Nine out of ten pieces were in place. My business still wasn’t working.
Turns out the advice I give every day applied to me too - I just couldn’t see it.
Close enough is not good enough. Systems either work or they don’t, nearly working, isn’t working. Most clients I work with are stuck at nearly working.
For a long time, I had almost everything right. I ticked the boxes I thought mattered going in: the experience; the skills; I knew the problem I solved; I knew how to solve it; I was good at the work when I got in the room.
But something wasn’t clicking, and I couldn’t see what.
I did what I see clients doing all the time - took the advice and decided I should apply it differently. My type of business couldn’t niche. I solve lots of problems, surely it’s better to show breadth. And if something isn’t working, change it - rather than sticking with it long enough to actually get the data.
Nine out of ten. Close enough. But just not good enough.
Then in the space of a few weeks, everything shifted. A client booked a call because of my headline. A prospect repeated my own content back to me. Someone who’d been following me for months finally said “I’m ready.”
The tenth piece wasn’t a strategy or a tactic. And I didn’t find it on my own. I’d heard the same advice before -more than once, I mean more than 100 times. But this time I was ready to connect the dots.
One realisation that let me see the other nine differently. Tiny shifts - not moving mountains stuff - but enough that suddenly everything lined up.
It’s obvious in hindsight. Come on, it always is.
I’m now having to think about capacity for the first time. That’s new, a little bit terrifying. But being past that and onto the next problem feels incredible.
The hardest part was never the client work. It was never going to be, I started doing this because I knew, I knew how to do it well. The hard bit was learning to do the thing I spend my career telling other people to do - trust the system, even when you can’t see it working yet.