Over the last 3-4 months, I've been working hard at transitioning my business from a predominantly service-based one to a product-based one. And it's been rough!
I love serving my clients. I love meeting new people and watching people I've known for months or years grow over time. It's delightful.
But I also can't sustainably serve enough people 1:1 in order to make the kind of money I need to have the kind of life I want.
The work I do is deep, meaningful, vulnerable, brilliant and challenging. A combination of teaching, coaching, mentoring and therapy, I bring whatever each person in front of me needs in order to move forward on that given day.
Since I'm good at teaching I've created a big handful of courses over the years. Though I discovered I'm better at teaching than marketing so my very useful content doesn't get consumed by anywhere near as many people as I had hoped.
At some point last year I had this nagging sense that I really just wanted to take everything I knew about one of the topics I have studied deeply and organise it all into content that can be consumed by anyone, anywhere, at any time.
And when my favourite long-term client said she really wanted to become certified in this same topic, I committed to the process of taking all this information out of my head and putting it into tangible, consumable form.
The stuff I teach people helps them to understand themselves and their potential better than any other tool I've ever come across. It helps people to understand their kids, their spouses, their best friends, business partners and anyone else whose birth details they can get their hands on.
Anyone who has enough food, clean drinking water and safe shelter (as in, their basic human needs are met) can benefit from this knowledge. This means there are literally billions of people whose lives would be improved by learning about the stuff I know.
But I can't fit billions of people into my coaching calendar, even if I wanted to. Thus, creating digital content on the topic and selling the information at a much lower price than if I had to teach it manually to each person makes so much sense.
It makes so much sense...
But, making the transition from this service-based business to a product-based business has turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated.
Over the last 3-4 months I've been:
- Building a website from scratch
- Planning and writing the first of 10 planned ebooks from scratch
- Writing 150+ blog posts (to help market the ebooks)
- Overhauling my social media strategy, and
- Creating a certification program based on what I wish I'd had when I began this journey 11 years ago
I can share that I've made real, tangible progress. Though at times I've wanted to pull my (precious) hair out!
The first ebook is written. I've got wonderful testimonials back from my beta testers and the feedback from these people is almost all integrated. Members of the public could buy it right now - if they tripped over the website and felt inspired to buy it as all the parts of the sales funnel work.
The website is live and functioning. My graphic designer has given me stuff to make it look pretty and feedback that I've already integrated to make it look even better.
Learning how to build a new website on a new platform has been one of the hardest things I've had to do in the last... God knows how many years. But with Brad's encouragement, I have persevered through the struggle and created something I'm immensely proud of.
And I'm on the home stretch with the blog posts. I have one small chunk of study to do to make sure I am accurately conveying one piece of information. Once I've done that I'll synthesise it into my own words and add that missing piece to the 13 blog posts that need this one bit.
Then. It. Will. Be. Done.
Then comes the hard/easy bit: I have to tell everyone 😶
Truth be told, I think I'm afraid. I think I'm so afraid of being criticised or told that my work is not good enough that, if I wasn't a highly skilled practitioner who knows how to stalk her own unconscious behaviours, I could easily stall on sharing this important work with the people who are waiting for it.
I know what I need to do though: I need to keep reassuring the part of me that's afraid she's not good enough, and also remember that sharing this work isn't about me, it's about all the people it could help.
This post was inspired by the mushrooms I saw when I was out on a rainy walk with a new local friend the other day.
I drew comfort and hope from these little beings springing up out of the ground, looking beautiful and marvellous when all around us was dark and dismal.