Episode 177Sep 9, 2026· 43:38
🚩 Business Triage: What to Do When Your Biz Isn’t Working
▸ Show notes from the creator
Welcome to Season 11 of Off the Grid!
This month, we're exploring strategies + stories of business pivots.
Today we start with my business triage process. It's a checklist of things to consider when your business feels bad and/or isn't making enough money.
Then for the next three weeks, we'll hear from business owners who have made major pivots in their self-employment journeys, including: quitting a dream job, filing for bankruptcy, closing a retail store, and more.
Tune in for lots of support, camaraderie + inspiration. And check the links below for extra resources 👇
RESOURCES + LINKS
👋 Download the FREE Leaving Social Media Toolkit
🌐 Get on the Interweb waitlist for creative business courses + community
💓 Join the Clubhouse for exclusive bonus episodes + emails
About this episode
Welcome to Season 11 of Off the Grid!
This month, we're exploring strategies + stories of business pivots.
Today we start with my business triage process. It's a checklist of things to consider when your business feels bad and/or isn't making enough money.
Then for the next three weeks, we'll hear from business owners who have made major pivots in their self-employment journeys, including: quitting a dream job,…
Listener reactions
💡0
🤝0
🔥0
😄0
0 reactionsShare your reaction
Pick how this episode landed — then leave a public review or a private note to the host.
You
Your name will appear with your review0/300 Visible to everyone
Sign in to leave feedback
Full transcript
00:00
Amelia HrubyHello, and welcome to Off The Grid, a podcast about sharing your work and making money online without social media, big tech, or corporate paychecks. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby, and I join you today to kick off season eleven of the show. I can't believe we're hitting season eleven. Seasons of off the grid are kind of each their own unique thing. They are five episodes in five days, like we did for season ten in August.
00:00
Sometimes they are 20 episodes over six months, like we did for season nine in the first half of this year. And season 11 is going to be, I think, three months long, September, October, November, the end of twenty twenty six. I will be coming to you weekly with really amazing conversations about creative business and technology and how we're all navigating tumultuous economic times. And I really just can't wait to share these chats with you, these episodes, these interviews, these really heartfelt, honest reckonings with what it means to be a creative person and what it means to just be a person in 2026 and beyond. So if you're brand new here, thank you so much for tuning in to the show.
00:00
I'm so glad you pressed play on this episode, and I wanna make sure you know that this podcast is paired with a free Leaving Social Media Toolkit that you can get at offthegrid.funtoolkit. It includes a five step plan for leaving any social platform, as well as my list of 100 ways to share your work and life off social media, and a creative marketing ideas database so that as you listen to the show, you can keep track of things you want to try and then make a plan for when and how you'll implement them. So all of that is totally free, and you can grab it at offthegrid.fun/toolkit anytime. If you've already gotten it, you can also go there to get it again. And if you do, then you'll get our weekly email telling you more about episodes of the show, things we have coming up, and other goodies that I share from time to time.
00:00
So again, that's the free Leaving Social Media Toolkit, and you can find it at offthegrid.funtoolkit. Now if you are a returning listener, if you're an Off the Grid friend, fan, or super fan, I am especially excited that you are tuned in for season eleven because this season is really going to be emergent. It's going to be of the moment. It's going to speak to exactly what I'm seeing happen in creative online business right now. So there's so many business podcasts out there.
00:00
Right? There's so many marketing podcasts out there. And I have to say a lot of the ones that I check-in with from time to time seem to be proceeding as if things are business as usual. They're telling you to start Black Friday planning and hire people to buy back your time and invest in your Facebook ads strategy. You know, that stuff that people have been saying for years now, and I'm still seeing it on all of the big marketing podcasts, at least the ones that I see on the Apple charts from time to time.
00:00
And hearing off the grid, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not coming back with five easy wins for your business or tips for success no matter how much experience you have. I've never really shared quick wins or big promises on the show, and I'm not gonna start now. Especially because I think that most of us in The US and otherwise are noticing or have been noticing or experiencing the fact that we are in economic and political turmoil. The actions of the US government have really shaken global economies, particularly going to war in Iran, disrupting the international oil market that has caused a break in the flow of international trade as well as an increase in diesel prices that makes it more expensive for goods to get around the countries they go to when they get there, if they do get there.
00:00
And many of us are starting to see that in our grocery prices, at the gas station, and then as all of that trickles down in the reality of how many people are buying things from our businesses. I am hearing more and more from business owners this year that sales are down, inquiries are slow, it's taking longer and longer for clients to commit to new packages and services, and I want this show to respond to that. I'm not going to come here and be like, well, if you just implement AI, then your business will 10x in ten days. Like, I don't say stuff like that ever, and I'm especially not going to say it now when I'm just seeing how challenging and even dire things are becoming for some of the business owners in our community. Now, I'm also noticing that we have a lot of new listeners here who are thinking about self employment because they have lost a job or left a job and are sort of looking around, noticing that there aren't that many jobs to apply for.
00:00
The ones out there are getting thousands of applications, half of which are AI generated, and work can just be hard to come by. And I wanna say I have a lot of empathy for you, and I welcome you with open arms into the world of creative online business. It is not necessarily an easy world all the time, but we want you here. Come learn from off the grid. Join us in the interweb. I would love to see you step into self employment and find success there. So if that's you, thanks for tuning in. I'm glad you're here. And if you're an off the grid listener and your business is doing great right now, I also just wanna celebrate that with you. This season, I am going to talk a lot about what to do when business isn't going so well, when it's not working.
00:00
But all of the things I'm gonna say are lessons you can apply when it is working as well. There are things that you can think about or do as things are going well. And also, no matter how well your business does, eventually you will change and you will need your business to change as a result. And that's actually what's gonna come up on the show for the rest of this month. So let me get to season 11. We're here. I've told you what we do at Off the Grid, what we don't do, who we're for, maybe who we're not for. Who are we not for? We're not for probably, like, VC funded companies. We're not for people who are all in on building AI apps.
00:00
We're not for folks who are super invested in big tech or only do consulting with places like Google, Amazon, etcetera. We're probably not for you. If that's you, I wish you well on your journey, and there are literally hundreds of other business podcasts for you out there. But if you are a maker, an artist, a healer, a service provider, a therapist, a writer, a copywriter, if you want to share your work and make money online without relying on social media or big tech, Off the Grid is here for you. And I'm gonna tell you what we're gonna do today and what's gonna happen in the rest of season eleven.
00:00
So today's episode, I am calling Business Triage. That is a phrase that I got from my friend Nick when we were talking about how hard business has gotten in 2026 and realizing that a lot of folks just need a quick triage of their business. They need to be able to think through, okay, if things aren't working, what do I look at? Where do I go? How do I start to fix them? So in today's episode, I'm gonna teach you my process for business triage and where I look when people tell me their business isn't working. Then we're gonna move straight into season eleven from here, and we're gonna start with a series of conversations with people who have gone through major pivots, failures, and successes in their business. So I'm gonna talk to Luca Davis, who was a personal trainer who started a gym and then had to file bankruptcy to get out of a long term lease for that gym, and then eventually became a web designer and is more successful and profitable than ever in that field. I also have spoken to Shireen Leon Schwartz, who was a fine dining chef turned private chef, who went out on her own in the chef space and built a knitwear business alongside it before deciding to retire from cooking and chefing altogether and become a creative business adviser, which is super exciting. I love that conversation.
00:00
It's also a lot about grief and how our businesses change as we grieve. And I've also recorded with Heather of Small Business Rodeo. Heather was once a dog trainer, then quit that business even though it was very successful. You'll have to tune in to hear why to go to a coding boot camp, ended up getting a job as a web developer of sorts, left that to start a retail shop, left the shop to start a business consultancy, and so much more. So the next three episodes of the show are really gonna be these pathways of business resilience and conversations that show us that any creative career, particularly a self employed creative career, is always gonna go through evolution, and we can survive that and perhaps even enjoy it in the process.
00:00
So today, you're gonna learn about business triage. Over the next three weeks, you're gonna get those insights into the ways that people did the work of triaging what wasn't working and then changed their business and then came out on the other side. And again, doesn't mean it was all easy and they're gonna tell you exactly when it wasn't easy, But I'm hopeful that this can be a reminder that we can do hard things as Glenn and Doyle's podcast name reminds us. And I think the best way to do it is together. And this type of camaraderie, whether just by listening to these stories or by coming into the interweb and being with some of these people, those are the ways that we feel supported and are supported, get supported, find the resourcing and resilience to make it through.
00:00
So again, that's what we're gonna do in season 11 of Off The Grid. I am so glad that you've tuned in to this episode, and I hope you'll stay tuned in through the fall. And for now, I think it's time to get into this business triage process I promised to teach you. So let's dive in to what to do when your business isn't working. Okay. So let's talk about business triage. And first, what does triage even mean? So typically what this word means is it's this process that medical professionals use to determine the order of priority for providing treatment to injured people. So, you know, earlier this year, I was watching The Pit, and what Doctor. Hruby does when people come into the ER is triage them and sort of say like, okay, what's the most important thing here?
00:00
You know, we need to make sure their heart's working. Need to check for a head injury. I am not a medical professional, so I don't know the order of operations. But that's what it means to triage, to sort of see something that needs care and then figure out the order of priority of where does the care need to go. So that's what I'm going walk you through. If your business is the thing that needs care, if your business is broken in any sort of way, then where do we look first? And what do we look at? Right? If you go into the ER and you're like, I think my arm's broken, and they look at your nose, that's not going be very helpful. Right?
00:00
And this happens in business a lot. It is so frequent that someone will say to me, oh, my business isn't working, so I made a new website. And I'm like, wait, did you need a website? Was the website broken? What do you mean your business wasn't working so you made a new website? I think often we notice something is wrong, but we don't totally know where to look to fix it. And then maybe we start listening to a bunch of business podcasts or watching a bunch of free classes, and we're like, well, maybe that's it. So I'll try that. And we end up just sort of like throwing spaghetti at the wall of our business, which is a lot like just putting a bunch of random band aids on a body and hoping that will fix what was hurting. So this episode is for you if you think that something isn't working in your business right now, but you're not totally sure what.
00:00
And it's especially for you if you are not making as much money as you want to be making, or if you have noticed your sales decline or flatline or just not happen over the past weeks, months, years. I think that often when people tell me their business isn't working, what they mean is they're not making enough money. So this episode is definitely gonna speak to that, but it's also gonna get into some of the other reasons your business may not be working, which doesn't always mean it's not making enough money. Sometimes our business is quite successful, but it's not working for us. So in this triage process, we'll kinda speak to both of those things.
00:00
What do you do when your business isn't working? You look at yourself, you look at your business, and you try to figure it out in between you. So in this business triage process, we're going to look at five things. It's sort of four things because the first and last one are the same. We're gonna start with you and we're gonna end with you. In between, we're going to talk about your offerings, your messaging, and your audience. This is my list of priorities of what I go to when I want to triage why a business isn't working. So let's start with you. The first thing that I ask anybody who tells me their business isn't working is I ask how they are doing. How are you?
00:00
And do you really want this business to work? Which is a really hard question. Both of these are hard. How are you? How do we even answer that these days? Right? But the first thing we have to check-in with is your general well-being and how much you really want this business specifically to work. Because one, if you are not doing well, and doesn't mean you have to be perfect, you don't need to be in like A plus tip top best shape of your life. But if you are going through something really hard, if you're grieving, if you've been ill for a long time, if your diagnosis has changed and you don't know how your meds work right now, if things are really hard with you, that's going to be reflected in your business. And so I always want to start there.
00:00
I always want to be like, okay, how are you doing as a person before we look at why your business isn't working? And then the second thing we have to look at is, do you really want this specific iteration of your business to work? Because sometimes when we think our business isn't working, it's actually that we're not in love with that business anymore. Sometimes when you go to couples counseling, the reality is you just don't want to be in that relationship anymore. And sometimes we don't know.
00:00
Often the answer is, I don't know if I'm still in love with this business anymore. I don't know if I want to do it this way anymore. I don't know if I want this anymore. That was me with my business Softer Sounds last year. I knew it wasn't working because I was making less money and I didn't enjoy it anymore, But I wasn't sure if I wanted to make it work. I wasn't sure if I wanted to recommit. So I decided to take a break. I called it a sabbatical. I guess it was sort of like a separation. Me and softer sounds separated for six months.
00:00
And after that time, I decided I actually didn't want to run that business anymore. And so I didn't need to triage it. I just needed to let go of it. So that's why we start there. Because sometimes the reason the business isn't working is because it's time for us to let it go. So our first questions, if you feel like your business is not working, the first question to ask yourself is how are you? And are there reasons in your personal embodied life why things aren't working? And the second question is, do you really want to commit to making this business work? And the answer is yes. Now we go through the rest of the process.
00:00
If the answer is I'm not sure, now we go through the rest of the process. If the answer is actually no, I just need to be honest to myself that I'm not in it with this business anymore, then we have a different process to go through. We don't need to do all this stuff I'm going to talk about next. So that's where we begin. First step, how are you? Do you really want to fix this business? Now let's look at your offerings. So there are so many places that we can start a business triage process. As I said before, you tell somebody your business isn't working and they will tell you, look at your website, look at your copy, look at your sales emails, look at your scheduling, look at whatever. There's so many places.
00:00
But the place that I like to start is with your offerings. Because to me, the offering is where you, the creator, meet the potential buyer. We have to have clarity in our offerings, and they have to be compelling and exciting to other people such that they will buy them and we have a business. So that's why I like to go to the offerings first. Before I look at the website, before I look at your audience or anything else, if I'm trying to triage your business, I wanna know what you sell.
00:00
That's where I'm always gonna begin. What you sell is your offerings. Or if you are a maker or product based business, it's your products. That is where we begin. So when I look at the offerings or products, here are a few things that I'm looking at in a triage process. One is the clarity of container. Is it super clear what your offering is? Is it a six week coaching program? Is it three one on one sessions? Is it a weekend intensive?
00:00
Is it a group class that you join for eight weeks? Is it a year long membership? What is it? Is the container clear? In some ways, this can be easier in a product based business. You're like, my product is a ceramic vase. My product is a beautiful pink bow for your hair. My product is a journal based on the cycles of the moon. Right? When you make a product, it's like a discrete object, so it has that clarity to it. When you design a sort of service offering, sometimes people are really muddy about what it is. Right? They're like, well, it's a course, but it comes with a membership and you get a one on one with me. And all of that can be great, but it may not be clear. So the first place I triage offerings is clarity of container.
00:00
Is it super clear what it is to you and to potential buyers? The second place that I wanna look is expertise and energetic fit. So why are you the perfect person to offer or create this? And how does that also match your energy? For some people, this is super obvious. They're like, I have been training in massage my entire life. Of course, I'm the person who's going to give you a massage. I can tell you all this expertise I have, these credentials I have, the hours I've worked on other people's bodies, etcetera. Perfect fit between my massage expertise and selling massages. Right?
00:00
For other people, it may be, I am a business strategist, and I have built these types of businesses. I've worked with this many clients. I have this many hours of coaching in. That is like the perfect fit of my expertise between business and strategy, etcetera. With that example, it's actually a little vague though. Right? Like, what types of businesses do you work with? What exactly have you built before? What modalities do you bring in? Are you a trained coach with a certification?
00:00
Is all of your expertise just that you did it before and now you're telling other people what you learned from that? Do you use nervous system support work? Do you use human design or astrology? You know? Actually, when we're looking at your containers, how are we bringing in a holistic view of your expertise and making sure that the offerings you've designed are a perfect fit for them, and that you are the perfect person to lead them.
00:00
Another piece of this is that sometimes we build offerings that look like the stuff other people are doing. Maybe you're like, well, I saw that Amelia has a year long membership, so I'm going to have a year long membership. But maybe a year long membership isn't a good fit for you. Maybe you're somebody that's like, actually, I don't wanna talk to anybody for a year, and I don't wanna commit to doing this for a whole year, so I'm just gonna teach one month classes. Right?
00:00
So with expertise fit, it's like, does all of your experience and expertise perfectly fit the offering you've designed? And does the shape of that container fit the way that you like to work? We really need all of that aligned for an offering to work well. The third thing I look at when I am triaging a business through the lens of offerings is social proof. So I think that offerings sell best when you have testimonials and other people say it worked really well for them.
00:00
So if your business isn't working and we think there's a problem with an offering, it may be that there's no social proof for that offering. Maybe you're trying to sell something you've actually never done before, and so we need to figure out how you can get that type of social proof. There are lot of different ways to do that, but I think that that's a really important part of triaging an offering. Then after I look at all of that, the last thing I look at with offerings is pricing. Does your pricing make sense to your ideal potential buyer for exactly what you are offering with the container, the expertise and the proven results you've gotten for other people?
00:00
Is this price a good fit for the people you're selling it to? Now pricing is notoriously challenging. You can sell the exact same thing for $5 or $5,000 depending on who you are selling it to and how good you are at selling it. Right? That is the power of sales. But the place that I like to begin is just really thinking about doing some research, having some conversations with the type of person that I want to buy something and figuring out how much money are they spending on similar things. Right? So if I am an astrologer who wants to work with luxury brands, well, how much are luxury brands spending on services? I actually have absolutely no idea. But maybe I could do some research.
00:00
Maybe I could talk to some people I know who work at those brands and figure that out. And that price point I come to will be very different than if I'm an astrologer who wants to work with queer punks in the Twin Cities. Right? Maybe I know a bunch of those people so I can ask them, and they'll tell me this is kind of what I could afford to pay for that. So I think, again, pricing is very specific to every community and audience, but those are the pieces I look at.
00:00
So if your business isn't working, I want to start by looking at your offerings. I wanna start by looking at the things you sell, and we're gonna look at the clarity of the container, the expertise and energetic fit, social proof, and pricing. That's where it begins for me. Once I feel like the offerings are all good, so if you came to me, you said, Amelia, my business isn't working, I look at your offerings and I'm like, the containers are clear. It's obvious why you are the person that should be selling this and feels like it's a good fit for you.
00:00
You have those testimonials that show that you get results and the price seems aligned with who you're trying to sell this to. If that's all in place, but your business isn't working, then we look at messaging. So messaging is how you communicate about the things that you're selling, right? It's how you get the word out. It's how you present them. It's how you help other people understand what you sell and why they should buy it. And your messaging is going to show up on your sales page and in your sales emails and on your sales calls. So that's the realm of messaging. And sometimes if your offerings are great, but they're not selling, we have a messaging problem. The way you are talking about them is not conveying the reason to buy them.
00:00
And so when I'm looking at messaging or I'm triaging around messaging, the first thing I look to is the specificity of the problem and solution. Now what I mean by that is every offering or product, in my opinion, should solve a problem or meet a need or desire that is unmet or unsolved. And your messaging needs to explain to people like, here's the problem you're having. I see you. I get it. And here's how my thing solves that problem. Now, when you're a service provider, this might be more obvious. So for instance, I used to be a podcast producer. And by used to be, I mean, I'm just finishing that work right now. And so it was really obvious to people that they had a podcast and they needed an editor.
00:00
But I could really get into the problem. I'm like, well, why do you need an editor? Your problem is that it takes forever to edit a podcast. It's a really technical skill to learn, and it's not very fun for you because you don't wanna be a podcast editor. You wanna be whatever it is you are and make a podcast about it. So that was the problem. The problem was it takes too much time and it's not fun to do, and so I wanna hire somebody else to do it. I can speak very specifically to that. Now if you are a product maker, it may not feel super obvious to you. Like, what is the problem that my ceramic vase solves?
00:00
Right? But I think if we think in terms of needs and desires, this is a little more intuitive. Like people desire beautiful objects. People desire a feeling of, like, handcrafted joy in their home. That's the problem that you're solving. You're solving for the problem of the mundanity of everyday life or of the banality of mass produced ceramics or furniture or accessories, whatever it may be. So in the realm of beauty, we have a slightly different framing than in the realm of utility. Right? In the realm of utility, we have problem solution. In the realm of beauty, we have unmet desire and met desire.
00:00
And sometimes we're just selling a cool thing. I gotta say. Some people can sell things that are just so freaking cool that everybody wants to have them. They become viral products. They blow up. That happens too. Right? This was like Stanley cups a few years ago or like squishmallows if you have kids. Like, I'm not saying that that doesn't happen. The problem is you can't really triage around it. You cannot triage around viral trends and success because nothing that you do can bring that virality back necessarily, especially in the age of algorithms and things like that. But I think most people tuned in here probably can work with that framework of desire unmet and met or problem and solution. And so when I am triaging around messaging, I'm trying to make sure that there is a very specific problem or unmet desire that we are solving for or meeting on a sales page, in sales emails, and through our sales calls or interactions. I wanna make sure that's clear because it's one thing to say, I sell astrology readings and they're great. And it's another thing to say, if you have been feeling lost, unfocused, unsure of what's next now that you've lost your job, come get an astrology reading with me and we will hone in on the three points of your chart that speaks specifically to career purpose and finances.
00:00
And this reading will help you make a plan for your job search. Right? That is such a specific problem and solution we're speaking to way more than like astrology readings are cool. And astrology readings are cool, but the issue with that messaging can be that there's not like a compelling reason to buy it right then now from Right? We need all of that to come together. So the second thing I look at with messaging is the clarity of the language. Sometimes we get more poetic in our sales pages, and I love some poetry. I love to be conceptual, But when we are selling an offering, we want to be clear. And this is something where if you write a sales page or a sales email, it can be a very good idea to pass it to a friend or to come join the interweb and ask people there to read it and just help you kill your darlings, so to speak. Right?
00:00
If your sales page relies on an extended metaphor about why somebody should stop being a tree trying to grow from the crack in the sidewalk and actually be a tree growing in the mycelial web of the forest, That's really beautiful language, but maybe as a kind of challenging metaphor through which to sell six astrology sessions. Maybe we use that metaphor in one small piece of a sales email, but we don't build the whole sales page around it because it's not clear to people what they're buying and how it will help them. Now, as always, I have caveats for this because there will always be the person out there who can write the sales page in the most poetic way possible and still sell out their offerings. That does exist. But if you've written that sales page and it's not selling your offerings, then one of the things that I would look at in a triage process is how do we bring in a little more clarity alongside or instead of your sort of poetic flow?
00:00
So that's the second thing I look at with messaging. And the third thing is why now? I think a lot of messaging around offerings is really missing that compelling reason to buy it right now. Now sometimes you build in the right now through the sales campaign and timing. So if you have something where you're like, class is in two hours, you gotta buy it right now or you miss class, that's a really obvious why now. If you have something where you're like, doors to my membership are open this week of the year and only this week, that's a really compelling why now. You don't actually have to do anything else to build in the why now. But if you are a website designer who always has web packages for sale, you actually have to explain to people like why now? Why does this person need to make this choice now? What are the signs that they are ready to make this choice?
00:00
It's not about coercing them into building a new website right now. It's about helping them see why this might be the right moment for them. Similarly, if you sell products, you know, people can add to cart your beautiful planners forever and ever. Amen. But you need to give them a reason to buy them now. Right? So maybe you need to build a seasonal sales campaign that's like, fall is the best time to start planning for this reason. Buy now. So that is the third and final piece I look at with messaging. When we've already triaged your offerings, everything's working there, then we turn to the messaging, how you communicate about them.
00:00
We look at the specificity of your problem and solution, the clarity of your language as you talk about it, and the why now ness, that compelling reason to purchase it now. And again, it's not about coercion into the now. It's about acknowledging that saying yes to buying something from you is saying yes to some type of transformation, and what is the reason to undergo that transformation right now? Why should I buy the sticker that makes my water bottle more beautiful right now? Why should I sign up for your coaching program right now?
00:00
If you haven't answered that question, this is a great place to press pause and figure that out about your offerings. Anything that you uncover and then put on your sales page will help people say yes to your work. And that's really like what we're trying to do in this triage process. Right? We're trying to get your business to work again. And for most people I talk to, that means making more sales. So that's what we're looking at. Offering messaging. Once we've cleaned up your offering and your messaging, so if we've triaged that and everything looks good, we've made the changes we needed there. Now we have cleaned up your side of the street on your business.
00:00
This is where we start to look at the other people, your audience or community, your potential clients. And when it comes to them, we need two things for any business to work. We need the right people and we need enough people. That's it, and also like a huge thing to figure out. Right? So for your business to work, you need to get your work in front of the right people. The right people are the ones that you wanna sell it to that are ready to buy it. And so you can sort of help guide them through that ready to buy it process. But if you're not getting your work in front of the people who it is for, it doesn't matter how much we work on your offerings or your messaging, it's not gonna sell because it's not for them. Right?
00:00
Again, if I'm trying to sell astrology sessions to HR teams at high end luxury brands, I need contacts at those brands. And if I don't know any of those people, my primary job is to find and meet them. And if I just keep advertising those sessions to my small audience of my best friends and family that have signed up for an MI newsletter, like, if they're not those HR consultants at the high end luxury brands, like, they're not gonna buy it. It's not gonna work. And I think this is quite obvious when I say it this way, but I find that a lot of people really get stuck here.
00:00
And I think we get stuck here because it takes so much courage to like build an email list, to ask people to pay attention to us. We get some people on it. We're like trying to talk to them about what we do. But if you haven't broken containment of the immediate people that you already know and your work isn't for the immediate people you already know, then it's not going to sell. And so we have to find ways to either create things for the immediate people we already know because that's who's in front of us, or we have to get our work in front of the people who it's actually for.
00:00
So that's the first step. And let me tell you, it's a lot of sending connection emails, asking for intros, doing discovery calls. Like, it's a lot of that work, but it requires doing that work. I definitely encounter plenty of people who are like, I wanna be a consultant for this type of company, and I'm like, okay, who do you know at that type of company? And they tell me, oh, I actually don't know anyone. I just thought that's who would pay me the most for this type of work. And then I say, well, that's fine, but now you gotta get to know those people. You gotta go find them. They're not just gonna show up because you built a website for it. So that is part of this triage process, getting in front of the right people.
00:00
The next stage of audience and community triage is getting in front of enough people. Right? So maybe you know the one perfect person for your offering, but you actually need to sell it to 10 people a year for your service provider business to work. Then you're not gonna have enough people. And it can be really hard to know what enough is. I think that this is something we have to figure out in the context of your business and how long you've been working at it, how much time you have to work on it or in it. So I don't have an exact answer for you of what enough people is. People always want me to tell them this. They're like, if I get a thousand email subscribers, is that enough? And I'm like, I don't know.
00:00
Frankly, I don't know if I have enough people in my audience. The only way I know it's enough is that I'm actually meeting my financial and offering size goals. And so enough is something you're always calibrating, you're always figuring out. But if you're noticing that you are selling things to your email list and you're definitely getting one or two people in the door, but you need 20 or 30, it may be that there just aren't enough people on your email list and you need to go get more people on there. There's always this balance between, like, do I have enough people?
00:00
Is my messaging right? Is the offering right? This all has to be triangulated for it to work. So that is a piece. When we're looking at triaging why your business isn't working, we are looking at do you have the right people and enough people that you are putting your work in front of. If your work is in front of the right people and enough people and it's still not selling, then we typically go back to messaging and offering because something is off there. There's a disconnect between your messaging or your offering and the right people. Sometimes it could be that the price is wrong, could be too low, could be too high. Sometimes it could be the messaging is wrong. Maybe you built a whole campaign around selling this intensive for May, but you actually sell things to like busy moms who spent all of May at graduations and like had no time to do it.
00:00
Right? That's a messaging problem or a timing problem. And so we have to triangulate between these three. But in order for your business to work, you need to have clear offerings, clear messaging, and an audience full of the right people and enough people. That's kind of a basic thing here. That's what we're trying to figure out when we do a triage process. And then finally, I promised you that we would start with you and end with you. So if we started with you and we're like, okay, you're doing okay. You have the energy to triage this business, and you really want this business to work. That is a true deep desire that you have.
00:00
If we passed go with those two questions, we went through offering messaging audience, we figured all that out. Okay. Then the last place I go with people is we look at them again as the business owner, and I check on three things. One, are you committed? Is there clear commitment here? And that can look like a lot of different things, but to me, it typically means that your desires and your actions are clear headed and aligned. So it means that you really want this to work. You have a sense of what it will take to make it work, and you are doing those things to make it work. Sometimes we really want our business to work, but we're not actually taking the action steps that we've figured out or what the business needs. Right?
00:00
There were times when I really wanted Softer Sounds to work, but I was not willing to do more sales calls. And so I wasn't going to get new clients because I needed to do sales calls to get them. There are so many places where sometimes, like, we're just not actually committed to the process of making it work. We're not willing to do the thing the business really needs. And so we have to recalibrate there. Either we have to change what the business needs, we have to change what we're willing to do, we have to change our schedule so we have the energy to do it. We have to hire someone so they will do it instead of us. That commitment piece is tricky, and I definitely don't wanna shame people in that place. It is tricky. We have to figure that out.
00:00
But commitment is a really important part of making your business work. The second place I look with people is consistency. Now this doesn't mean what a lot of people think it means, which is like, I have to work nine to five in my business every day. That's not what I mean by consistency. I really mean, do you have a clear sense of how you best show up energetically? And have you cultivated a rhythm that you are sticking to and living out in your business? So have you built in the rhythms of your sales cycle? Have you built in the rhythms of your marketing? Are you sending, you know, your email newsletter with a frequency that feels right for the amount of sales that you need to make? And so I'm always trying to figure out with folks like what is your version of consistency and how are you doing that in your business such that your business can consistently support you?
00:00
Right? Because most of us want that from our business. Right? We want consistent support. We want consistent financial support often. But are we giving it some degree of consistency or our version of consistency in return? So we have to look at commitment. We have to look at consistency. And then the third piece I'm always looking at with people is, are you doing experiments and keeping an experimental mindset? Because at the end of the day, if your business isn't working, it's going to take a series of experiments to figure out why it's not working and how you're gonna make it work again.
00:00
And this really goes back to where we started with like, how are you? If you're in a place where you're like, I don't have any energy to try anything. Or my favorite phrase, like tried nothing all out of ideas. If you're there, if you are so burnt out that you're like, I have tried nothing. I have no ideas. I don't wanna try anything. The business triage isn't gonna work because the only way business triage works is by doing all these experiments that I've talked about already in this episode. Right? We have to experiment with your offerings, the containers, the expertise, the social proof, the pricing. We have to experiment with your messaging, the problem, the language, the why now ness of it.
00:00
We have to experiment with your audience, finding the right people, finding enough people. We have to experiment with you, your commitment, your consistency. Like, all of that is an experiment. And so in order to make your business work again, we have to find space for that experimental mindset. And sometimes that means you actually need a break. Sometimes it means you need to take a couple weeks off or a day off or some period of time off. Sometimes it means you need to quit doing one part of your business so you have space to experiment in the other. Sometimes it means you just need, like, a good cry and some EMDR therapy, and you're ready to go. Like, there are so many ways that we can get into that experimental space. That's a really important piece of what we're looking for in business triage.
00:00
And honestly, I put it at the end, but it kinda comes up along the way. Sometimes I step into a sort of business triage situation with someone, and we start to look at these things I've mentioned today, and I can tell that, like, they're just way too burnt out to experiment around any of them. And when that happens, we, like, pump the brakes, and we try to sort of work with the burnout and recovering from that first because no business is rebuilt from a totally burned out place. No business is rebuilt from, like, you being charred to a crisp. Right?
00:00
Like, I do believe you can be a phoenix rising from the ashes, but, like, you yourself can't be the ashes. Right? You have to be the ember that's in there and reforms to rise. So sometimes we need to recover from our burnout before we go through a business triage process. So that is what to do when your business isn't working. I covered a lot in that process. And let me tell you, like, there are classes inside the interweb on almost every one of these things. We have classes on messaging and on social proof and on developing offerings and on growing your audience. Like, the work of this is very different than the, like, listening to my thirty minutes talking about it. But hopefully, this episode helped you orient in where you might begin looking if your business isn't working, what sort of process you might reflect on or go through.
00:00
You can listen back and sort of look at some of the areas I mentioned. You can head to the show notes where you can find a transcript of this episode and sort of read through and think about, okay, I need to do this, this, and that. Or if you want camaraderie and support, you can come join us in the interweb. Doors are not open as I'm releasing this, but they will open again in October 2026. So put yourself on the wait list, and you can join us very soon.
00:00
And until then, I'm gonna work on triaging my business. There are some things that are not working right now that I would like to be working better, and so I'm gonna get to work. I'll be back next week with the first of those conversations I promised you, hearing from people who have triaged why their business isn't working and made different types of decisions to make it work or start a different business or get a job or do something else. We'll be talking about all of that in this month's episodes. Thanks so much for tuning in.
00:00
Again, I'm so glad you're here. And until next time, you can find me off the grid. Okay. That was an abridged version of Social Media by Surfer Boy and Rectangle. To hear the entire song, find Surfer Boy on Spotify or head to the link in the show notes. Thanks so much to them for sharing the song with us, as well as to Melissa Caitlin Carter, sings our theme song that you hear at the start of every show. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. And if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you will download the free leading social media toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit. Until next time, I will see you off the grid.