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We’ve hosted an (un-boring) live coaching session for 36 months straight and in 2023 we want to share our plans with coaching moving forward.
If your business is anything like ours and it’s starting to feel a bit overstuffed and overwhelming for your customers (with TOO much good content), it’s time to think about simplification! We did this two years ago when we created the Un-Boring Business Roadmap. And, we’re feeling called to simplify again in 2023 with our monthly coaching sessions.
Next year, our goal will be to focus on 12 core topics for online business. Things like Marketing, Email List Building, Audience Growth, Selling, etc. These are topics we’ve already covered, but we want to focus each month on our “greatest hits” (and tips!) around each of those topics instead of just talking about a bunch of random topics and overstuffing our coaching catalogue.
Is it time for you to zoom the lens out on your business and start simplifying things a bit so your customers get value faster? We feel that way and we also know that’s just part of being in business for many years.
👀 Take a peek at our WAIM Flow Chart we mentioned: wanderingaimfully.com/flowchart
✈️ No pramvel this week, our travel updates will return October 20.
**
More goodies from us:
🚀 WAIM Unlimited is OPEN FOR ENROLLMENT until October 18. Let us help you grow your business with intention! https://wanderingaimfully.com/join
⚙️ Build and sell your online course using our easy-to-use and friendly course platform - teachery.co
🎥 Make sure you’re subscribed to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/wanderingaimfully
We’re Jason and Caroline Zook, a husband and wife team running two businesses together and trying to live out our version of a good life in the process. In this business podcast, we share with you our lessons learned about how to run a calm, sustainable business—one that is predictable, profitable AND peaceful. Join us every Thursday if you’re an online creator who wants to reach your goals without sacrificing your well-being in the process.
Caroline: Welcome to What Is It All for? A podcast designed to help you grow your online business and pursue a spacious, satisfying life at the same time. We are your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an unboring business coaching program. Every week, we bring you advice and conversations to return you to your most intentional self and to help you examine every aspect of your life and business by asking, What is it all for? Thanks for listening. And now let's get into the show.
Jason: And I'm here too.
Caroline: Hello, everyone.
Jason: Well, hello. Let's just jump right into things. We didn't have to do an ad read.
Caroline: We did...
Jason: Which is really nice.
Caroline: Yeah.
Jason: That's great.
Caroline: Our sponsors were kind in that regard.
Jason: But we're going to have a shorter episode today.
Caroline: Yes.
Jason: Even though it's an exciting episode today.
Caroline: It is an exciting episode.
Jason: Because 50% of us of this show not doing so hot in the feeling of the body and the nasals and the throats.
Caroline: I was going to say, if you're like, oh, Caroline's on the podcast this week. There's some more sultry...
Jason: A more sultry woman?
Caroline: A more sultry...
Jason: Yeah. Like a snottier sounding Caroline.
Caroline: Okay, first of all, it's because that's right. If my voice sounds a little different, it's because I came down with a nice little European flu.
Jason: Yeah.
Caroline: Which is okay. I'm fine. Thank you for your concern. Also, it's okay. It's not COVID, thankfully. I'm very grateful for that. We tested many days and got negative tests, which was...
Jason: Which is kind of amazing, to be honest.
Caroline: I know. The second...
Jason: We were just like, this is it.
Caroline: The second it hit me. I was like, oh, here comes COVID again. But I'm grateful that it wasn't that. And I'm definitely on the other side of it now, even though I don't sound super cute, but I think yesterday was like the peak.
Jason: It's like that when you get sick and you feel really crappy, but then it's like the day after your body wants to get rid all the stuff that it was like...
Caroline: Yeah, we're on the downhill slope. I mean, it's not fun. Don't get me wrong, you're still on the mountain, but we're going in the right direction. So that's good.
Jason: We actually are kind of on a mountain. Ohh!
Caroline: Jason.
Jason: We'll get back to those things later. But yeah. So the first thing was just to share that you're here, but you're not feeling great. So if there's some hacking or if the nasally sounding's... Don't sound good.
Caroline: I'm going to try not to offer any interesting sounds that I can offer.
Jason: Can you try and do a non nasally voice?
Caroline: Hi, this is me. Definitely not sick.
Jason: Try and open it up.
Caroline: Okay.
Jason: But the first thing, the most important thing, besides your health, that's already covered, the second most important thing is that Wandering Aimfully Unlimited, our signature unboring coaching program, is open for you, amazing intentional online business owners who want a specific plan of action, a roadmap to follow that's not going to bring you any guaranteed results because we're not about that life around here. But if you want a ton of resources to help you build a calm business, a business where you don't feel like you're on the hamster wheel of content, one where you're striving for enough and not for more all the time. And you want a community of people who are just like you that are doing this same thing. And we're going to be there as well. WAIM Unlimited, go to wanderingaimfully.com/join, check it out. It's open until October 17. Technically 18th, but just 17th on your calendar if you're going to wait around.
Caroline: Early morning of the 18th. Yes, and we would love to have you there. And for a fun episode today, we wanted to share a little bit more about WAIM Limited, but more so, like our plans for what... So the core offering inside of WAIM Unlimited, our unboring coaching program, are these monthly live coaching sessions. You hear us talk about them often on this podcast, but we had a meeting this summer and we always do this. And this is just to give you a little behind the scenes so that you can apply this to your own business. But we thought we're always thinking ahead of what does the next year look like for unboring coaching? And we are steering it in a little bit of a different direction than what we have been doing for the past three years. And we thought it would be a fun episode to walk you through why we made that decision. As well as to touch on this topic that I haven't heard many people talk about, which is what happens when maybe your offer has been around for a while and you keep sort of like adding to it and you hit this point where it can become almost... I mean, the word I'm using is bloated. I don't know a better word for it, but it's becoming overstuffed with value to where you're actually losing the value because it's becoming overwhelming.
Jason: Yes, I think this is one of those situations where some of you who listen to this are just starting a business. You're like, I haven't even put any stuffing inside of my metaphorical turkey of business. And then other of you are like, us, you have a very full turkey of business, and the little crumbles are falling out. This is getting kind of really gross, but it's that season. So that's the thing about... But for us, we just recorded our 36th coaching session. This is a monthly thing we've done for three years. And it kind of crept up on us. Like, we would say, like, oh, this is our 15th and this is our 20th. Then we hit the 36th. It really kind of hit me. I was like, this is a lot. This is a lot for anybody to go through. And I think that's one of the things that we really have worried about over the years of Wandering Aimfully is just there's so much that we have to offer and that we've created. But how do we not make it so overwhelming?
Caroline: Exactly. Because every month that we add a new topic, which is what we've continuously done, there's only a few that we've kind of revisited. I think, for example, our Reflect and Project that we usually do in December, which is all about reflecting on the year that just is about to come to an end and projecting on the next year. We've done that one twice now, but there have been very few overlaps. And so when you think about that, we'll end the year was basically 39 different topics and we are always putting ourselves in the shoes of, and I do want to say, the whole point of the Unboring Business Roadmap. So if you're even someone who's considering WAIM Unlimited and you're like, whoa, that does sound overwhelming. That's the whole reason that we created the Unboring Business Roadmap, which is basically a sequential order taking you through five phases of business that gives you an order to go through those coaching sessions so you don't have to worry about which one to start with or where do you start. It's like if you know that you need help with marketing, you go to the roadmap and it'll give you the ones on marketing. If you know you need help with your website, you go to the roadmap and it'll lead you to work on your website. So we have created solutions for that.
Jason: Also, I just want to mention really quickly. In the show notes, I'm going to link to the flow chart that you just redid. So we had this really helpful flow chart that's just like you were just saying, like, have you worked on your marketing? If not, go here. Okay. If you have, keep going down the flow chart and it's like through all of our resources. So I'll add a link to it in the show notes, you can check out that flow chart and you can literally walk through and see all of our resources. But it's also just a really helpful thing to almost just keep it on your desktop and be like, okay, what am I doing this month? And you pop it open, you go, I've done this, this. You move down, you're like, okay, I'm at 3.4 on the roadmap now. That's the lesson I need to go into and watch some resources.
Caroline: Right. Which is what we wanted it to be because we know that this is a big problem, really the core problem of what our WAIMers deal with, which is what do I focus on next in my business? And so we're constantly coming up with solutions to that problem in the form of the Unboring Business Roadmap, in the form of the flow chart, etc. But what I was going to say is, as we approach this, almost by the end of this year, 39 different topics, we just thought adding more new topics isn't going to magically help someone in their business. If anything, it's going to just keep fragmenting and almost like, diluting the value of WAIM right? So our idea for unboring coaching sessions for 2023 is to still do our extremely entertaining, if I do say so myself.
Jason: Nice.
Caroline: Two to sometimes three hour sessions where we are on live with everyone. They're always extremely fun and unboring. And Jason and I always say it's like our favorite day of the entire month because just the energy that you get after going to one of those live sessions is just unmatched. And so if you're feeling down about your business, you always know that that day of the month is going to be a great way for you to lift your energy back up. But what we're going to do for next year is instead of having a brand new topic every time, we're going to kind of identify, and we have already identified these twelve fundamentals, I would say, of business and what we're going to do, and we're going to make the month that theme, right? So let's just as an example, let's just say that marketing would be just one theme of February, let's say.
Jason: Well, it would be March Marketing, obviously.
Caroline: It would be Marchh Marketing. Let's just be honest, don't be dumb. Don't do it February. It would be March Marketing. And the great thing about that session is we would basically bring together all of our greatest resources, tips, like pluck out the best of the best of everything that falls under the marketing umbrella that is a resource inside of Wandering Aimfully Unlimited. Bring it to you. Do a really in depth Q. Amp A. And again, just like kind of steer the unboring coaching part back into this extremely potent, very focused format so that we're delivering on the promise of giving you one thing to focus on.
Jason: It honestly feels like with Wandering Aimfully Unlimited, we have written like a thousand page tome. And so we just have this extremely huge and indepth and full of amazing content for you to go through. And that's been great. And we're so happy that we did that because we basically covered everything we could cover.
Caroline: And that will always be there for you to go dive deep in.
Jason: Now what we want to do is we want to create the little Cliff's Notes version. We want you to be able to have a resource where if you want to go into the depths and you're a tome reader, by all means, go and read. But this is going to be kind of like you're tuning in every month in 2023 and going, okay, in January, I'm doing this. In February, doing this. In March, I'm doing marketing. And you're going to be able to walk away from each month knowing with some specific tips of exactly what to do to apply those things in your business, because that's what I really want. I think our coaching sessions have been so good at delivering a lot of the theory and explaining a lot of these bigger concepts because it's very difficult to just say, hey, go do some marketing. It just feels very nebulous. But we really want to do in this next year is to give you, hey, here are ten actionable things you can do.
Caroline: Correct.
Jason: Go do those things this month. And so every month you can feel like I'm doing, just as an example, ten things for marketing, ten things for email building, ten things for content creation, whatever those topics end up being, which we will discuss and plan out. But it becomes something where every month next year you go, I have a plan. Like, Wandering Aimfully is giving me a plan of how to improve my business every month.
Caroline: I have a plan.
Jason: I have a plan.
Caroline: Yeah. And I think that's just to pivot the conversation away from WAIM Unlimited and more to extract some tidbits that people can take away for their own business. That this is...
Jason: Something helpful.
Caroline: Not just an ad read, but also something that you can think about and it's helpful for your business but lost my train of thought...
Jason: Oh, I think it's about like, for someone listening to this, if you have a lot of stuff, if you have an overstuffed business right now, or you just feel like there's a lot of things you've created, you don't even know if it's overstuffed yet, it's to maybe step back and zoom out the picture and go, what are the most important parts?
Caroline: I found it.
Jason: Yeah.
Caroline: Thank you. You knew that if you would just fill the time and talk about...
Jason: But I think what I said was actually helpful too, because that's what we want to...
Caroline: I don't even know what you said because I was trying to find my thoughts. My thought was where I was going with that is something that is a helpful takeaway is I also view us as part of what someone pays for when they pay for Wandering Aimfully Unlimited is we're saving them time. Right? So it's like you don't need to go and scour the entire Internet for all the best marketing tips. You are joining, not just for the community, not just for all the resources, but also for someone to kind of serve up to you on a platter. Like, hey, I've scoured all of this for you. Here are what I think are like the most potent twelve things for action steps for you to take. And so apply that to your own business. Like think to yourself, okay, I can provide value in all these different ways. I can provide value in terms of knowledge. I can provide value in someone's return on investment, but I can also provide value in the amount of time that I'm saving someone to go scour this information and really deliver the most curated information for them. Right? So that's a takeaway that you can apply to your own business. But yeah, let's dive into what we were saying about maybe, if you listening, are getting to this place where your offer like maybe you've done a couple of launches and you've added bonuses every time, or maybe you have one signature online course and every time you launch it, you add a couple of new lessons. But now you're starting to feel like it's getting a little bit overstuffed and I just want to talk about the value in simplifying and curating a little bit and the fact that we think of adding value so much as adding more things.
Jason: Of course.
Caroline: But sometimes adding value is in subtracting.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's something to be said for you as the person creating the thing. You know that thing so well that it's on you to edit down quite a bit so that you're only giving the most important parts of it. And I think a lot of times you don't know how to do that. It's just like writing a book. You don't know how to edit down until you have a bunch of crap that you're looking at and being like, okay, this is all helpful crap, but it's too much.
Caroline: And that's so hard, isn't it? I don't know what made me think about this. But this just made me think of also. Sometimes I have such trouble writing concise emails and sometimes because I want to add every bit of context and so I'll be like. Okay. Then there's this. And then I'll add this for a little bit of context and then I will think of this objection and then I'll put myself in their shoes. Before I know it, I have this long email and I go, oh, in my mind I was adding value, but now I think I'm subtracting value by making this virtually unreadable.
Jason: Yeah, it becomes too long. And I think a lot of that is just you want to give so much and that we're so used to someone giving everything and all of the things when it's just like, yeah, but if you actually give a little bit less, it's more helpful because someone can do something with it. So, yeah, I think that's definitely a good tip for anybody who, again, has an overstuffed business. If you don't have an overstuffed business, give yourself permission to keep stuffing until you get to a point where either your customers are telling you this feels overwhelming because that's where we got to when we decided to build the roadmap.
Caroline: Exactly.
Jason: Everyone was saying like, you have so much great stuff, I don't know what to do.
Caroline: I don't know where to start.
Jason: We were like, we agree, and I would be writing out this little roadmap for people myself. And then we finally were like, well, let's not write this out, let's just make this into a thing.
Caroline: Definitely.
Jason: So, yeah, I think those are some helpful tidbits for folks who are listening to this. I think if you're someone who's listening that you want one thing to focus on your business and you're already feeling overwhelmed, we hope that Wandering Aimfully Unlimited can be something that you check out and you look to see if it's right for you.
Caroline: Yeah. And if you like the way that sounds of what our plans are for next year, very much steering things toward this curation, very much trying to give a theme every month so that we can really deliver on a solution to that core problem, which is I don't know what to work on to improve my business. We will have twelve individual things for you to work on to improve your business and you could just focus on one thing at a time. If that sounds like it's up your alley, then definitely head to wanderingaimfully.com/join and check it out.
Jason: Do that for sure. And also don't forget you get a Teachery account. If you want to make online courses, you get a software, you can create your course and sell it and do all those fun things. You get a whole bunch. You get 15 different brands and the Brand-in-a-Box Bundle that you can apply. You have a Squarespace template at your disposal called Thicket that you created.
Caroline: Yeah. Remember when we said overstuffed? Like we weren't kidding. There's so many stuff in there.
Jason: There's the Notion StarterPpack, there's the Page Layout Library. Like there is just so much and...
Caroline: It's a one stop shop.
Jason: Don't forget the flow chart will be in the show notes. If you want to just click through that because it will give you a good little glimpse of things right wherever you are. Yeah. So head to wanderingaimfully.com/join to join us before October 17 and then the next time you hear from us...
Caroline: First of all, will not sound like this, I can guarantee.
Jason: Yes. And you'll be feeling better. That's what I wanted to get to. We'll probably have a little bit of a longer episode because you did a great job. You didn't cough through this. Don't ruin it.
Caroline: I know. Let's not push it.
Jason: Alright, that's it everybody. Thanks for listening. We hope you check out WAIM and we appreciate you.
Caroline: Talk to you next week.
Jason: Bye.
Caroline: Bye.