One-To-One to One-To-Many (And Back Again?)
At the beginning of this year, one of my main goals was to be “appointment-free” by the end of it. I no longer wanted to do one-to-one work and so my plan for 2020 was to phase it out to the point where my calendar was gloriously empty and all my time was my own. This is something I was very open about and shared the detail of in my newsletter and here on the blog and I got lots of questions about how it was going along the way – so I thought I would sum it all up here. Keep reading for my journey from one-to-one to one-to-many (and back again?).
Here’s a little back story: I was objectively successful at one-to-one.
I made good money (enough to raise a house deposit in a few months), I was booked up, I had a waiting list. Throughout 2018 I had gone to WORK establishing myself as a marketing coach with interviews and workshops and podcasts and courses and clients, all of which led to The Great Burnout of 2019. By 2019 I’d lost sight of the point, of the joy, and I couldn’t get it back. I wasn’t showing up for clients in the way I wanted, I wasn’t able to squeeze out any time for me and didn’t know what I’d even want to do with that time if I had it.
I spent much of the first half of 2019 feeling I was living a half-life; as if I was under curfew and while I could walk around in the world I couldn’t really be a part of it. I spent the second half of 2019 actively figuring out what the problems were and how I could start to feel joyfully alive again. One of the “problems” I isolated was that my calendar was full of client work that a) made me feel trapped and inflexible, which in turn is out of alignment with my core business value of freedom; and b) made me feel anxious and heavy for days beforehand as I worried about being “enough” for my clients.
The solution, obviously, was to change my business model: to move from earning most of my money from one-to-one services to instead earning it solely through one-to-many offerings. I had already been creating and launching courses for a few years so it was really a change of emphasis and a re-education project to make people want to learn from me instead of talk to me.
And now, here at the end of 2020, I have mostly achieved what I set out to do.
This year only 13% of my income came from one-to-one clients, the rest coming from courses and Kits, The Trail and the odd bit of sponsored brand work. I have spent many months of this year appointment-free as existing clients cancelled or postponed due to Covid, and spent that time living the vision I had for my work back in The Great Burnout – sitting in the garden, writing, with nowhere I had to be. I am also immensely proud of the work I’ve created this year and feel like I’ve unlocked greater possibilities for the future.
It feels that at this point I should say “and I lived happily ever after” and close the book. But of course, in new circumstances emerge new problems. Doing business is like whack-a-mole, you think you’ve dealt with one deep-seated psychological issue and then up pops another one. For me this has been around launching.
I’ve done product launches before of course, but somehow this year they became more problematic for me. I suppose because now the success of these launches were all I had – before they were an added extra on top of one-to-one income rather than all I had. I actually enjoy planning launches, it’s just the implementation I struggle with: I clam up, my ideas drain away, I get low mood and generally want to do anything but show up. Selling one-to-one came more naturally to me as it was really just showing up regularly with valuable stuff and modelling the experience so people could make up their own minds; the time restriction of a launch began to feel like the same anxiety I’d felt around client calls.
There are two big lessons I’m taking from this one-to-one to one-to-many journey.
The first is, not everything is going to be joyful. I started on this quest to do nothing that didn’t fill me with utter joy, and saw anything that wasn’t intrinsically joyful as a problem to be removed. But you know what, sometimes you have to just do the stuff. You have to do the launches and the sales because it contributes to a greater, overall joy. I am now starting, with my evergreen courses especially, to look at how I can sell one-to-many products in a one-to-one way.
The second lesson may be more of a surprise.
I have worked with clients who were desperate to leave behind their old career and start something brand new, only to end up missing it. Very often when we’re unhappy in our jobs it’s the context of the work that’s the problem, not the work itself; it’s not that you don’t want to be a designer anymore, it’s that you don’t want to be a designer at that company anymore.
Throughout this year I’ve done the odd one-off call where I’ve been asked to and am now starting to finish up with postponed clients and…I’m enjoying it. I’m enjoying the delving into problems and ideas, I’m enjoying the camaraderie of working together, I’m enjoying the impact a conversation has on someone’s life.
I am realising that it wasn’t one-to-one work that was the problem, it was the context of that work: having a calendar so blocked out it felt my time wasn’t my own. Having a couple of calls a month over the last quarter has felt invigorating. I’ve noticed how the ideas have flowed easier and my confidence is growing back. And so I am, cautiously cautiously, looking at re-introducing one-to-one to the business model in a less intensive way – making space for a few one off sessions a month and just six quarterly check in sessions.
And so, the whack-a-mole goes on. I think the only conclusion here is that there is no “done”. No point at which you can look at your business and say “everything is perfect and I never need change another thing”. Your business is an extension of you, and it flexes and develops and evolves just as you do. And that, is what makes it beautiful.
