Right Idea, Wrong Order

Today I hosted a workshop all about your Designing Your Offer.

One of the key components of Designing Your Offer is thinking about your Ideal Client’s friction points: What's getting in the way of your Ideal Client getting to their desired change (or dream outcome as some call it)?

One participant showed up frustrated. A year into her business, she had tried all sorts of offer tweaks and nothing seemed to be working. She asked:

"What do I do about something that is a key friction point but that my client doesn't know or care about?" 

This question really resonated with me and got me thinking about the my offer's journey this past year.

Designing your offer is one of the most challenging parts of building your business. You need to think about your ideal client, what change they're trying to achieve, what needs to happen to get there, and what's getting in their way. 

Then, based on all of that, you have to design an offer. Most of the time, you're doing your best educated guess and using trial and error to figure out what will click.

That workshop participant's question stayed with me because I've been exactly where she is: convinced something really matters that my clients don't see yet.

I believe that your business should fit into the life you want. That you need to understand what life you want (roughly, you're not psychic) before you really focus on your business. I've had clients come to me who have built the business they think they "should" build, not the business they want to build. 

You'll be more successful—and less resentful—if you build something aligned with your life, values, and dreams.

I call this process Personal Foundation: figuring out the life you want and how your business fits into it. When I started this business, it felt like the most critical first step—so naturally, I led with it.

The problem? I learned I can’t lead with it.

At the outset, to my Ideal Client this work often feels like a “nice to have,” not an obvious solution to their problem.

I was convinced this foundation work mattered so much that my free sessions would start there. After all, this process was critical to me finding my way after transitioning out of International Development.

In these sessions, we would focus on this first step—your 10-year plan, your values. Participants would thank me, tell me how much they appreciated the time, and then… no sales. In posts where I talked about it, engagement was barely there.

So I pivoted. I went back to my Ideal Client and asked: what's the bigger friction point right now? What feels acute? What would make them feel lighter if I helped them solve it in an hour?

The shift worked. Once I made that shift, not ignoring the foundation work (we'd get there), but leading with offer clarity and decision-making confidence—people started converting.

Here's how that looks in practice. A client, we'll call her Jasmin, came to me last year unsure if she wanted to continue her membership plan. She wasn't getting the revenue she had expected. I could have just said, "Okay, let's look at your marketing and sales plan and funnel." But what was clear was that she had started the membership plan because she was seeing other people in her field doing it, not because she really loved it. So we had to look at the life and business she wanted.

Did she want staff? For the amount she wanted to work and what she liked to do, she'd need to hire someone to do the marketing and run the membership back-end. Was this something she wanted?

Did she want to be more public? A low-cost membership plan often requires the owner to lean into their personal brand. You constantly need to be getting large numbers of people into your pipeline. If she didn't want to be on social media or spend energy on writing and podcasts, we needed to think about how she would fill her pipeline.

How was this fitting into her overall revenue goals? If she wanted to increase her revenue, was this the best way to do it aligned with her values and time?

With clarity on what the membership actually required, Jasmin decided to give it another year, but now without the rose-colored glasses. She hired someone to handle the day-to-day marketing so she could focus on what she actually enjoyed.

The Personal Foundation work didn’t make the decision for her. It helped her understand the tradeoffs so she could choose a membership business model that fit her life.

Jasmin was one of those early wins that told me I was on the right track. The Personal Foundation work isn't wrong, it's still important. The timing was wrong.

Rather than having a set structure and modules that always start with Personal Foundation, I now start where my clients want to start. For Jasmin, this meant yes, talking about marketing and sales. And that was our focus and framing. But I also stayed true to what I my experience has told me is important in order to build a sustainable business, and ultimately what I thought would help Jasmin achieve her goals.  

Now I lead with what people are actively searching for: clarity on their offer and confidence in their direction. Because that's where the pain is acute. That's what makes someone say "I need help with this now." And once we're working together? The Personal Foundation work is woven in—not as Module 1, but when it's actually relevant to the decision in front of them.

So to that frustrated workshop participant: You're not wrong about what your clients need. You might just be having the conversation in the wrong order. 

Meet them where they are—in their immediate pain. Earn the right to guide them toward the foundation work that makes everything sustainable.