In this episode, Michelle gets real about the guilt so many business owners feel when the world is heavy and life feels bigger than revenue goals, marketing plans, or growth targets.
Is building your business right now brave, tone-deaf, or actually one of the smartest things you can do in uncertain times?
In this episode, Michelle gets real about the guilt so many business owners feel when the world is heavy and life feels bigger than revenue goals, marketing plans, or growth targets. She makes the case that building a business is not a distraction from reality, but one way to create more safety, stability, and agency for yourself and the people around you. Michelle also breaks down the difference between being skilled at your work and being skilled at making money, and why that second skill matters more than most of us realize.
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Hi, I'm Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist. And in the 15 plus years I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence.
Because the reality is, the steps you take in your business, and the order in which you take them, is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So in this show, my goal is to fix that, by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions, rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
A Different Kind of Conversation
And before we get into today's episode, I'm just going to warn you, this one is a little bit of a different sequence over strategy methodology. And we're talking about some really high views of why I do what I do, and things that I want to invite you to believe, and to think about yourselves, as we kind of navigate the craziness of the world right now. Because I want you to think about something.
And that thing that I want you to think about and to answer to yourself is, have you felt a little weird about focusing on your business lately? Because the world is doing a lot right now. And that is being really simplistic about it.
Things are incredibly heavy. There's a lot of just really difficult things that people are navigating right now, and that we're watching on the news, and that we're seeing. And there might be a voice in your head wondering, is it okay to be sitting around thinking about my revenue, and my clients, and my growth?
And even in particular, is it okay to be marketing myself right now, when all of this stuff is happening around us? And if that's you, this episode is for you. I'm going to share some of my very personal thoughts on how I navigate it, because those thoughts come up for me as well.
Is It Okay to Focus on Your Business?
And also some, frankly, sequence over strategy thoughts about how I land where I land, in terms of how I navigate my business, how I think about the ethics around my business, when everything around me feels really difficult, and really dark, and just really hard, like it does right now. Because I'm going to make the argument that business is not a distraction from what's happening in the world, and it's also nothing that you should be ashamed of in any way. And it's actually one of the safest things that you can be thinking about right now, and let me explain that.
What I mean by that is that some of the skills that you're building, some of the things that you're doing as a business owner, if you are a person who has the privilege of being safe right now, and by safe I just mean you're in a place where you're physically able to think about your business, but you're wondering if that's the right thing to do or not, I think some of those decisions and some of that being able to focus on your business actually continues to make you more safe. Because in many ways, the skill of making money, the ability to make you money, however this shakes out, some of the skills that we build in the course of making money, those actually ultimately make you a lot safer based on where you might land and things that might happen because of how intense the world is right now. So here we go.
Let's talk about some of the guilt that we might be feeling, right? A lot of business owners, especially people who care about the world, those of us who have small businesses, we're paying attention to what's happening and we're not like this corporate conglomerate that just keeps going, right? Every day we have to wake up and decide what are we going to do today?
Am I going to be loud about my business? Am I going to promote my thing? Am I going to do this thing while all these other things are happening and maybe all these other people that I care about or just that I care about humanity in general are in pain and are suffering and who am I to sit down at a computer and go market my business when that's happening?
The False Choice Behind the Guilt
How can I be focused on my revenue right now? Is it shallow to be thinking about pricing or should I be promoting myself? And here's what I want to say about that.
That guilt, it's kind of based on a false choice. So this is where I was saying our sequence over strategy is going to be a little different today, right? Because it assumes that if you're focusing on your business, you're ignoring everything else.
But that's not true, right? Your business in many ways is how you operate within the world and it's how you build sustainability and safety for you and your family. And so it's okay to be thinking about your business when things are chaotic around because it's part of how you are staying safe.
And there's kind of a deeper truth underneath all this, right? Because when you work for a company, this is more I'm talking about like economic upheavals that may be happening, your stability is kind of at the bequest of their decisions, right? Their budget cycles, their leadership changes, their appetite for risk.
You can be a really good employee and you can still get laid off because something else happened and you're not in control of that moment. And then you just have to figure out what to do next. This is part of why I became an entrepreneur, honestly.
I grew up during a lot of economic upheaval in the 2000s, the Great Recession, all that. And I watched my dad go through some of this where he had a lot of loyalty to companies. He was really high up in companies and then poof, in a day it was gone.
Why Building Your Own Stability Matters
And I looked at that and my dad and my grandfathers and my grandmothers, they still had what I would consider an old view of jobs and they would look at me as I was figuring out my way in the world and I was towing in entrepreneurship and they were like, when are you going to settle in and get that job that's there for 25 years? And I thought, you can't count on that anymore. That's not a thing anymore.
And why would I, after watching what we went through as a family, why would I ever put my trust in an organization again? I would rather put my trust in myself, right? And I would rather figure out how to navigate this.
And so that's part of my personal story is when you're looking around and part of why I advocate for continuing to focus on your business when that may feel like a bad choice because if you are going to take control of your own destiny, this is part of it, right? You're moving your stability to your own frequency, to your own place and you get to be the one to make decisions and so that's building agency for yourself and I think that that is really important. And part of why I believe that that is important is for a couple of reasons.
Number one, when you have your own business and it's stable and in a way that a lot of us are building this, it becomes really portable. And this is another thing that I think is important, again, in like all the upheavals that are happening when you can pick up your business and take it with you, that's important because maybe things change. I know they changed for me too like that's part of, again, like another layer of why my business is set up the way that it is because when I started this business, I was living in Denver.
The Two Skills Every Business Builds
That was far from my family and I was single so I knew that I probably wasn't going to be in Denver for my life. At some point, I was likely to move closer to family and so I made a really conscious decision. I'm not going to build a local business.
I'm going to build something that is going to allow me to go where I need to go. Back then, things were a little bit more stable in the world so it felt like oh, I'm just going to build something that allows me to take it with me when I decide to go closer to family. But now, it would allow me to not be tied anywhere geographically.
If I want to go somewhere else because of any kind of instability or because of politics or because of whatever, I can just go somewhere else and there's a lot of power to that and there's a lot of clarity to that. This comes back to the kind of big point that I want to get to and that I'm going to say out loud because I know a lot of women listen to this podcast and here's the deal. When we have businesses, our businesses do two things.
Starting your business, right? You learn two skills when you're doing it and I don't think we always talk about this as explicitly as we should. When you're building a business, you get better at the thing you're already an expert at, right?
However you deliver. I happen to be a business strategist. Maybe you're a social media person.
Maybe you're an HR consultant, a change leadership consultant and executive coach. It doesn't matter what you are. An agency owner.
You get great at that thing. You get great at delivering results for your clients. And that is a skill that could be really similar to something that you would just have in a normal job.
Why Making Money Is a Core Skill
But you also build a second skill and the second skill that you build is a skill of making money and that is a completely separate skill, right? And that completely separate skill allows you to sell the services that you're an expert at. So we have these two parallel lines happening when we're building businesses.
We're learning, again, not only how to deliver results for clients, but we're learning how to make money. And when I start to zoom out and I think again like I know a lot of women listen to this podcast, but even if you're a male, that matters because in a world of instability, in a world where you don't know what the economy is doing, you don't know when markets are going to change, you don't know when someone's going to decide your skills are no longer valuable. You know, what is AI going to do and you're going to have to figure out how to do something completely different.
Well, when you have your own business and when you navigate through it, you're learning that skill of making money. And that is also a portable skill that can go into different business models. And so when I look at what I do of building business strategies and helping people understand their business models and how to market in different ways, I always come back when I think, oh, should I be doing this?
Should I be being loud right now? You know, should I be talking about my business? Things are really weird.
There's a lot of horrific things happening. I come back to time out, Michelle. One of my skills is teaching you how to make money.
And I firmly believe that we are all safer, even if just by one little degree, you know, like whatever situation we find ourselves in, we're all going to be at least one degree, usually many degrees safer if we know how to make money. Because you can apply that to whatever situation you may be in. Again, like if AI makes your industry kaput in two years, guess what?
Creating a Chain Reaction of Safety
You still know how to make money. And you can look around and you can say, what has AI not made obsolete? And how can I go insert myself into that?
And so I firmly believe that making money is a skill in and of itself that is separate from the skill that you deploy when you're actually building your business. And that, by the way, really informs a lot of what I do. Like yes, I am by nature, like my natural skill set is in building business models, right?
I always say I can close my eyes and understand the puzzle pieces and see what's broken in your business model and how are we going to fix it. So I'm lucky in that I get to talk about this safety factor and that making money is a skill and that happens to pair well for me. But again, that also leads into the skills that I double down on that I talk about a lot because I think about them separately.
I think about, okay, like what do you need for your business model? And then I also think what are some of those foundational skills that we are probably applying to your business model, but also build you a portfolio of all the skills that you would need to learn how to make money. And this, by the way, is why I yammer on about relationship marketing and how to network intentionally because to me that's one of the biggest foundational skills.
Again, if we go to like a broad conversation we're going to have about sequence over strategy, when I think about what are making money skills, one of the first things I think about is being able to build and be strategic with a network. It's one of those foundational things. We can even look at the data from big waves of layoffs, big waves of recessions.
We have data that shows us that people who have strong networks end up better. They get jobs faster. They are the ones who get jobs that continue to move them up the ladder, if you will, after layoffs happen.
They don't get left behind. And so when I'm looking at your business model as is today, I know that having a network is one of the most foundational things that you can have that will move you forward. But I also know that if something were to fall apart, you're still going to understand those network building skills and you'll be able to take that to whatever business model is next.
Holding Multiple Truths at Once
I also know this when I'm talking about the levers of business model design. When I'm explaining to you the alignment that has to happen between a product mix and a customer and marketing mix and how to think about that in a sequence over strategy way and in a strategic way, I'm showing you let's not just learn the skills that you can slap onto this model you have now, but instead let's understand what is making that model run so that A, the most important thing, we can fix whatever is in front of us today. But now I've given you that knowledge.
I've given you more knowledge into the parallel pillar of how to make money. So not only have we looked at the current model, like the what you're great at and how we can do that better, but when I teach you how to build a network, when I teach you how to think about the components of your business model, in my mind I am also ticking off, I'm like okay, now we have skills in the making money column. So when I'm fixing a business model or I'm teaching you how to market, I am teaching you both for today, what do you need for your business right now, but also mentally I am checking off lists and I'm like what do you need to know so that we're in parallel building you the skill of how to make money if you have to go move this, if you have to go make this portable and figure out something else, or if you have to go do a new industry, go to a new geography, go do whatever, because that is what's required of uncertain times.
And so what all this comes back to is the same conversation about are you allowed to market your business right now? And when we talk about this and that the skill of making money is different from the skill of doing work and what does safety look like, right? What does safety look like?
Yes, you're allowed to market your business right now and I can promise you I'm going to continue to market my business because of everything I just told you. I believe that people who can make money and especially women who understand the skill of making money are going to be safer in whatever world that we're living in or that you are finding yourself living in. And so guess what?
I'm not going to stop talking about that when the world gets more uncertain because I look at that and I'm like, well, now you need to know and believe this even more than you need to believe it when times are good. And so I'm not going to feel guilty about marketing my business because I know I do it ethically, I know that I can really help people, I know that I get results, etc., etc., etc. So I'm not going to feel guilty about it because I know that you're going to be stronger for it, right?
And I can't solve just by myself. I wish I could but I can't snap my fingers and solve everything that's going wrong about the world today. But I can look individually and individually and individually at the people who come into contact with my business, whether that's through this podcast or other free resources I have or whether you become a client and I can say, how can I make them a little bit safer through all of this uncertainty?
And I know that part of that answer is by helping you make money and by helping you learn those skills. And then when I look at you potentially feeling guilty about marketing, I think, okay, well, if you market your business, again, in ethical ways to people who actually need it, etc., etc., now you're safer because now you're actually making money, right? I taught you how to do it but now you're actually doing it.
And then if the impact of what you do, right, makes somebody else a little bit safer, like now we have a little bit of a community chain going where we're all making ourselves a little bit safer by making sure that we all have that ability to make money and have that ability to navigate this world in the way that we need to. Because, again, it would be wonderful if we could all kind of collectively come together, snap our fingers, and problems were solved. Amazing.
But as individuals, we normally can't do that. Or we can't do it. I'll just say that as a blanket statement.
We can be activists. We can do all those things, but we can't snap our fingers and fix things. But what we can do is look around us and say, how can I make people safer?
And knowing that there is a chain reaction we can create of individually making everyone safer if we all continue to build our businesses, then that's something I feel really good about. And it's something I would invite you to feel good about. And this is the classic rising tide lifts all boats, right?
Even if your business has nothing to do with teaching someone how to build a bigger business. So you're listening to me and you're like, oh, Michelle, that makes sense for you because you're teaching people how to have better businesses. I don't do anything like that.
So that doesn't count. No, it does count. Because if you make money from what you learn from me and you feel OK moving forward because of things I say to you, then guess what?
You're now safer. What happens when you're safer? When you're safer, you're going to participate in the world a little bit more.
And inevitably that is going to cause somebody else's business to make a little bit more money, be a little bit safer, right? And so that's how I think about it. And that's the invitation I would give to you is to remember there's kind of two sides to this story.
And yeah, we can have our eyes on the chaos of the world and the cruelty of the world and what we may want to do about that while also keeping our eyes on the fact that at a very micro level, if all of us learn these skills, we're going to make ourselves safer. And in doing so, we will make other people safer, right? That's not like a selfish thing.
It starts a chain reaction of all of us watching out for each other. So this episode has been a little bit different, obviously, than what we normally talk about, but it feels important to say all of this out loud because, again, I want you continuing on. I want you in the fight with me.
I want you believing that your business matters and that it is okay to keep going right now and to think about multiple things at once is essentially what we're talking about. Like we're allowed to hold multiple truths at one time. And those multiple truths can be that the world is a big mess and that's distressing and distracting and puts a lot of stress on us.
And sometimes it's hard to keep going. And also, it's okay to keep going. It doesn't make us terrible people if we're marketing our services in the middle of this because that's how we make each other safe.
Thank you for always being here. Thank you for allowing me to help make you safer, for being open to these conversations and always showing up and being open to these episodes and learning what I have to share with you because, again, I believe in the heart of my gut that when you are learning these skills that I talk about, this is foundational stuff. This is not fly-by-night strategies, right?
It's foundational stuff. And not only will it make whatever you're doing right now better for you, it is going to make whatever you might be doing tomorrow or a year from now or five years from now, ten years from now, it's going to build that parallel skill set for you of, like, I know how to make money. And that's always going to pay off and it's always going to make you safer, which in turn makes your community safer.
So thank you for being here. If you know of someone who could use this episode or who would benefit from other episodes, I'd be so grateful if you shared the podcast. It just helps us reach a broader audience.
And also, if you haven't yet and you want to leave a review, I would love for you to do that, too. That also helps us reach a broader audience and make sure that everybody is learning these skills of how to make money. So with that, I will see you back here in a couple of weeks.
Be well.