Tad Hargrave, a leader I respect a lot, recently introduced a guarantee for his program Marketing for Hippies Fundamentals Tier.
His guarantee is that if you haven't earned back the cost of the course in a year, he'll give you double your money back. However, the guarantee requires you have done your part in the membership: attend at least 50% of his weekly calls, participate in a structured co-working call each month, complete certain course materials, and publish four core assets.
I thought that was an amazing idea.
And it got me thinking: What would my guarantee for business growth be?
If I had to identify the things I’d want someone to do before I was willing to say "Yes, do these for six months and I’d guarantee you’ll see results," what would they be?
I came up with three:
Measure. Connect. Build.
Not “post three times a week.”
Not “launch a funnel.”
Not “find your perfect offer.”
Three practices that help us see what’s happening in your business, make sure enough people know about your work, and systematically improve the business itself.
One: Measure
The practice: Complete your Roots to Fruits metrics every month, for six months.
Most businesses track the results: revenue, new clients, email subscribers, inquiries. Yes, we track those too.
But Roots to Fruits also tracks what’s underneath them: the activities producing those results.
Because we can’t know what to address if we don’t have the right diagnosis.
Two clients came to me with the exact same problem: “I’m doing guest speaking and I’m not getting enough clients from it.”
For the first client, the problem wasn’t the speaking. When we looked at the rest of her metrics and her client base, we realized the audiences she was reaching were relatively new to her ideas—and she had no process for staying in touch with them afterward. For her, that meant an email list.
We also discovered that her sales calls were functioning more like free coaching sessions than a structured sales process.
Over six months, she installed an email newsletter, wrote an educational email course as her welcome sequence, and restructured her sales conversations around her diagnostic framework.
She’s now getting two to three new clients a month from her speaking.
The second client was a different story. She did have a newsletter and ways to stay in touch, which we could see from her metrics. The issue was that she was speaking in the wrong rooms.
So instead of telling her to speak more, we paused much of the speaking. We tightened her client profile and identified target referral partners who had relationships with those clients.
This week, she got her first client referral from one of those new partners.
Same symptom. Two completely different diagnoses.
What this means for you: The Roots to Fruits metrics let us see what is happening under the surface, so we can put the right practices in place for your business. They also help us see whether your level of activity is meeting the threshold needed to build the business.
Two: Connect
The practice: Sacred Sales Hour, 75% of the time. Three out of four weeks a month, reach out to five people a week. And one of those weeks each month, either ask to borrow someone else's audience or make invitations that give a clear next step towards working with you.
I have never failed to see this practice teach us something when it’s done intentionally.
Sometimes you start reaching out and realize your network simply isn’t large enough. Great. Now we know we need to expand it.
Sometimes you realize you’ve been meeting potential referral partners without ever developing those relationships. Or that you haven’t followed up with former prospects, previous clients, or people who already expressed interest.
And sometimes you realize you’ve been building relationships, but never actually inviting anyone to take a next step.
(Crucially, this is NOT cold outreach to people you don’t know with a generic DM or email series sent by you, a VA, or AI. This is real relationship building.)
We can’t reach people through social media the way we used to. People who already know us don’t necessarily see the things we publish. A relational outreach practice is how we make sure our work gets seen and how we build the relationships that carry that work forward.
Leaving the distribution of your work to algorithmic platforms is a dead-end street. Posting isn’t enough; you have to reach out to your audience directly if you want to survive.- Seth Werkheiser, from 2024!
Three emails landed in my inbox this past week:
- One client, six months into the Sacred Sales Hour practice, wrote: “As if on cue, starting in June, I have had many incoming project requests.”
- Another has been at it for a few months and already has a stack of inquiries lined up for fall.
- And another, about three months into a regular Sacred Sales Hour practice, wrote: “I started doing my outreaches every week and suddenly out of nowhere I have two potential clients. When it rains, it pours.”
This doesn’t happen overnight. It usually takes three to six months of the practice to generate meaningful change.
What this means for you: This is not a hundred-touch challenge that burns you and your network out. It’s five meaningful outreaches a week. At that pace, three weeks out of four, you’ll make your way through your network twice a year—or discover that you need a larger or different network.
Three: Build
The practice: One focused Build project a month.
There are really two pieces to this.
First, protecting the time. Through the Building Blocks philosophy, we carve out an hour of outreach every week and enough focused time to build something that improves the business, based on what you’ve learned from your metrics and your Sacred Sales Hour.
Second, choosing the one thing your business needs next and finishing it. Not simultaneously trying to drive five projects: fix my marketing, rewrite my website, launch a podcast, create a new offer, set up a CRM. And then getting to “done”—or at least, done enough to move on.
A career coach saw in her metrics that her average package price was too low to be sustainable. Over the following months, one project at a time, she sharpened her messaging to reflect her best-fit clients, stripped her site down to one core package with a higher price, added key deliverables to each phase of her delivery process, addressed a leak in her sales call structure, and created a new, tightened offer doc.
The result? “12 days into the month, I’ve had my best month ever. The last three months have been my best months ever.”
Another client evaluated her client list, picked her most lucrative client profiles, and rebuilt her positioning and offer structure around them. That one assignment also reset her relationship map—which partners and communities to invest time in.
For her? Eight months in, she’s already had her best year ever.
Part of protecting time for build projects is stopping the things you don’t need to be doing.
One of our students was writing a weekly newsletter. But she didn’t need a few hundred readers. She needed one big client at a time. So she stopped the newsletter and used that time to update her method and socialize it (and through those relationships, landed a huge client).
What this means for you: This isn’t “add something new every month.” It’s choosing the next thing the business needs, getting clear on what done looks like, and moving it far enough forward that next month you can turn your attention to something else.
There is nothing super exciting about this.
You don’t need the perfect offer before you start, because talking to people and looking at your metrics will help you improve the offer.
You don’t need to post consistently on social media or have your own podcast.
You don’t even necessarily need to send a weekly newsletter.
You need to:
- Measure to see what needs attention.
- Connect to create opportunities and learn from the market.
- Build what those two reveal you need next.
Then repeat.
This both seems like not very much and like an absolute ton. One project at a time? Tracking my metrics? Doing outreach every week? Blech.
And I want to respect that.
But here’s my hypothesis: do these three things for six months—metrics every month, Sacred Sales Hour three weeks out of four, one completed Build project a month—and something will change. Every client I’ve watched succeed does these three things.
What changes depends on where you’re starting. If we’re putting infrastructure in place from scratch, it takes longer to see the fruits. If you come in with a steady practice already and we identify one or two missing mechanisms, things can move pretty quickly.
But change will happen.
Why this works especially well inside Define Your Foundations
Inside the Define Your Foundations cohort, I’m helping you look at the metrics and diagnose what’s going on.
I’m helping you choose the Build project that makes sense now, rather than the seven things you could theoretically work on. And then I’m helping you push it to completion.
I read the offer docs before they go out. I review your methodologies and your client profile documents. I look at the sales pages for your activation events. I’m helping you decide what to stop doing when the numbers tell us something isn’t pulling its weight.
Participants know I’m looking. They get my feedback. And I can make sure these practices are happening—for those who let me stick my nose into their business.
Define Your Foundations is six months of curriculum and tools, structured rhythms to keep these practices going, and the personal support I just described.
Waitlist members get first access on August 24. If you want to hear more before deciding, come to an open house on August 26 or September 1, where I’ll walk through how the six months actually works.
The cohort begins the week of September 14. Capped at 20, with a few spots already claimed by returning participants.
If this is the kind of structure and support you’ve been missing, the waitlist is open.