those type of things aren't really going to be the kind of objectives, lifestyle visions that we can actually build a plan for. So if you find yourself just thinking at this time of year, what I really need to do in the first quarter of 2026 is make more money, get more clients, save more time. I would encourage you to get a little bit clearer about what your actual ideal lifestyle vision is. What does lifestyle freedom, which is what I think most of us want our business to find a fit around, what does that look and feel like? I'll give you an exercise that will help you with that in a minute. The second thing that helps, uh, prevents solopreneurs, purpose-driven solopreneurs from making progress and having a business that funds and fits their ideal lifestyle vision is they haven't taken the time to actually figure out where they are and what they're already doing and what the return on investment of all those investments of their finite time, attention, money, effort, reputation is. If you don't know where you're actually going and you don't know where you're actually starting and what you're starting with, it's impossible to build a path that will get you from where you are to where you want to be. You have to have a clearly defined destination. You have to have a clearly defined starting point and a clearly defined set of assets and resources that you can leverage so that you can define what that gap is between where you are and where you want to be so that you can use your existing resources and assets to build the bridge, to do the 2 or 3 things that need to be done more correctly to help you close the gap with greater ease and velocity. And that would be the third thing that prevents us from making progress. We don't really have— since we don't have a clear destination, we don't have a clear starting point, we don't have the ability to craft a clear plan. We don't know what the number one priority— what's, what's the number one bottleneck preventing us from getting from where we are to where we want to be. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to share this process that I have been using myself for at least 3 years, maybe 4 years at this point. It's the process that over time has helped me create a business that does actually fully fund and fit around the life that I want to be living right now. And it's a process that I taught just last week to folks like Claire and Penny and Alice and Kyra, who just joined us, who are all members of the circle or inner circle community of subscribers at Create Our Purpose. And I'm going to present this in a way that I think is even more distilled than I shared with you all last time. And I think it will set us up for doing a deeper dive in the Circle and Inner Circle monthly workshop on the second Tuesday of this month, where I'm gonna actually provide an over-the-shoulder look at an audit of my Q4 progress and all the data and how I analyze that data and how I use the analysis of that data to set my priority for Q1 and to strategize a plan that will get me there. With the greatest ease and velocity. So here are the 3 steps that will help you make real progress in crafting your Q1 priority, your Q1 success path, and all but guarantee that you'll at the very least make progress. So the first step, as I indicated in the introduction, is You have to know where you're actually going. You have to have a clearly defined vision of the lifestyle that you want your business to fund and fit around. So this is not like some fixed point on the horizon that you're going to put blinders on and just hustle and grind your way towards. It's just what's a good enough vision of the lifestyle that you would like to be living. That you would find good enough for right now. So we're not talking about grandiose, kind of outrageous goal setting here. Like, what's— what would good enough look like? What would a sufficient daily, daily schedule look like? What would— what's enough revenue to help you take care of all your responsibilities and still have some discretionary income for having some fun? You're looking for a point on the horizon that's clearly defined that will guide the decisions that you need to make as you audit your current resources and assets and identify the thing that's preventing you, the most immediate bottleneck preventing you from achieving that. We're setting up kind of a ruler against which we can measure all of our decisions so that we are doing things that help us close the gap between where we are and where we want to be with greater ease and velocity and stop doing things that are keeping us stuck or even worse, moving us further away. So the way that you can create this statement of your ideal lifestyle vision is really simple. I know I'm living my ideal life when, and then Describe what you're doing when you're living your ideal life. And then the second part is to accomplish this, I will need— well, what are the resources that you'll need? What's the revenue that's required for you to be able to do that? What's the amount, the minimum amount of time that you want to be spending earning that revenue that gives you the life that you actually want to be, that you actually want to be living? So just to give you a an example. My lifestyle vision statement right now is, "I know I'm living my ideal life when I can spend weekdays from 7 AM to 4 PM caring for my grandsons. To accomplish this, I need to work fewer than 10 hours per week and earn at least $60,000 a year." Now, I know that that kind of statement sounds simplistic and maybe the revenue goal sounds like it's too low for some of you or what have you, because we're used to gurus and digital marketers saying, hey, you got to earn $10,000 a month or $20,000 a month or got to make your first 7 figures before the end of the year. I don't actually need to do any of that. I don't believe in chasing after F.U. money. I believe in architecting an FU lifestyle. My wife and I have worked really hard to make sure that we can live with very little debt, and therefore it doesn't take $10,000 a month or $20,000 a month for us to take care of our financial obligations and have plenty left over for going to the coffee shop, going out to dinner, doing shopping to support our hobbies and so forth. Scott Perry: So don't get hung up on arbitrary numbers. If you actually audited what you're currently spending your money on and stop spending it on stuff that didn't help you live the life that you actually want to be living, that would automatically get you closer to your goal. If you just stopped doing things that get you further away or keep you stuck, you're actually going to make progress just after doing an audit of your current spending. But figure out what your enough number is. What's a good enough annual revenue goal? What's a good enough looking schedule of how much time I want to be spending in my business? And what am I doing with the time and the revenue that I earn that makes me feel like I'm living a fulfilled, prosperous life? So that's step 1. Step 1 is actually articulate what your ideal lifestyle vision is. What does lifestyle freedom look and feel like for you? I know I'm living my ideal life when whatever you're doing. And then the second part is to accomplish this, I will need what, what's the time, what's the revenue, what are the other resources perhaps that need to be acquired and need to be able to be invested to achieve that goal. So that's step 1. Step 2 is actually the one that's the hardest for most of the folks that I work with. And we talked about this at great length in the workshop last week. And that is you have to actually take an audit of what you're currently doing in your business. Where is the money currently going in your business? What are the— what's the software, the platforms, the apps, the programs, the courses, the coaching? Where's all that money going? What, what is the return on investment for all that spending? Where are you spending time trying to get the word out with your offer? How much time are you spending on social media platforms? What's the return on investment for spending that time there? How much time are you spending grinding out content for your blog, for social media, for your YouTube channel or your podcast? What's the actual return on investment for that? And when we're talking about the audit, I think it's really helpful to just focus on the 3 fundamental things that you have to have to have a viable, sustainable, prosperous business. Because philosophically, thinking from first principles, reasoning from first principles, you need 3 things to have a viable, sustainable, fulfilling, prosperous business. You need an offer that is irresistible enough to an audience that is eager enough, that whose lives would be enhanced by the thing that you do, the thing that you sell. And you have to have a way of putting that offer in front of that audience. And in the Purpose Driven Prosperity model operating system, which is what I teach my clients, it's what I use myself. We have different names for those things, but offer audience and client attraction system or process is what we're really talking about. So you can plug in whatever those mean to you, but we call it it the forever offer? What's, what's the perennial promise that I'm making that evolves as I gain in preeminence in delivering this promise? And how do I position myself in places where people who already know, like, and trust me can witness my Making promises and keeping them. Witness my expertise, my authority, my ability, my competence in delivering the difference that I can make through my product or service. That's your forever offer. Not a power offer. No ideal customer avatar necessary. No niching necessary. Niching is a trap. No No funnel, no content grind, no social media tools and tactics, no software apps. None of that's necessary. Forever Offer just allows you to, by virtue of knowing who you are, what you're good at, and where you belong, show up and do your thing and let people watch, and your people will find you. And that is the most sustainable, successful way I know to build a business. The Be a Blessing marketing web is the second part. That's, that's how we interact with and find our audience. I prefer webs over funnels. Funnels are leaky. They're ineffective. They're inefficient. They give you a very low return on investment for all your time, attention, money, and effort. They require a huge investment of time and other resources to grind out content, be everywhere, all, all all at once, all the time on the social media platforms, grinding out content for blogs and YouTube channels and podcasts and all that sort of thing. You don't need, again, you don't need any of that. Where is the place where you can have what Seth Godin calls permission marketing-based conversations where you're engaging with people in ways that are anticipated, personal, and relevant? Where you're just showing up and doing what you do out loud and in public so that people can witness you making and keeping promises, witness your competence at delivering what you say you can deliver. That's the best marketing that I know of. And the final piece is what we call the Close the Gap conversion engine process, which is rather than constructing, you know, trying to create this ideal customer avatar that is ideal and therefore a fantasy and not going to help you actually engage with real people. There's no niching. If you're trying to jam yourself in a crowded competitive marketplace, you are doomed to fail because there are so many people that got there before you. And getting— being first in the marketplace is always a huge leverage point. And if you're trying to differentiate based on demographics and psychographics and features, benefits of your offer, you're just going to spend all your time tweaking avatars, tweaking your niche, tweaking your power offer, funnel hacking, and all sorts of other funnel gymnastics. And you're going to spend very little time doing the work that you actually started your business for in the first place. Instead, we Scott Perry talk about conversations as the fastest path to cash, making micro promises and keeping them in a sequence in doing the right thing, making the right promises at the right time in the right order to the right people over and over and over again is a much faster way to get the right people to purchase your product or service. It's also a way that you create opportunities to become increasingly preeminent in your craft and doing what you do, the difference that you make in the way only you can make it for the right people. It becomes its own marketing because even when you are helping people with your, whatever elements of your, of what you do are free. Then you're earning goodwill, you're changing people's lives, you're— they will talk about you, they will evangelize the difference that you're making for them, or people will just recognize that they look different, act different, and they'll ask them what happened, and they'll have to refer to you and the product that you sold them or the service that you provided them, or just whatever it is that that you did to help them. So in the conversion, the conversation engine, we start with icebreaker conversations, just natural ways to open a conversation with someone that is identified as a prospect, someone that is the kind of person that you can help with the kind of problem or aspiration that you can help them with. You move them into some sort of assessment conversation. Usually that is done for free. You are able to diagnose where they're actually trying to get to, where they're starting and what they're starting with, and help them see their blind spots, see their misleverage, recognize their false beliefs, and deliver insights that actually help them start to make progress in accomplishing what they want to accomplish or solving the problem that they they want to solve. And if you do that well, it takes much less time than grinding out content for Facebook and Twitter and podcasts and YouTube channels. You get better at what you do and it becomes your marketing content. And people will naturally, if you make a series of small promises and keep them that actually make a difference in their lives, rather than have to get them on a discovery call or a sales call or put— force them into some sort of funnel to try to force them, pressure them into attending a webinar or going to a sales page and buying a thing. They'll actually raise their hand and ask how can you— they get more help from you because maybe for the first time ever, they're dealing with someone that's not a digital marketer or online guru just trying to force and pressure them to, to the next step in the funnel to get closer to grabbing their credit card credentials. You're actually helping them get clarity and traction towards the things that matter to them. So your audit is the audit of your current business systems. What are you— where are you spending time on quote unquote marketing? Where you're trying to earn people's awareness, attention, trust, and permission so that you can get them into some sort of conversation where they are interested in what you can do for them, your product or service. They're enrolled in the journey that you can take them on, and they're ready to invest in your product or service that will help them close the gap with the greatest ease and velocity. So you have to audit where you're spending your time, attention, money, effort, reputation, and you have to audit what's the return on investment for that time, attention, money, effort, and reputation. And if you can't identify, if you can't get numbers that tell you what the return on investment is, that's your most immediate bottleneck. You have to create it. You have to identify, define your system, and you have to define the effectiveness and efficiency of the system. If you can't do that, you don't have a system, you don't— and every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. So if you have this vague system with no clear data or, uh, that you can analyze and no clear strategy that you can improve upon, you're just going to keep getting the results that you're currently getting, which is probably not what most of us want. Most of us are here to make progress. We want to be able to generate more revenue in less time, of course, but we also want to make a bigger difference and a bigger impact with the people that we seek to serve. So step 1, define that lifestyle vision that you want your business to fund and fit around. Step 2, audit the current business systems. How are you attracting clients currently? What are the numbers? What are the things that are underperforming? What are the things that are not delivering any results that you can stop doing? And again, you'll automatically recapture time and money, which makes your business more profitable and prosperous from the get-go just by doing this simple audit. And then the third, just one more note on this process. So we have, we have a scorecard process that we use when we're, we're looking at all of these things. We look at our offer and we give it a green card if we can say what we do, the difference that we make in one sentence. And if people consistently are taking the next step with us and if it all fits within our lifestyle conditions, then it's, it's a green. That means we're good. That's not a priority right now. A yellow card for your offer would be if it takes too long to explain. Or people like it, but they don't commit to it. And you're always tweaking or ditching and creating new offers, then you're in the yellow zone. That's a point of concern that may be your most immediate priority. And then a red offer would be one where it's completely unclear. You can't state it in a couple of sentences. You're attracting the wrong people. People are telling you they don't understand who you are, what you do, or what you can do for them. And or you're just doing a lot of custom work rather than just delivering on the promise that you're best equipped to deliver on. When you're looking at your marketing web, what you're looking at is if it's, if your, your, your marketing system, your marketing web is green, it means that you're posting the minimum amount of content necessary at a cadence that is reasonable and and is not exhausting or depleting. It's actually kind of energizing and exciting. People regularly raise their hands to engage with your calls to action to leave a comment or start a conversation. And you'll be in the yellow zone if your content lands, but it's not getting a lot of engagement. It's not starting those conversations. Or if you're just keep trying new calls to action over and over and over again because nobody's, nobody's buying or raising their hand for the next step. And you'll be in the red zone if you're posting and it's, there's just no connection at all. And therefore, and you then just overproduce content. So creating more crappy content with AI is not going to help you get the right people into your marketing web and have the conversations with people that you can actually help or would want to help. And so if you don't have a reliable, sustainable content generation process, calls to action that lead to to conversations and don't have reliable invitations where people take the next step with you, then you're in the red zone with your marketing web. And when you look at your client attraction, your Close the Gap client attraction system, or what we call the conversation engine, you'll know what you're doing here is asking, do I have a system that reliably turns interest and commitment? And you'll be, you know, we use again an icebreaker that leads to an assessment process that leads into a low-ticket continuous that leads into a mid-ticket or high-ticket. You're in the green zone if you can predict conversions. If you know your numbers and your system can, you can count on this many icebreaker conversations get me this many assessment conversations. This many conversions into a low-ticket thing and this many conversions into a high-ticket thing, then you're in the green zone. You know where your drop points are, you know where you have to raise the floor, you know where, where the improvement needs to happen. You'll be in the yellow zone if your conversions are lumpy. You can't name why you're, you're, you're getting clients or why people are moving forward. And if the system feels really fragile, like, oh, it doesn't work, you know, during certain times of the year, or if it doesn't work consistently at all, that's a yellow card. And you're in the red zone if your strategy with client attraction is hope, hustle, and random referrals. If you're relying on hopes and dreams, it's not a strategy. Sometimes we need it to get through., but, uh, you're, you're in the red zone. So you will have after this audit a, a sense of, you know, with, is my offer green, yellow, or red? Is my marketing process, how I am interacting with my audience, green, yellow, or red? And then my client attraction process, green, yellow, or red? And that gets us into the third step, which is That audit will tell you where is the most immediate bottleneck, whatever the, the most red card is, is where you need to start to fix things, fine-tune things, or find what's missing, broken, or needs work. And so in general, I like to look at it. My offer first. If I don't have something to sell, I don't really have a business. I might have a nice hobby where I'm interacting with an audience, but I find the offer to be the thing that needs to be defined soonest. That doesn't mean that you're not engaging with an audience to define that offer. It's way easier to talk to the people that already know, like, and trust you and listen for their dreams and aspirations and the problems and challenges that they have and craft offers that address the concerns or the aims and aspirations of the people whose trust and permission you've already earned. But still, at the end of the day, you have to have that offer. What's the promise that you can consistently deliver on with and for the people that would benefit, whose lives would be enhanced by the difference that only you can make for them and the way that only you can make it? Once you have an offer, then it's a matter oftentimes of, of auditing and refining and improving that marketing web. Where you were, the conversations happening, where are the weak spots in, in the connections? Where are the places that you could stop showing up and it wouldn't have any discernible impact on your revenue because you can just stop doing that and automatically improve your business by saving a bunch of time, money, and effort. Uh, and then the last step usually is in the client attraction conversation engine. Where are the gaps? Where are people falling off? Are they responding to your icebreaker questions? Are they raising their hand for the diagnostic assessment? Once you provide that insight and provide them with a roadmap that helps them get clear about close to what they're trying to accomplish. Do they enroll in your low-ticket continuance? Do they enroll in your mid-ticket or high-ticket offer to continue to collapse time to target? That's what you're looking for. So the whole— by the time you have done that audit and defined what your most immediate bottleneck is, that bottleneck is going to become your first, your next quarter's priority. For most of the folks that are here that are working with me, like Penny and Alice and Kyra, and I can't remember who else was here earlier. Oh, Claire. These are folks that for the most part have an offer, have some clarity about their offer and audience, and they're working on their client attraction process. But Everybody's different. So whatever you need to work on next, that's what you need to work on next. What is your Q1 priority? Where is the brightest red card or where is the— if you're further along and you've got a couple of yellows, but things are mostly green, then what's the most important yellow that needs to be addressed in order to propel you the furthest and the fastest into the business that will fund and fit the ideal lifestyle vision that you have? When, you know, what do you need to accomplish by the end of this quarter? So if your priority is, for instance, I want to go from having 7 clients that I'm working with at any given time to 10 clients, that's— I need to consistently— I need to add 3 clients or have 3 new buyers for my offer by the end of March 31st. That would be your priority. Then you're going to look at your system and reasoning from first principles, like looking at your offer, your audience, and your client attraction system. If it's your client attraction system, what are the 2 or 3 places where if you raise the floor on that system, you would actually create greater ease and efficiency for getting the results that you want to get? And then simply decide what it is. What's that first micro step? What's the thing that you're going to do today or first thing tomorrow? So that is the process for, you know, what I consider to be the 3 steps that will make 2026 the best year ever in your solopreneur endeavor. Get clarity of the life that you want to be living, the lifestyle freedom, the ideal lifestyle that you want your business to fund and fit around. Audit the business systems that are getting you the results that you're currently getting. What are the assets and resources that you have? Where are you starting from and what are you starting with? What can you stop doing? And that will help you define with the card system, red, yellow, green, what are the elements of the 3 core, the 3 fundamental things that I have to have performing well enough to get me closer to my goal? What is your forever offer? What's— is it red, yellow, or green? Your marketing web, is it red, yellow, or green? Your client attraction system, is it red, yellow, or green? And from there, you'll be able to define your business priority because the most immediate bottleneck is the thing that needs to be addressed now. And once you have your, your goal in mind, your lifestyle vision, and your most immediate constraint, you've defined your objective, your priority for this quarter. And then it's just identifying the 2 or 3 things that need to go better, that need to go right enough for you to start collapsing time to target. Magic Maiko, happy New Year to you. Debra, welcome. Larry, Tom, looks like Justice, Rudy, a lot of folks have joined while we've been, while I've been running my mouth. So I would love to hear from folks here. You know, was that, is that helpful? Does that jibe with the way that you think about setting your Q quarterly priorities and crafting your success path for getting there? And if anybody has any questions, I'm here for it. But I'm just going to wait a few more minutes for any comments or questions to come in. And if nothing comes in, then I'll just assume that my work here is done and I'll get on with my New Year's Day. Cultural role of caregivers is very, very helpful. I appreciate that. I love the, I love the branding. Culture is is so important. Penny says, I like the scorecard as a guide. Yeah, that, that's sort of a new addition to the process that we did for the first time in that last training. So I'm glad that is helpful. We're going to talk more about that in, in the coming days and weeks, and we'll talk about it in more detail in the workshop on Tuesday. I think it's the 13th. Emma has joined. Kato has joined. These are also members of the Inner Circle and Circle community. So we got lots of, lots of members of the community here. Appreciate having you all here. Happy New Year to all of you. Kyra says, thank you, Scott. Looking forward to getting it done in 2026. Indeed, Kyra, I saw your post today. It was really, it was really inspiring. Cultural Caregiver, as a new business owner, I will definitely revise it. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah. So it looks like everybody's got what they need. Thank you, Emma. I appreciate that the scorecard resonates and is helpful. For those of you in the Inner Circle, I'll be editing and enhancing the replay from the workshop and putting it in the All Access Vault over the weekend. You should, if you signed up for the workshop, as a Circle member or had a seat reserved as an Inner Circle member, you have access to that workshop now. Yeah. All right. Well, it looks like it doesn't look like any more, any questions are coming in. I appreciate the comments, and I'm glad that it was helpful and useful to you all. For those that would like to do a deeper dive into this on Tuesday, I think the workshop is, it's the second Tuesday of January. I think it's the 13th. And on the Monday before that workshop, there will be a free Substack post that lays out this entire process. In fact, I've been referencing that, that post as I've been talking about it here. So you can get kind of an overview of the process. As a free subscriber or as just a reader of the Substack. If you would like to attend the workshop on the 13th where I'm going to actually show you my— walk you through how I went through this process myself, how I crafted my ideal lifestyle vision statement, the audit of my current business systems, and how I defined my priority and success path. Over the shoulder. You'll learn how to do it for yourself by watching me do it for myself. That requires a paid subscription. So if you are interested in joining us for that workshop, then sign up for a Circle or Inner Circle paid subscriber membership to the Creative On Purpose Substack. The folks— there's lots of folks from the community are here right now. They're welcome to share their experience with the community and with the exclusive content that's available to Circle and Inner Circle members. But you can sign up for 1 month, attend the workshop, and it will deliver at least a 10x value on the cost of 1 month's membership. I guarantee it. Thank you, Penny. I anticipate I will see you there as an Inner Circle member. Your seat is already reserved. Thank you, Tom. I appreciate that it was helpful and inspiring. Happy New Year, Cato. This is the year that The Odyssey comes out. I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get to Connecticut so that I can tag along when you go to see it. All right, everyone. It looks like, looks like all the questions and comments have come in. I hope, again, appreciate the gift of your time and attention and hope that this was helpful to you all. Wish you a very, very happy, prosperous New Year. And until I see you next, be well, do good, have fun.