Gill Moakes (00:00)
Welcome, welcome to the Rewild Your Business podcast. feel like this week's episode is very Rewild-y in its nature. And I think you're going to enjoy this one because the more I talk about the topic of simplifying our businesses, the more it seems to resonate with you lovely, lovely people. And that fills me with so much joy and hope.
Because I do believe that we've allowed business to get so overly complicated, so unpleasant to have to work in, and it doesn't have to be that way. So, topic I want to talk to you about today is the way that we've kind of been sold this complex version of what business needs to look like and why.
we've been sold it. You know what I mean when I'm talking about complex business, right? You know, the 47 step funnels and intricate launch sequences and all of the social media strategies that you need a bloody degree in digital marketing to understand, right? All those really complicated business models where you literally cannot even explain it to someone without a flow chart. None of this
building in of complexity into our world is an accident because what's happened is that someone sells you a complicated system. You implement it, it doesn't work or it kind of works, but it feels exhausting. So you think, ⁓ I must be doing it wrong. I must need the advanced training or I need the next level. I need the next missing piece. Right. And they're in there like swimwear.
They've got you for another course, another certification, another mastermind, right? The complexity isn't a bug in the system. It's the actual entire business model of the online world these days. And I see this all the time with the coaches I work with. Coaches come to me absolutely drowning in systems. They've got CRMs they don't use. They've got email sequences that, you know, they've never actually got around to sending because they're so complicated. They've got content calendars that
literally make them and me want to cry. And they're spending more time managing their business infrastructure than actually doing the thing that they're really brilliant at. So that's what I want to talk about today, because this feels important. know, people are feeling like failures because they can't keep on top of how complex doing business has become, but it doesn't need to be that way. So what I'm going to go into today is what actually does it take?
to build a business and how simple can you make it? Okay, let's dive into the episode. Welcome to Rewild Your Business, the podcast for women doing the work their soul intended. I'm Gill Moakes I'm an international business coach and I'm a guide for women doing the work that matters. Rewilding your business means cutting away what doesn't belong to allow what does to thrive, finding simplicity in your work.
And it's about bringing the whole of who you are to the table. Whether you're building something new or finding your way back to what really matters to you. I'm so glad you're here. Like I say, I think people begin to feel like a bit of a failure when they can't stay on top of the perceived complexity that is doing business right now. But the truth of it is it's not a failure in us.
The whole system is designed to make you feel inadequate so that you keep buying solutions to problems that actually didn't exist until someone convinced you they did. It's a crazy little loop that we're in. So I want to cut through that today and I want to talk to you about, you know, what actually matters when it comes to building a coaching business, when it comes to building any kind of business, actually this applies.
What is it that genuinely creates clients and income and allows you to have the impact that you started your business for in the first place? And it is not complicated. In fact, I can probably do it in one sentence. Let's see if I can do it in one sentence. You need to be visible where your people are and you need to talk about what you do in a way that makes sense. And then you need to have conversations with potential clients.
and you need to make offers to them of how you can help them and when you help them, you need to deliver excellent work so that you can ask for testimonials and referrals. Boom, one sentence. I felt like I was on that quiz show then. This won't resonate at all with you if you're over the other side of the pond. Is it just a minute on BBC Radio 4? You know the thing where they have to speak about a topic?
And they are not allowed to kind of pause or repeat the same word or something. Well, anyway, there's rules about it. I felt like I was doing that. So basically that is it. That one sentence that I just gave you, right? That's it. Everything else, every bloody automation, sophisticated funnel complex system, all of those things are optimizations.
for a business that's already working. They're not the foundational things. They're optional extras that you can add later if and only if they actually serve you. I have some automations in my business because my business has evolved. It's mature enough for the automations to make sense. But even so, even though I've been in business for a reasonably long time now, my business is still very simple.
⁓ If I had to run my business just on my own without Kristin and Linah totally could do that. Kristin and Linah if you're listening, my God, I don't want to. Please don't make me. But if I had to, I absolutely could. I know how everything works. It's not super complex. But here's the thing. The gurus out there don't make money if they tell you the simple truth. So what happens is they sell you complexity.
and they disguise it as sophistication. That's kind of what's happening here really. And here's where this connects to the thing that you know that I really care about, which is identity. Because the reason that complexity sells so well isn't just clever marketing, right? It's because most people are operating from an identity that doesn't trust the simple path. Think about that for a moment.
If you fundamentally don't believe that you're the kind of person who can build a successful business through really straightforward means, through your actual talent, your real relationships, your genuine value, then complexity is going to feel necessary. Feels a bit like armor, like proof that you're a serious business person. So complexity becomes almost like a credential that you have.
when you don't trust yourself to be enough. And the business gurus out there, know this, they're not stupid. They know that someone who doesn't trust their own authority is gonna pay often a lot of money for a system that promises to do the trusting for them. But here's the thing that I know to be true after years of coaching ambitious women. The minute you step into the identity,
of someone who creates value, builds relationships, makes offers from that place of genuine authority, then that complexity starts to feel exhausting. Instead of feeling like it's something you have to have, it starts feeling like a chain around your neck. All of the things you've been sold that are going to make your life so much easier suddenly become really heavy and you realize that you don't need them.
So if we break down what you do actually need, I would say the first thing you really need is you need clarity on who you serve and the transformation you create. I don't care what you do for a living. I don't care what your job description is. If you don't have complete clarity on who you serve and what the transformation is that you create, don't even bother trying to put one foot in front of the other yet. You've got to get that clarity first.
And I'm not talking about, you know, 27 point ideal client avatar. I just talking here about a clear, honest answer to who do I help and what do they get from working with me? As simple as that. Who do I help and what do they get from working with me? Second thing, you need a simple way to reach those people. And I believe that it should be your own platform where you are able
to put out content that is original. So it's your thoughts. It's your thought leadership. So for me, it's this podcast. For some people, it's going to be a YouTube channel. For some people, it's going to be a sub stack. It might be that LinkedIn is your thing and you love it and you just do everything on LinkedIn. have your articles and you do lives and that is your platform. Personally, I'd rather you did it so that you were owning the platform rather than on social media.
But you know, whatever your thing is, whatever your primary platform is, where you are going to show up consistently and let people know about what you stand for and who you are, then just pick one thing and just do it consistently well. Don't try and do like seven things poorly or mediocally. Mediocally? Is that a word? Let's make it a word. Love it. Third thing.
You need to talk about your work regularly. Now, again, this doesn't have to be some overly complex content strategy, but you do need to be talking about what you do when you work with a client. You need to be talking about the kind of things that you work with clients on, and you need to be sharing about who you are, what matters to you, what's your story.
So you've got to have this platform and then you've got to talk about your work. You know, talk about what matters, talk about why you're different, talk about what you love or don't love about the industry you've decided to work in. The fourth thing, I would say probably the most important thing because visibility will get you so far, but if you don't move on to the next phase, then visibility does not lead to paying clients.
The fourth thing is you need to be building genuine relationships like your life depends on it. And basically your business definitely does. So you need to be finding a way to have conversations with potential clients, with potential collaborators, with potential introducers of business. And again, I don't really mind how you do that, whether you're inviting people to have a coffee chat, whether you are calling it a discovery call, whether you do what I do and get people
to apply for a best next move session, which is what I do. And that is a level of complexity that if you're a bit earlier on in your business, you won't need, you don't need to get people to apply for a session because you've probably got room on your calendar to be able to take bookings for plenty of calls. you're probably thinking, God, that'd be a nice problem to have. Right. But in time, you get to the point where you can't actually, you know, just accept bookings from anyone into your calendar, or you never actually get any work done. And then you can do what I've done.
which is now I get people to apply for a best next move session. And if I think that they're a good fit for me and I'm a good fit for them, then I give them a free hour of my time to see if that's true. Obligation free, money free, right? But that's a level of complexity. This is a perfect example of a level of complexity that you don't need at the beginning, but in time you might want to introduce it. But this fourth thing is, you you need to actually be talking to people.
Particularly now, I think there was a time when service-based businesses could set up these funnels and get people to almost sign up online and book in and suddenly they're off to the races. It doesn't work like that. We are in a trust desert. Thank you, Chat GPT and Claude and the rest of them. Other AI suppliers are available. But you know what I mean? With the rise of AI,
Written word, not enough. You need to be having conversations. People need to be able to look you in the whites of your eyes to build enough trust in you to decide that you are a coach that they would like to hire and work with. So you need to be talking to people. And then the fifth thing is, you you need a clear offer that you can give those people that solves a real problem and that is priced appropriately for the value you create. So you've got to be clear on how you help someone.
Sometimes with people I work with that might look like creating a signature framework that makes it really easy to talk about how you take someone from where they are now to where they want to be. That's one way that your offer can become very clear, but you need to be able to very easily explain what your offer is. So for a long time, I just built my business to whatever six figures and I'm not doing that to be one of those twats who's like, I'm going to think of me a bit.
I built my business to over six figures just by doing one-to-one coaching. So it's really important for me to say that because sometimes I think that people think you can't do that unless you scale into group things and other offers. You can, you absolutely can build to six figure business offering one-to-one coaching. But what you need to be sure of beyond any doubt is that your offer solves a real problem and is priced appropriately for the value you create.
So those two things you need to be really confident around. If you haven't done enough work of understanding your ideal clients, this is where you might struggle with this. If you have done the level of work that I talk about and teach around getting to really know and understand your ideal clients and what their challenges are and what their desires are, then you should be able to create offers that absolutely speak to those. And you need to be able to price them appropriately for the value.
If you undercharge, that completely affects the perception of the value of what you're offering. So don't think that going in low means you're going to sell more. It never works like that. You can't overprice either. What you need to do is really understand the value to your client of the problem being solved. And then the last thing is that once you're working with a client, you've got to do that work brilliantly.
so that you can ask for referrals and testimonials because that is the momentum starting. As soon as you can start delivering beautiful coaching experiences for your clients, then you can start asking for referrals and testimonials and your word of mouth business starts having momentum. Outside of those six things that I just talked about, honestly, everything else is optional. Everything else is optional. You don't need
every single system and process and strategy under the sun. You need a sleek way of moving someone from coming into your world to paying you and having a great experience of working with you. And we just make it so overly complicated. So I feel like the rewilding move here is we need to actively resist that pull towards complexity.
So when someone's trying to sell you some kind of sophisticated system, I want you to ask yourself, does this actually solve a problem I have or is this kind of addressing a problem that someone else has convinced me I should have? When you're tempted by another certification or training, you know, is this because I genuinely need these skills or am I just avoiding the really simple but sometimes scary work of putting myself out there? I want to share with you
a secret that the gurus just don't want you to know. Everyone who's built a successful coaching business did it through relationships first and systems later. That is the truth. But of course, that's not lining the pockets of the people who are out there selling you the very, very complicated, complex systems, processes, frameworks, blueprints, and the rest of it. For me, I believe that
The work that really matters here, the work that makes the difference here is the internal work, as usual. It's the identity work. How are you going to become the person who trusts their own value enough to make simple, clear offers? How are you going to become the person who believes in their expertise enough that they don't need to wrap it in kind of overly complex packaging? How are you going to be the person
who can have conversations about their work without needing scripts and funnels and fear-based kind of urgency tactics and all of that crap. Because that's the transformation that will change everything. Forcing yourself to simplify your business without doing this identity work can sometimes backfire. Because until you've done the identity work to become that person that trusts themselves enough for things to be simple,
it's going to feel very intimidating because like I said before, we tend to wear complexity like a little bit of an armor, I guess. So that transformation of becoming that person, you know, it doesn't come from buying another course or programming. It comes from just choosing consciously and repeatedly to operate from your actual authority rather than constantly outsourcing it.
to systems. So here's what I want you to do this week. I want you to look at your business right now, all of it, like everything, the tools, the systems, the strategies, the platforms, the frameworks, the social media channels, all of it, and ask yourself, what here is actually serving me versus what am I serving? Because if you're spending more time managing your business infrastructure than actually building relationships,
having conversations, making offers, creating value, then you've probably been sold complexity and now you're hiding behind it. And the antidote to it is not another solution, it's subtraction. It is simplified, it's rewilding your business. It's trusting yourself enough to strip it back to what actually works. And honestly, sometimes this feels risky and that is because we have been so
bombarded with noise around what success looks like, that it feels quite exposing, it feels quite vulnerable to strip things back. But honestly, if you can strip back to relationships, value, offers, delivery, repeat, right? That's it. Everything else is negotiable. So if this resonates with you and you are ready to strip back all that complexity,
and build your business from a place of genuine authority. If you're ready to do that identity work around becoming the coach who builds that business with that level of confidence in how simple it can be, then I want you to apply for a next best move. Call with me. I'm going to pop the link in the show notes. And that's an hour of one-to-one time with me.
It's application only, like I say, because I do only make a few slots available each month. But apply for one of those calls and let's try and figure out what you actually need. What could that simple version of your business look like? Because I will guarantee it will be more effective if it's more simple. Okay. I hope you've enjoyed this episode and yeah, what can you subtract this week? Okay. I will see you back here again. Same time, same place.
next week. Bye for now.
