I was consistent. Consistently wrong.
Almost 10 years ago, I asked myself one question.
How do I make more money?
I was deep in six-figure debt. I had young kids. I’d just been laid off as the sole provider.
I decided to start a business alongside my job. Chasing promotions for increments that didn’t justify the extra hours or the time away from my family didn’t feel like the answer.
So I got to work.
I did everything I was supposed to do
I posted consistently on social media. Sent weekly emails. Produced a podcast. Hired a virtual assistant. Tracked my post impressions, likes, comments, and email open rates.
I was consistent. For years.
And I still wasn’t hitting my revenue goals.
What I finally figured out
It took me a long time and a lot of money to understand what was actually going on.
I was optimising for the wrong things.
The strategies I was following were designed for people doing this full time, with a team, at a stage of business well beyond where I was. I was applying them anyway, wondering why they weren’t working.
What I did instead
So I stripped everything back.
One social media platform. No podcast. A weekly email to stay in touch. And most of my energy went into 1:1 conversations with ex-colleagues, friends of friends, women I already had something in common with.
It felt almost too simple. Like I was doing less, not more.
But those conversations led to clients faster and more naturally than years of showing up online had. Sales stopped feeling like selling. I just started signing clients.
The shift that actually mattered
What changed wasn’t the effort. It was what I was measuring.
I think of it like adapting a recipe. The basics have to be right first. Once they are, you can adjust for the time you have, the season of life you’re in, the outcomes you actually want right now.
When my kids were younger, they needed me physically. Now that they’re teenagers, they need me differently. My business has had to flex with that. That’s not a failure of consistency. That’s design.
The question worth asking
Most of us have never been shown that there are multiple paths to where we want to go. We pick one, usually the one someone else said worked for them, and we grind it out, wondering why it isn’t landing.
If that feels familiar, it might be worth asking one question:
Am I optimising for what actually matters at the stage I’m at right now?
That question shifted more for me than any strategy I’d paid to learn.
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