Within the first five minutes, she told me her brain was running at ‘five million miles an hour’.
About forty minutes later, after we’d wandered from pricing to partnerships to a web app she’d built on a train journey, she laughed and said, “You’re going to have to reel me in here all the time.”
I’d already guessed. (And honestly? That’s exactly what the brown paper is for.)
This is the story of one of my Brown Paper business strategy workshops. I’ve kept my client anonymous, but I wanted to share it because I think a lot of you will recognise yourselves in it. I certainly did.
Meet my client
She spent over twenty years in corporate tech, in a client-facing role. A few months before we met, she soft-launched a business helping business owners sort out their technology.
That wasn’t the only plate spinning. She also runs another business in a completely different field, plus several freelance roles in that industry that take up a good chunk of every week. That’s steady, valuable income, and also a lot of hats.
She came to me because the new business was taking off faster than she’d expected, and she wasn’t sure which direction to point it in.
What I Heard at this business strategy workshop
Every business strategy workshop write-up I send starts with “What I Heard”. Before we talk about where someone is going, I play back where they really are. Here’s what I heard at this one.
She has a rare mix of skills. She understands technology, but she also understands people and business. She can sit with a business owner, hear what they’re really trying to achieve, and turn it into something practical. I recognised it straight away, because I spent ten years as a Customer Success Director doing exactly that: sitting between clients and developers who didn’t speak each other’s language.
Her clients weren’t who she expected. She’d planned for brand-new businesses needing help setting up email and the basics. Instead, established business owners were booking. These were people who had collected platforms, subscriptions and half-finished automations over the years and now felt buried by them.
The problem she solves is bigger than ‘tech support’. In her first sessions she had ended up mapping customer journeys and helping clients drop services that didn’t make sense. She was simplifying whole businesses, and the tech came second.
Her ideas are her superpower and her biggest risk. Websites, apps, automations, memberships, a coding qualification: she can learn and build almost anything. There will always be another shiny thing.
Time was the real constraint. It wasn’t ideas and it wasn’t demand. It was time, spread across too many roles, including admin she’d put off because she hated it.
Where she wanted to get to
Point A was clear. Point B: over time, she wants the tech business to become the main part of her income, with her other business carrying on in a lighter form.
She didn’t want to recklessly walk away from steady income to get there. (I’m not a financial risk taker either, so we were in total agreement.)
So the question became: what’s the quickest route from A to B, with the hours she actually has?
The priorities I recommended, and why
1. Let the evidence tell you who it’s for
She’d built the business around the client she expected. Her first clients were telling her something different, and potentially much more valuable. They didn’t want a ‘tech person’. They wanted someone who understood their business first and then made the technology fit around it.
I recommended rewriting her ideal client around the evidence, not the assumption.
Business strategy lesson: your first few clients are telling you who your business is really for. Listen to them before you build anything else.
2. Sell the outcome, not the hours
Her half-day session was selling brilliantly, and people were choosing it over her cheaper entry offer. But it was priced by the hour, and she was over-delivering. One session ran to nearly five hours for a half-day price. In another, she gave away an extra hour for free because she was worried about proving her worth. (We’ve all done it.)
We talked about the idea of “solve my tech problem in a day”. The value isn’t the hours. It’s removing a problem that’s been sitting in someone’s head for months.
In the meantime, her current half day becomes the learning ground. After every client, she captures what problem they arrived with, what she did, what they left with, and what they’d have paid to make the problem go away.
She should also capture the savings. One client was paying for two email platforms. I’ll be honest, so am I (I’m sorting it, I promise). Cancelling one forgotten subscription can pay for a session on its own. That’s a message that sells itself.
Business strategy lesson: price on the problem you remove, not the time it takes you. Let real clients shape your offer rather than inventing it at your desk.
3. Build recurring income, but put a fence around it
A business that needs brand-new clients every single month is exhausting. I’ve learnt that the hard way. Having regular income land at the start of every month takes so much pressure off.
We talked about aiming for roughly half her income to come from recurring clients. Her monthly support offer is a starting point that needs refining. It should be deliberately bounded, have a minimum term, and only be offered once she’s worked with someone and understands their business.
Business strategy lesson: don’t start every month at zero. But don’t create an unlimited support service that quietly becomes another job.
4. Don’t build everything you can build
This is the one I think will matter most. When you’re capable of building almost anything, deciding what not to build is a skill in itself.
So we created an ‘ideas car park’. New ideas go there, rather than straight into a new project. For the next few months, new skills and tools go into solving client problems better, not into launching another product.
Business strategy lesson: don’t confuse possibility with priority.
What we parked
Sometimes the most useful part of a workshop is what you decide not to do.
An app. She had a genuinely interesting idea for an app for membership and networking groups. It’s parked under ‘future opportunity’. The strongest products come from seeing the same problem again and again, so prove the service first and let your clients show you what’s worth building.
A partnership. It would have meant giving away half the revenue for access to an audience that was already very price-sensitive. The numbers didn’t stack up.
Another qualification. Learn because it expands what you can deliver, not because you need another badge before you’re allowed to charge properly.
Bringing it all together
She didn’t need more ideas. She needed enough focus to prove which of her existing ideas deserves to become the business.
That meant getting clear on who it’s really for, selling outcomes rather than hours, building recurring income with a fence around it, and parking everything else for now. She’d already started handing admin over to a VA, and we agreed she’d keep moving more across as cash flow allows. She should be showing up for the work only she can do.
The goal isn’t to become more disciplined at doing work you hate. It’s to build a business where less of it needs to be done by you.
Watch this space…
I’ll be catching up with her at her three-month momentum call, and I’ll share how she’s got on. Did the car park hold? Did the full-day offer land? Watch this space.
In the meantime, if you’ve got 101 ideas and not enough hours, this is exactly what my Brown Paper Strategy Workshop is for. It’s two hours at my kitchen table in Hockley, with brown paper, coloured pens and Buck greeting you at the door. You get a written plan within one working day, then a 30-day check-in and a three-month momentum call to keep the momentum going.
January dates are filling up. Book a discovery call and secure your slot.
