A few weeks ago I wrote asking you to tell me what was going on out there - I wanted to know what was working, what wasn’t, what you were celebrating and what was keeping you up at night.

I wish I could say I was surprised by what I heard but I really wasn’t.

Two big trends stood out:

1. Conversion. Conversion is hard right now, especially for new leads. Previous leads and customers are continuing to show up, but it’s harder than ever to find - and close - new business.
2. A lot of you were wondering and asking whether this online business and/or coaching market (insert either - I heard both) were dying, done and/or gone forever.

I have thoughts, and with a wink and a nudge the universe has been using my offline life to reinforce those thoughts and remind me that I’m no exception.

Stick with me here because if you have a solo or close to it business that either sells b2b or operates online in any capacity, you need to be aware of what’s going on out there - and what it means for what you should be doing about it.

First, the painful real life universe nudges I’ve been receiving.

Two and a half weeks ago a project was started at my 100 year old house to replace the very, very old and very falling apart driveway and front entry walk.

It was supposed to last 3-4 days.

We are now on day 17 and I’m hoping against hope it wraps by early next week.

First they pulled the stairs out from my porch and discovered it had all been built on sand (I mean fair enough, I live on the beach) with no foundation underneath.

That would explain the weird pooling of ice every winter.

Then they discovered the other set of stairs - the ones we weren’t going to touch - were were in fact sinking in said sand and had to come out too.

Then the foundation of the house shifted as they moved more concrete and the very very old front door wouldn’t open. (this ended up being a very minor deal but you can trust I was in a panic about it. The foundation shifted? Excuse me?)

Then the driveway offered up a few surprises.

Then the public sidewalks that we weren’t going to touch began to shatter by proximity because they were (apparently) left over from the World War 2 era and thus had been made with makeshift provisions among all the shortages, so couldn’t withstand all the work being done around them.

Issue after issue, day after day, and every single one cropping up because over and over again nothing had been built on the (literal) correct foundation.

We’re working through it and it’s all good, and I don’t begrudge the choices people made 100 years ago or during war shortages. Life happens.

But the lesson is the same: shortcuts were made, people got away with what they could, and the price has been paid.

I say this was the universe winking at me in real life because as all of this has been happening I’ve been very quiet in my own business, taking a chunk of that same time off from client work to plot and plan some changes to how i operate.

(don’t worry they’re exciting, and you’ll start to hear about them - and how to participate in them - next week).

And let me tell you during that planning I have been tempted to take some short cuts.

But as soon as I jotted something down that maybe took a little too much liberty with my own teachings on the alignment of product mix to the relationship to traffic marketing continuum, or to how quickly I might be able to move some new relationships, or some work I might not want to do to expand my audience ….

Every time I started to head down that path the jackhammer or whatever obnoxiously loud thing was being used that day fired up again, jolting me back to reality to remember that doing it right - doing the hard work of building the foundations each and every time - mattered.

And that my friends is my answer to the question of whether the coaching or the online business or the solo consultant b2b or insert solopreneur industry is done - No. Absolutely positively it is not done for.

It's also the answer about how hard conversions can feel right now.

What is true is that it is a lot louder out there. There's A LOT and I mean A LOT more noise in this industry.

And the noisier -the more crowded - an industry gets, the less you can get away with.

The shortcuts you could take (whether or not you even realized you were taking them) even a year ago? Gone.

This isn’t wing it and pour a concrete entryway on a pile of sand and hope for the best time, folks - right now you have to get things right.

In order to convert those new leads to customers - heck, in order to find those new leads...

In order to not be a business that leaves because you’re not convinced the industry is sticking around...

In order to be that person and to be that business you have to recognize that you can’t get away with just anything any longer...

You have to understand what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and - most importantly - that everything you’re doing is aligned and working together on a strong foundation and NOT working against you.

(because you’d be amazed once you poke under the hood how much of your model may have been secretly working against you the last several years. It just didn’t matter because under the old market conditions you could get away with it. No more).

This is not a doom and gloom message though - this is a message of hope.

My new driveway is so smooth and stunning I want to cry every time I walk across it (pretty sure this happens to everyone when the old one was a combination of loose bricks, cement potholes, ant holes and patches of grass).

And the new entry stairs? They’re not quite done but you can see them coming together and my mailperson ran across the street to give me a high five today. She’s as excited as I am to not be navigating the random pools of ice and chaos those suckers offered up each winter.

Foundations matter now, folks. They help you get things right and get things that work.

And I’ll going to keep talking about those foundations, and you know I'll be talking about the sequences you need to follow to implement them, and I'm going to be doing it even louder than I have been to date.

Because it matters to me that you win.

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