I remember the first time I had a beach holiday as a business owner.
It was one of those moments where I thought I made it.
Until I got there and realized how much it sucked trying to work from my laptop on the front porch of our Air BnB.
Trying to control the light of the screen, trying to focus, managing gear…
It’s a fucking nightmare, not a dream.
The fact of the matter is that most of us got into coaching or being a creator because the other options stripped away the freedom and creativity we deeply craved.
Here’s where most run into problems.
They’re suffering from what author Michael Gerber calls an entrepreneurial seizure.
In his best-selling book, The EMyth, Gerber talks about 2 things that I think you’ll be able to relate to.1
The entrepreneurial seizure and the fatal assumption.
The entrepreneurial seizure was the moment you decided that you couldn’t do this work for someone else anymore and that you had to go into business for yourself.
But the fatal assumption is this…
“if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work. And the reason it’s fatal is because it just isn’t true.”
Creatives and coaches assume that all they need is this skill they have that encapsulates their craft.
And that will be enough to make them successful.
The fact of the matter is that being a great practitioner, creative, or coach is not enough to have a successful business.
It doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do. You still need to learn how to run and operate a business.
It’s kind of sad.
Too many gifted and talented people struggle for years before they realize this.
For some, that’s too late.
By that point, they’ve already given up on their dream to change the lives of many.
The years of struggles and failed attempts to establish and scale a successful business carried too much weight.
If you’re currently at this fork in the road, I want you to hear me when I say…
It’s never too late.
Especially if you’ve been at it for a year or more, you’re most likely three feet from gold. The problem is that too many coaches and creators give up right before something is about to shift.
For that shift to happen there’s one thing that needs to take place.
You must embrace the business side of being an expert in your craft.
And realize that entrepreneurial freedom is a big fat myth.
In fact, the need for freedom is what’s holding you back from actually achieving that freedom.
I know that sounds like a contradiction.
While it may sound that way, it’s more of a paradox than a contradiction.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In this article I’m going to unpack why the need for freedom is holding you back and the shift that needs to happen to successfully grow your business as a coach or creator. By the end of this, my hope is for you to see that the systems and structures required are more within reach than you may think.
Let’s kick this off by looking at what birthed your desire to do what you do in the first place.
Your need for freedom is a reaction
Freedom isn’t a bad goal. It’s quite a good one actually.
No one wants to feel trapped in something they don’t enjoy.
Or worse, something they hate.
If you’ve worked for a demanding boss at any point in your life, you can probably relate with these things:
- The stress of meeting unrealistic expectations
- Worrying that you’re going to fuck something up and pay the consequences
- The pressure to perform up to someone else’s standards
These do something very interesting.
They pigeonhole you into a place where you no longer feel like yourself.
And when you wake up in the morning you start to resent having to put on the mask of who you think you need to be to meet others expectations.
This causes a knee-jerk reaction where you’ll do anything to get away from what you don’t want.
I dive deep into this here in the context of maximizing your day and how freedom from things unwanted oftentimes doesn’t mean we’re moving in the direction of what we want.
But here are some of the reasons in this context why the need for freedom is crushing your dreams of having a successful business.
- You avoid systems, structures, and routines
- You’re seeking novelty and variety in your business when you should be looking for predictable and reliable revenue
- When one offer isn’t working you create another one before you give yourself the chance to see why it’s not working (or you’re just not sure how to assess that)
- You think that consistency means doing the same thing every day at the same time (but consistency looks different for everyone)
There has to be a shift at some point from moving away from the thing you don’t want to move toward the thing you do want.
From avoiding to pursuing.
This is where you no longer seek freedom as a byproduct of wanting to escape one reality.
You engineer freedom so that you can create your ideal vision for your life and business.
There’s something very important to understand about freedom.
Freedom requires structure.
And if you’re suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure, you’re likely allergic to structure (in a proverbial sense of course)
The more structure you lean into the more freedom you’ll have.
This is the paradox of freedom.
The cold hard truth about entrepreneurship is that it’s not easy. In fact it’s infinitely harder than holding a job.
You will be stressed
You will have sleepless nights
You will have a ton of failures
Your success or failure comes down to you.
And how you manage your state of mind, productivity, and focus.
Freedom is earned
The sooner you accept the fact that freedom is something you have to earn, the sooner you’ll move things forward.
You have to reconcile the dissonance between wanting freedom and not having it, yet.
Read that again.
So what’s required to engineer freedom?
It’s really quite simple.
To give you a little context…
I coach coaches. I know, I cringe too.
My path to coaching coaches started in 2012. Even though I didn’t fully own it until 2021 (ish).
I think in some cases our niche (or whatever the fuck you want to call it) chooses us. And in others we choose it.
Originally I was a transformational coach. After I got certified, I practiced for a couple of years before realizing I had absolutely no clue how to sell my services.
Part of that was because I just didn’t understand marketing and the other part was because I was selling things that were named…
- Conscious Language
- Outcome Facilitation
- Sacred Body Language Translations
- Bio Optic Holography
I know, right?
What ended up happening wasn’t what I expected.
Even though my original intent was to use the knowledge I acquired through workshops, courses, and content to grow my own business I ended up supporting my mentor in growing the brand and doing most of my work with clients through that company.
Over 7 years I played essentially every role in this company.
- Coach
- Audio engineer
- Tour manager
- Executive Director
- COO
- And anything else you can think of…
Not to mention being solely responsible for filming the live events, building out the members area, building out all the funnels, and everything else in between.
And in doing that I learned the ins and outs of everything that needed to happen to run a successful 7 figure coaching business.
I essentially got paid to learn how to market.
Before supporting coaches in my own business here for the last 2-3 years I was also a coach in one of Preston Smiles’s companies where I coached groups of coaches, took on over 500 sales calls, and was also Head of Growth.
This is far from a flex as much as it is to say…
I’ve been around for a minute. And I’ve seen the inner workings of businesses that generate millions of dollars every year and smaller coaches who do anywhere from 50k-300k per year.
Now, if you fall into the latter category, these are the systems and structure you need to iron out to successfully grow your business using organic social media.
Systems and structures to engineer freedom
The reality of this industry is that you’re not going to have exactly the same revue each month.
Consistency looks different for everyone.
At the end of the day, you will need to be more diligent in managing your business finances.
Just because you have a 30/40k month doesn’t mean every month is going to be that way.
But you can predict patterns and over time normalize your cash flow so the highs and the lows come closer together.
It may start with a 4k month and a 40k month. And by implementing these systems and structures, that may end up looking more along the lines of 15-30k months more consistently with less work.
Here are those 4 systems:
1. Know your enrollment window
The reality is you’re going to be working with people 1:1 until you’re not. In that case, you’re going to have times when you’re hyper-focused on delivering a service and other times when you’re super-focused on enrollment.
Your job is to be able to reliably predict and pull off systematically doing this.
If you don’t, then you will be perpetually stressed out, wondering where your next client is coming from.
Knowing your enrollment window and having more of a focus on enrollments during that time will help you campaign to fill up the books.
This doesn’t mean that you have periods where you’re just delivering coaching and periods where you’re just enrolling.
It means that when your books are full and you can’t take on any more 1:1 clients, your attention shifts to delivering and improving on that service with less of a focus on enrollments. This DOES NOT mean you stop those efforts altogether.
This is why most coaches experience the rollercoaster of revenue where one month is in that 30-40k range and the next is a fraction of that.
When you know your enrollment window and your systems are set up so that you focus more on income-generating activities during that window you can stabilize your revenue AND consistently improve the quality and experience of the service you provide.
2. Content creation on a rhythm
This doesn’t happen overnight.
I’ll unpack this in-depth in another article but one of the biggest blockers for coaches and creators I have seen over the years is a lack of a content creation system.
If you’re currently just creating content when it’s time to post then you’re keeping your body in a state of (unnecessary) perpetual stress.
The last thing you want to do is sit down to create content and have to start from scratch and just cook up an idea on demand.
Even just introducing one practice into your content creation process will significantly speed up the process and have you feel more confident in the delivery.
Idea generation.
This is akin to money in the bank. Ideas are potential currency and it’s very hard to cash in on ideas if you’re just sitting down when it’s time to make a post and write or shoot a video.
A system that allows you to reliably create content on a rhythm looks something like this:
- A central location to log and expand on your ideas
- One or two dedicated video sets (if you’re doing talking head videos) where you can just turn on the camera and go
- Blocked time to generate ideas and consume content with the intent to create
- Knowing your primary platform and your secondary platform and staying in your lane
- Having a list of CTAs (call to action) and hooks you can use as a plug and play to speed up creation and efficiency
The truth is that everyone’s system get’s to be designed around how they work best and what platforms they’re on.
Not having a system is the problem.
A system is a system. It’s anything done in a specific way that you can rely on. That doesn’t mean that it’s automated. It just means that it’s predictable and reliable.
Your ideas and content are what generate goodwill and conversations.
3. Generating and nurturing conversations
Conversations take priority over content creation.
If you’re not careful this one can fuck with you a bit.
Here’s an example…
If you’re currently:
Posting on Instagram
Publishing on YouTube
Writing a Newsletter
Those all take a good bit of time.
Not to mention delivering on your service.
Something has to give.
This is where it’s key to know your enrollment window. During that time, conversations and calls are going to be your #1 priority.
As far as your content goes, that may mean you repost old posts that performed well for a week or two.
Or it just may mean that you prioritize sending messages and engaging for 15-30 minutes each day.
The idea here with conversations is knowing how to start them, asking the right questions, and knowing when the time is right to extend the invitation to get on a call with you to explore if this person is a fit to work with you.
There should be a reliable system for doing this on your primary social media platform AND in person.
Initiating conversations is a massive point of friction for a lot of coaches. It tends to fall in the same category as sales. Overcoming your resistance to having these conversations in my experience has the largest upside potential of any skill you could acquire.
4. Delivery and evolution of your service
This is probably the most nuanced of the bunch.
Having iron-clad confidence in your offer is one of the most underrated tools.
This will give you genuine confidence on your discovery calls, during launches, and even in conversations where you talk with random people you meet about what you do.
And man do people fuck this one up. If you’re currently delivering on a handful of products and programs, chances are you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Your best option is to grow 1 offer to 10, 20, and 30k per month before you go creating anything else.
If your activities aren’t focused on growing this one offer and making it best in class, then there’s a problem.
Especially if it’s still just you in your business this is the most important … to keep it lean and simple.
Spreading yourself too thin and having too many offers typically results in outdated information simply because you just don’t have the bandwidth to iterate and improve on everything so most iterate and improve nothing.
This includes your onboarding process, any prework you have, how you delivery your service and any supplemental material you provide, and performance metrics, check-ins, and reviews.
These 4 areas are the basics.
Mastering the basics gives you an incredibly solid foundation to stand on.
In my experience, this is what’s required as a coach or creator to attain freedom.
At first, you will work more than you play.
Your business starts off manual.
You have to be the initiator of conversations.
Of course, some people will reach out but you must go first.
Over time the scales tip.
You get better at doing what you do and marketing, not by magic, but by doing it over and over again and working your systems.
As you build your reputation through helping people get results you’ll have more leads coming in.
Stay focused on growing the offer that’s working and eliminating the one or ones that aren’t.
As you build out more reliable systems (with your ideal lifestyle in mind) you will be able to build your business around your lifestyle and not the other way around.
Freedom and flexibility has to be designed.
And there’s a lot of work and skills acquired along the way that must be mastered.
This is not a petition for hustle, but if you’re avoiding certain things because it feels restricting, you’re most likely also only operating at a fraction of your capability when it comes to productivity.
And the reality is if you want something different than you currently have…
- If you want to hit those 10 – 20k months (and beyond)
- If you want to have a business that supports hundreds or thousands of people a year (or even just 30-40)
- If you want the confidence and esteem that comes with being one of the best in what you do
Then you can’t skip steps.
Structure and systems are required for freedom.
And the paradox of freedom (that it takes not being free to get free) must be accepted.
This can 100% be done on your own.
But coaching can significantly speed up the process.
A former client of mine had this struggle.
She was relying on her feminine and “the woo” as she called it to manifest things into her business.
Until she met me.
Within a few months, she secured 60k in contracts that would go over the next 3 months.
How did she do it?
Structure
Systems
Showing up consistently
You can see what Ellie had to say about working together here.
Before you have…
- A reliable and predictable system that leaves you feeling more relaxed than stressed
- Night’s where you’re so fucking grateful you chose this path
- More successes than failures
- Something that looks more like freedom than what you currently have
You must embrace structure and systems.
Now, while it takes and extreme amount of work to get these things all set up, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be that way forever. In fact, the more systems you put in place the more freedom you’ll have.
If this one hits home and you want to explore what it would look like to work together to bring more systems and structure to your business so you can engineer a life of freedom then let’s chat.
You can grab a time to do that here.
Until next time,
Jeff Agostinelli
P.S. Here are a few additional ways I can help
#1 – Master the art of telling your story – Personal Story Prompts and Posts
#2 – Follow me on Instagram and TikTok for more marketing tips, personal growth, and how to get more clients from social.
1. Gerber, Michael E. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It. 2nd ed., Harper Business, 2004. pp. 25-27, 31.
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