In the past few emails, I’ve alluded to Define Your Foundations, a six-month, high-touch group program for building the foundations of your expertise-based business.
Define Your Foundations is six months of curriculum and tools, personal support through laser coaching and 2x1:1 calls, and structured rhythms to implement the core practices of your business.
But beyond "I want Jessica's eyes on my business", I haven’t spent much time telling you what the program actually does and who it’s for!
There’s a particular threshold that everyone hits at some point in their business journey.
You’re past the starting phase, and often a few years in.
You’re skilled at the craft of your work, but feel wobbly about actually running your business.
You’ve learned enough to know that building an expertise-based business involves quite a bit more than being good at the work you do. But you still feel like you don’t know what you don’t know.
You have clients, but not as many clients as you want or at the prices you want, and you don’t know whether the problem is your positioning, your offer, your network, your marketing, your sales process, or something else.
You guess you should spend more time “working on the business,” but you’re not entirely sure what you’re supposed to do during that time.
And when you look for support, you often find more marketing tactics, content strategies, or offer structures that don’t seem to fit your business.
Enter: the Define Your Foundations Cohort.
This is the seventh cohort of the program, with the curriculum and tools honed each time.
In the six-month program, we move through four phases designed especially for this transition point.
Phase 1: Create the Space and Set Down the “Shoulds”
There’s an inordinate amount of noise about what a “good” business looks like: recurring revenue, scaling yourself out of the business, group programs, hitting multi-six figures, building a team.
And over a few years, most business owners also accumulate an enormous number of things they’ve been told they are supposed to be doing: newsletters, podcasts, cold outreach, social platforms, networking groups, funnels, launches, offers, events.
All of this creates a heap of “shoulds” around your business.
We start by defining what you actually want from your business and creating the space to work on it by setting some of those “shoulds” down.
Is your goal a seven-figure company? Is it a $75K high-profit business that gives you a lot of flexibility? Does your business need to cover a particular share of your household expenses? Are you building it alongside a part-time or full-time job?
We use the Zone of Enoughness philosophy to look at your business in the context of your life and goals. We’ll identify the one or two areas that need your attention most, decide what projects are worth working on next, and set down commitments that aren’t in service of what your business really needs.
This gives us the space and focus to work on the foundations themselves.
Phase 2: Design the Business
Then, we work through the fundamental design principles underneath your expertise-based business.
Who do you serve? What is your point of view? How do you work? How do those decisions inform what you sell, how you’ll sell it, how you deliver it, and what you charge?
I call this “Business Model Tetris”: each piece changes the shape of the others, and how they fit together informs everything else you do.
This is also where your messaging gets specific and your client profile gets tightened to reflect your best-fit clients and services. After reviewing hundreds of websites, I can help you know what’s generic and what’s specific enough for your network to say, “I know when to call you.”
Phase 3: Build the Marketing and Sales Practice
Next, we build the practices that build your pipeline.
Now that we know who to reach out to and what to say, you’ll map your network and look at who needs to know you and your work. You’ll develop relational habits you can maintain, regardless of business model. And you’ll put marketing and sales processes in place that match your business model and market.
Selling 40 holistic nutrition engagements to individual consumers is different from selling advisory services to a handful of founders. Selling to online entrepreneurs is different from selling to executives inside larger organizations. A $3,500 offer requires a different sales process from a $20,000 organizational engagement.
This program won’t hand everyone the same sales script or marketing plan. But it will teach you the principles underneath relationship development, authority building, marketing, and sales, and help you apply them appropriately to your business.
Phase 4: Run the Business
The final piece is learning how to operate the business at a pace that works for you.
We look at how you structure your week, how you use your capacity, how you measure what’s happening (and make sense of the results), and how you decide what deserves your attention next.
The program also comes with the Membership, including the co-working rhythms that protect time to build your relationships, plan your week, and tend to the systems that matter in your business. Current members get the Membership fees waived while you're a part of the cohort.
The goal isn’t to leave you with a collection of completed worksheets. It’s to help you understand the business you’ve built well enough to continue running and developing it after the cohort ends.
Learn more at the open house on August 26th or September 1st.
Enrollment opens to the waitlist on August 24th. Cohort is limited to 20, and we start September 14.