|
Happy Tuesday, Reader! Last week, I talked about the $250K glass ceiling that has existed for women in this country for over a decade. Today, I’m sharing two things you can do about it. Breaking Through Tip #1: Bigger Dollars, Fewer ClientsThe top sectors for women-led start-ups still include retail, health, beauty, food, and support services. These industries often share a common problem: small margins and/or a need for scale to be viable income earners. The way to combat this issue (in the earlier stages of a company under the $250k mark) is to aim for sustainability through higher-ticket, healthy-margin services until the smaller things achieve viable scale. In other words, focus on selling a few expensive services that make good profit, rather than trying to sell lots of small-ticket items right away. This solution could look like:
Breaking Through Tip #2: Curate recurring revenue over investing in one-off sales.The one-sale-at-a-time model is almost impossible to scale, especially in micro-companies where one or two people typically do all the jobs. For many small companies, the key to breaking up with one-offs is focusing on packages, subscriptions, and solutions-based offerings. This solution could look like:
As your smaller-ticket products or services start to generate reliable profit, you can choose to streamline by removing some of your high-ticket offerings. But in the early stages, these higher-priced items can help you fill the revenue gap. Addressing your core business model's realities is essential for breaking through the $250K mark, especially when scalability and funding are in their fragile early stages. This week, take some time to brainstorm how you could apply these strategies to your business. What unique high-ticket offerings or recurring revenue streams could you develop that align with your expertise and customers' needs? Until next time, |
Renia (pronounced R-EE-n-a) Carsillo hates business silos and marketing hacks. So, she spends her days working with mid-size and small companies to integrate their business strategy with their impact strategy, design sustainable marketing frameworks, and find a growth cadence that works for their team and their lives. Renia believes founders are uniquely positioned to create a kinder, more equitable world. She is passionate about bringing C-level strategic support to the small and mid-size companies shaping their communities every day. Renia says, "Sustainable marketing is built on a solid business strategy. A solid business strategy is built on values-driven habits. Values-driven habits are built on healed/healing leaders. We can’t do these things separately. They’re all interconnected. ”
E63: Half of America’s New Business Founders Are Women. The Data Can’t Even See Them. The media spent the summer calling the surge in solo businesses a “fake business boom.” I dug into the data and found something else: just under half of new businesses are started by women, in a dataset that doesn't even track gender. Most small business research is built to leave women-owned companies out entirely, and I talk about why that matters. I also share my own path, from solo owner to a 10-person...
E62: I’m too dumb for Google AI Overviews (And so are you.) Most of us are bad at searching and don't know it, and because we expect Google to be accurate, we trust it more than other LLMs. In this episode, I talk about why I stopped trusting them blindly, and why I've started trusting Reddit, Discord, and actual humans over Google. Scan the code to listen. On your phone? Tap the image instead! Google's AI Overviews are confident, familiar, and wrong more often than you'd think. At least one...
E61: Big Tech’s Continued War on Local Business Small business marketing has depended on Google traffic for over 20 years, and this summer, Renia says Google pulled the rug out. The Small Stage, Big Impact podcast is back, and in this debut episode of Season 6, Renia traces her path from the wide-open, organic internet of the mid-2000s through the rise of algorithm-gaming, the diminishing returns she noticed by 2014, and the brand-first strategy she built in response. Then she shows exactly...