Joe Daniels thinks a lot of solo business owners are trying to solve the wrong problem.
When business slows down, the instinct is usually to blame marketing.
But if you had a "feast" before the famine, your marketing clearly worked at some point. The bigger question is why it stopped.
In this episode of Can We Not?, Joe and Sam dig into the operational side of running a solo service business, including the parts founders often ignore because they'd rather focus on the work they're actually good at.
Joe shares how his experience as the first employee at a marketing agency showed him the feast-and-famine problem firsthand, why he eventually realized he'd built a business he enjoyed talking about more than actually running, and the quarterly review that led him to change direction.
They also get into:
Why founders need both a visionary hat and an operator hat- Joe's Direction, Demand, and Delivery framework
- Why feast and famine can be an operations problem rather than a marketing problem
- How Joe used the Odyssey Plan to rethink his own business
- Why "I don't have time" is often really "I didn't make time"
- Making uncomfortable business-development work small enough to actually do
- Designing an offer around the business and life you want
- Joe's Do, Delegate, Die approach to simplifying work
- Why telling prospects they're not a good fit sometimes makes them want to hire you even more
If you're good at your actual work but occasionally wonder when exactly you became responsible for running an entire company around it, this conversation is for you.
What is Can We Not? Business Is Hard Enough. ?
Can We Not? Business Is Hard Enough. A Podcasts for Working Founders (previously Strategies, Solutions, and Sanity).
Running a business is hard enough. The advice you've been given shouldn't make it harder.
Can We Not? is the podcast for founder-led businesses that are done overcomplicating the work. No eight-figure frameworks. No systems that require a full-time project manager to maintain. Just the real, behind-the-scenes decisions that shape how a business actually runs.
I'm Sam Prestidge, founder of Auxo Business Services, and I work with visionary doers, the people who want to stay in the work but want that effort to actually build something instead of just keeping up. We talk about delegation, operations, team support, and the unsexy stuff that makes the difference between a business that grows and one that just stays busy.
If you're running a small team, or no team at all, and you're tired of chasing strategies that sound smart but don't fit how you work, you're in the right place.
Let's uncomplicate this thing.