31. 🌱 New beginnings: An Origin Story

With springs arrival and the start of Q2, it feels like "New Beginnings", and to celebrate we are sharing a story all about new beginnings.

These new beginnings come from our founder and CEO, Jill McAbe, who as of April 1st, quit what she’d been doing for the past five years, actually we (her whole team) quit with her, and closed up our training and coaching business for entrepreneurs, to embark on something new.

So we are sitting down with Jill to discuss how a pervasive marketing challenge her business faced, and many business owners face, became the catalyst for this change. A change that she realized could not be solved with another time consuming course or coaching program.

Like all entrepreneurial endevours Jill recognized a problem and sought a solution. This conversation explores that journey and the innovative outcome her and her team created.

With each hire I'd spend hours, sometimes days onboarding them to who we are, what we do and for whom. Then of course there was all the money we invested.

The most frustrating part was when they'd ask me, "Okay what do you want?". I went to them expecting an expert who would direct me and know what was the best strategy for our business. I didn't have the answers for them, so the R.O.I. on these hires never really materialized.

One night, at a dinner party with entrepreneur friends, I explained my dilemma and they recommended I work with a more serious kind of agency. I thought it was a great idea but when I got the quotes they started at $75,000 and went up considerably from there.

I wanted to work with them so badly but financially just couldn't. I felt as though my only options were either an Ogilvy-level Agency or Fiverr, with little in between.

Moving to Group Sessions

The next solution I attempted to master our marketing and sales was by investing in group coaching.

Although I expanded my marketing knowledge, what I received was group sourced information that wasn't specific enough for my marketing and sales needs.

As an entrepreneur, with only so many hours in the day to run my business, some of these programs and courses were really onerous with their time committments and deadlines, not to mention time zone differences that often had me working or attending sessions late into the evening.

But for me the biggest dilemma was the group sharing component. Often to get feedback we'd discuss our business, our strategy, our messaging out loud which meant sharing our Intellectual Property (IP) to the entire group.

Our businesses thrive when we have unique strategies and buyers journeys that are kept private. That way no one else can reverse engineer what makes you special, your particular way you offer what you do and your plans and strategies. Sharing our IP with the group didn't feel good.

In the end we spent more on courses, programs, and hires than if we'd gone with the high priced Agency and we still didn’t have a marketing system that we could trust to generate sales predictably.

I came very close to giving up altogether, but something compelled me to keep going.