Two announcements before we head into today's newsletter.
1. I'm going on "tour"!
I have a variety of trips planned over the coming months, and I'm turning it into a mini book tour!
If you're in one of these cities (or willing to travel!), please fill out the form if you'd like to be sent details of where I'll be hosting an an event!
- Minneapolis in May, Boston in June, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles in July, Chicago and Columubs OH in August, and Indianapolis in November.
- Want me to come to your city - email me! You never know which places we'll go!
2. I'm part of the Advanced Freelancers Summit happening next week.
I'm teaching my Building Blocks time and task alignment approach, and you'll hear from some of my best business friends:
- Amelia Hruby, twice-guest on Aggressively Human on how to market without social media
- Charlotte Crowther: Turn Your Expertise into a Signature Framework That Sells
- Corey Wilks: How to Overcome Limiting Beliefs and Unlock Your Next Level of Income and Impact
During the Relational Sales Workshop this week (replay available for Members!), one attendee asked, "Does Jessica sleep?". Because my business model requires a lot of networking, content, launches, workshops, and collaborations.
(This is why "passive income" is a sham, but leveraged income is real. It just means a heck of a lot of marketing).
And yes, I am efficient in creating slides thanks to years of training at McKinsey and Nike.
But more than that, I'm always looking for the easy button.
Not the "buzzy promises that fail to deliver and cost me so much money and time" option, because those are neither easy nor actual solutions.
Looking for, "what's the minimum viable way to accomplish what I need to do with what I already have."
As soloists or small teams, we simply cannot afford the time, at the start, to get fancy.
To anticipate edge cases and build around them.
To take too much time at the start to build out the final infrastructure before we've started building at all.
To come up with new material instead of reusing or re-packaging what you already have. (In fact, my summit material for the Advanced Freelancers Summit, plus my opt-in, was simply a condensed version of my first Building Blocks course lesson. Reuse, not rebuild).
What does hard mode look like?
Before sending your first email newsletter, you set up a series of complicated tags for every step in your sales process, ending up with a jumbled mess that you never update (been there).
Or, you can't build a new offer until you have an official sales page, a cart, and checkout automations — which means you never sell it.
You create new trainings or pitch new topics for every guest appearance, with a lead magnet tailored to the same audience.
What does it look like to press the easy button?
Don't worry about tags yet. Build that later, once you've actually established the email habit and know how you'll use them anyway.
Just use a Google Doc, a Stripe checkout, and manual emails when people register.
Pitch the same topics you already have material for, so you create less stuff. I use the same email course and landing page as resource almost everywhere because I simply do not have time to customize signup forms and sequences for every audience.
This week, I had no choice but to go MVP — minimum viable product.
Before the Relational Sales Workshop went live, I needed to:
For the Relationship Rhythms 9-week program, I already had the material ready because I taught it last summer to rave reviews. I've since turned it into an on-demand course, but this summer I want to do it live again with you, including live monthly Q&As, and a bonus CRM week of live office hours.
The "best" option would have been to turn off the on-demand version, and re-set up the cart, the email sequences, and the events into a synchronous set of emails. But that would have taken so much time, and prevented anyone who wanted to start early to get access to the material.
The "easy" option that I did was to simply add event registration links to the on-demand email sequences, and live event details to the existing sales page.
Will we all be in sync every week? No, and that's ok.
Will someone who buys after the June 1 deadline see the events, even if they miss the deadline? Yes, and that's ok.
It was better to be done than perfect.
And what about the replay?
The "best" solution is to set it up on a course portal, where only registered emails could get the replay.
The solution I chose? Put it up on a password-protected Squarespace page (which was actually a duplicate of one I built last year for my Authority Loop class), and give everyone the password in a follow up broadcast email.
Could people share their password with a friend? Probably.
Does that edge case make me want to spend another set of many many hours I do not have on implementing a different solution? No, it did not.
Where in your business could it be easy?
Do you need to write super-long personal email updates, or shorter ones for more people?
Does the blog post have to be perfect, or can you put it up now and update it later?
Instead of a complicated launch sequence, can you just personally invite the people you want to a call?
Can you record and share videos on a Notion page instead of paying for a course platform? (That's where Relationship Rhythms lives, and it works well!)
Sometimes you need to get formal. But most of the time, where can it be easy?