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What you’ll learn in this episode:
What if the fastest way to grow your business wasn’t doing more, but doing less? In this episode, I walk you through one of the most overlooked (and highest-leverage) growth strategies: what to stop doing. Because in established businesses, growth often accelerates when you remove the things that are creating complexity, friction, and unnecessary effort. I also walk you through a simple way to identify where your business feels heavier than it should, and how to use that insight to focus your next 90 days. This episode brings together everything we’ve covered in this series and helps you move from insight into clear, focused action.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why adding more offers, content, and strategies can actually slow your growth
- The most common low-leverage behaviors (and how to recognize them in your business)
- How over-posting, over-customizing, over-explaining, and over-building create hidden complexity
- A simple “calm audit” to identify where your business is out of alignment
- How to choose one high-leverage focus for the next 90 days
This Episode Is Part of a Series:
This episode is part of a high-leverage growth series where I’ve been walking you through the most impactful ways to simplify your business and increase revenue with more ease. If you missed any of the earlier episodes – The Buyer Moment, Your Offer as a Profit Lever, Existing Proximity, Strategic Partnerships, and Messaging as a Signal – I recommend going back and listening. These ideas are designed to stack and work together.
Mentioned in this episode:
Work/Connect with me:
Jessica Miller (00:00.974)
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the It’s Your Offer podcast. I’m Jess Miller. I’m the host of the show. For those of you that are new, you’ve been following along in our series. We’ve had a lot of people come onto the podcast. I’m so excited to have you here. Welcome. For those of you that have been with us for a long time and you’ve been following this, it’s so great to be with you every week, my favorite corner of the airwaves. So today I want to talk about something that might feel a little counterintuitive to a lot of you.
The calmest businesses are often the most profitable. And not because they’re doing less for the sake of doing less, like they just don’t have, you know, they’re sitting on the couch hanging out. It’s because these businesses are doing the right things and they have removed everything else. If you’ve been following this series, we’ve been talking about high-leverage growth. We’ve been talking about things like understanding your buyer moment, having a hell-yes offer,
understanding that existing proximity to you is a huge benefit. Looking at strategic partnerships as a way to leverage your growth. Looking at messaging not as a megaphone or an amplification, but really as a signal that calls in your right buyers. And we’ve been talking a lot about what to stop doing, this idea that success is in the subtracting. And what all of these things have been pointing to is this: ease is not accidental.
It’s something that is designed intentionally. Most people associate growth with the following things: urgency, moving super quickly, pressure, speed, more activity, doing more things, like this idea that more is better. But what you actually see at higher levels when people dial in a business that grows with ease is things like clear focus, clear offers, simplicity, shorter conversations,
less noise, hallelujah, and more decisiveness, the ability to make decisions clearly and confidently. Because calm is not a personality trait. It’s not something that you are born with. It’s a business design outcome. It’s something you choose to create. When your business is aligned, it feels simpler, not heavier. And that’s because it is simpler and easier.
Jessica Miller (02:25.678)
Growth oftentimes is frantic and expensive. And here is why this is the case. I think it’s important that we understand what frantic looks like and what the model that we see a lot of times that is kind of pushing us to think that this is the way to go and this is how it happens is actually not faster, easier, or cheaper. It’s actually really expensive and it’s costing you a lot. And here’s why. Here’s what this looks like. It looks like constantly launching, like we’re doing all the things.
Chasing new audience, this constant badge of honor to quote-unquote pivot. Adding more offers, thinking that something’s not working, if you just add another one, it’s going to solve the problem, it won’t. Overworking to maintain momentum, that over-effort, that pushing harder. Buying all the things, hiring all the random people to help you do something. What it actually creates is not growth. It creates burnout, it creates inconsistency,
lower margins because it’s very costly, and reactive decisions. Frantic growth is very expensive, and not just in your time, in your sanity, in your clarity. If you’ve been listening to this series and following along with the advice here in your own business, you can see and you are living that you do not need to move faster. You need to remove friction. Intentional subtraction and focus is a success strategy.
I see this everywhere and all the time with the clients that I work with. I live this every day. I have lived it in my own business. I’m not here to suggest that I am above all of it and I have never been there. I know firsthand the pain of knowing that there is an easier way and not being in it. And here’s what this looks like with a few businesses that I’ve worked with and that I’ve observed. So let’s take a service-based business like a consultant or a coach.
I worked with a consultant once who had multiple offers, multiple entry points, and a lot of activity. On the surface, it looked like she was doing all the things. Business is great. You’re moving. She was busy. She was out there. She was visible, and she was working, and she was working a lot. But her revenue was super inconsistent. She was in a constant state of panic every other month. And what we did was we decided that we were going to
Jessica Miller (04:50.214)
strip it down. When I sat down with her, I didn’t give her a million things that she needed to do. I gave her insight into the one thing that would actually make her life better. And when we stripped it down, this is what we did. We focused on one clear offer, one clear pathway and patient journey, client journey, and one defined outcome. What were we solving for and how were we going to create it in the fastest, easiest, most leveraged way within one?
Not only did her revenue stabilize, but her work week got so much lighter. It was night and day. She wasn’t doing more, her team wasn’t doing more. In fact, they were doing a whole hell of a lot less, but they were doing it so much better, so much more profitably, and so much easier. That is what it looks like when you get out of the frantic place. This also works for brick and mortar.
If you are a shop or a med spa, I’ve seen this in those industries many, many times. One of my med spa owners had a full calendar, like strong demand. People were coming in, she was running the ads, but she felt like she was constantly juggling everything. And if you have a team, you know this feeling. It’s like there’s all of these balls in the air. You feel like you are over-leveraged as a human being. And then there’s all of these variables that you’re just holding your breath, making sure that they don’t hit the ground
and that nothing happens to you because you’re the glue that’s holding it all together. Because it’s so complicated, you need to hold it up. She had multiple services, no clear client journey. People would come to her like, is her ideal client? Where do they need to go when they come there? And her consultation processes were super heavy. They often ran over and they were very long, like over an hour when people would come in. When we simplified the offer structures and we created a treatment plan instead of just a
what I call like a pick-a-mix. When I was a kid, there used to be these, and many of you maybe know this, like these bins of individual candies when you went into the supermarket, and they were called pick-a-mix. And you would get a bag and you would just pick all these random things. And literally that’s what it was like when you were standing there, like what can I just throw in this bag for the sake of throwing it in this bag? So instead of that kind of an environment, which a lot of aesthetics businesses, salons, you know, all those things, they have this
Jessica Miller (07:14.85)
this same phenotype where you go and you interact with their business and there’s this like laundry list of things. So we created a structured treatment plan. She knew exactly who her people were and how they were going to move through. And what ended up happening is sales got easier, retention increased, the long-term value and the way that we captured those people on the backend and kept them in there creating that passive recurring income for her was huge. And it was predictable.
She could manage her business in a simpler way where she was actually working less, making a lot of money, and knowing what was actually going to come in the door. And what changed the most for her is that she felt calmer running her business. There is nothing like being a business owner and being able to quote-unquote look across your business and know how you’re putting all the pieces together. That is pure freedom. And that is what we are solving for in addition to fast cash in the door
and ease. I also see this all the time at a higher level with places like luxury spa resorts and different experiences at hotel accommodations. So if you’re going to these amazing resorts, I see this all the time. They have it all. They have everything built, but they have no clear anchor. When you don’t know or have what your core experience is that everything points to when people walk in the door,
things start to fall apart. It feels super scattered for you as the business owner, and it absolutely feels scattered for your patient or for your client that you are trying to bring into your business. And in the words of Don Miller, when you confuse, you lose. When people don’t know what to do, they opt out. So you see people dropping off of your website or sales that don’t pull through, or they’ll get like halfway through to the place where they need to buy and then they fall out of the cart, things like that.
Clarity is created, everything else aligns. Your marketing, your operations, your client experience—you need to have this one place where you’re pushing people through that makes sense. It’s not an all-comer, what can I just throw out there and give to people? It’s creating a simpler, intentional journey that you know which assets to really dial up and put in front of people so that they move through that process super quickly.
Jessica Miller (09:43.767)
And bonus, they don’t feel like they’re in a marketing funnel. It feels like you know them, you get them, you’ve created something easy, and it’s so easy for you to manage. So when you do this, not only does it create a powerful asset for growth in your business, it creates a lever for growth. That leverage also creates confidence. The way you show up changes. The things you do are more on point.
You understand your ecosystem of your business and the people coming into it. And that puts you at ease and it puts you in the driver’s seat. When you build a business based on this leverage, you create trust and there’s trust wholeheartedly in what you’ve created and what you’re going to do next. You can see it, you can feel it. You trust your offers because you know you have chosen them intentionally and they’re connected together and they’re connected to the outcome that you want for the person you’re serving.
You trust your process because data doesn’t lie and you’ve built it intentionally around that. You’ve made good decisions using the information that you have and you’ve done it in a meaningful way. You trust your results. You can follow the bouncing ball. And I joke about this all the time, but this is really an important breakthrough moment. And I work with this a lot with my clients because people need to see it. They need to see
how they’re going to actually get to the thing that they want and how we’ve taken the thing that they want and we’ve reverse-engineered it to where they are now and created those connections and we can follow the bouncing ball. So your brain is on point with the logic and then you feel it. So you trust what you’ve created and the results that you’re going to create. So guess what happens? All of your decisions get easier. Like your life, your business gets easier. You’re not constantly asking,
Should I try this? Should I do that? Should we add this? Should we tweak that? You know what works. You can see it and you have chosen it. Doesn’t mean you don’t have the moments of like, okay, let me gut check this, but it’s easy for you to fall back on what you’ve created. Confidence doesn’t come from doing more. It’s not some magical, elusive thing out there that just either we’re born with and blessed with. People are not just confident. It comes from knowing what matters.
Jessica Miller (12:07.97)
and what works in your business that is connected to the outcome that you want. So I want you to take two minutes and I want you to do what I’m calling the calm business audit. And I’m just making up that name because I love it, but it is so on point with what I’m going to talk about in the next two minutes. So I want to give you something simple to walk away with with this episode. So grab a piece of paper or if you’re moving, just, you know, this is a mental note, you’re going to do this while you’re moving.
And I want to give something for you to walk away with, but it’s not like more to do. This is something for you to see clearly and pull through what we’ve been talking about right here and in this series. Okay? So I want you to think about your business right now. Hold it in your mind. I want you to think about it. Where does it feel heavier than it should? Don’t overthink this. It’s going to come into your mind right away. Where does it feel heavier than it should? Is it your offers?
Is it your marketing? Is it your sales process? Is it on the delivery end? Where is it? And I want you to just notice where the friction is. Okay, this is the first piece. Like where is that friction? This friction is not random. It is pointing to a lack of alignment in your business. It’s where the frantic lives and starts. This is it. It could be
If we’re thinking back to the things we talked about in this series, it could be hiding, starting in that buyer moment being unclear. So the messaging feels hard and that’s where you’re feeling that friction. It could be in a lack of clarity with your offers. They’re not hell-yes offers. So those sales feel long and hard like you’re convincing somebody. It could be in the proximity you’re not leveraging those people that are closest to you, your audience, the partners, the strategic people around you that are
more likely to actually convert. So maybe the marketing feels heavy. You feel like you’re pushing it up, you know, the boulder up a hill and there’s that friction there. Or there’s just like too many things, too many things. You can’t even keep in your mind like what there is to do next. There’s too many things and everything just feels scattered. I refer to this as like controlled chaos. Like you feel like it is chaotic. You can feel it in your body. You can feel it in your business.
Jessica Miller (14:34.978)
and it’s controlled, but it’s like one step away from going off the rails.
So here’s what I want you to ask yourself now that you’ve identified these things. I want you to ask yourself, if I had to make my business 20% calmer in the next 90 days, what would I simplify?
I’m going to repeat this. Ask yourself, if I had to make my business 20% calmer in the next 90 days, what would I simplify?
What would you stop doing? What would you focus on? What would you remove? What excuses would you drop?
The answer to that question is your next leverage point and where the calm in your business is hiding. And here’s the thing, most people do not need 10 things. They need one.
Jessica Miller (15:36.993)
If you want to pause this episode and actually write this down, I invite you to do that. Because this is the freedom lever. This is where it’s at. This is where you could grow your business 20% or more easily. This is it. Because again, calm is not something you earn at some point later in time when you become a special snowflake or arrive at a certain place.
Here’s the deal, you’re already there. You’re already her, or you’re already him. Calmness is something that you design right now. It’s something that you choose.
So when we think about all of the things that we’ve talked about and making them actionable, because action creates the result, it’s the pull-through of these things. And if you’ve been following along, you’ve already done a lot of this thinking. I mean, this is where you get to really pat yourself on the back. You’ve identified where your clients are and where they’re hiding and where it’s easier to get them.
You’ve identified what your offer is and where that hell-yes offer is and the one that’s really the backbone and driving easy money in your business. You know where the opportunities are. You know where we don’t need to go anymore and where those most likely converting people and opportunities live. And you know now it needs to be simplified. It is there, right in front of you, in your existing business. So the question now isn’t,
What else should I learn? Right? You have all the things you need to be successful. The question is, what am I going to focus on for the next 90 days? Because real growth does not come from doing everything at once. It doesn’t come from doing all the things and doing them right now. It comes from focusing on the right thing long enough to actually make it work.
Jessica Miller (17:42.669)
And that’s where most people get stuck. Not in the knowing what to do, but in executing it clearly, consistently, and without adding more noise. If you’re listening to this and you are nodding along and you are thinking, this makes sense. I can see where this opportunity is. I get it. I just want to get there faster and do it right. I am tired of screwing around. This is exactly why I’ve created my programs the way that I’ve created them.
And the profit accelerator, which is our one-to-one business owners, where it’s structured and it’s focused and it’s a high-leverage approach where you get clear on your priorities, you clean up the execution, you get rid of the clutter, you build 90-day momentum without adding chaos. You’re not adding more. You’re refining what already actually exists in your business. That money is hiding in your business right now. And you do it with support, accountability, and strategy.
If you’re listening to this and that sounds like you, it’s probably because there’s a sense of alignment there. Maybe you’re someone, for some of you, who already know that you want something more tailored and you need something faster, maybe fewer moving parts, you’re more established. That is where private consulting comes in. Both are designed around the same philosophy. In my world, we do less, we do it better, and we grow faster because your time
and your money and your energy are super, super, super valuable. If this feels aligned to you, you can book a profit strategy call using the link in the show notes. We’ll look at your business together. We’ll decide what makes the most sense for you because you do not need to build a more complicated business to grow. You need to build a more aligned one, one that is created intentionally knowing the results that you want
and leveraging the assets that are already in your existing business to get you there. And when you do, growth does not feel like pressure. It is not high-pressure stakes. It is not controlled chaos. It feels like momentum. It feels like flow. It feels like ease. We’ve all heard this. The calmest businesses aren’t the ones doing less by accident. They’re the ones designed to do less on purpose. Until next week, everyone, I am cheering you on.
Jessica Miller (20:08.387)
Have a great week.
