Experimenting With Your Business Model with Jessica Lackey

When you started your business, you probably imagined steady revenue growth under your original business model—only to discover that the only way to grow the way you want is by experimenting! Business Coach Jessica Lackey (a McKinsey and Nike alum) shares her year-by-year experience in crafting her ideal business model:

How she contracted for “bridge jobs” in Year 1 to ensure cash flow—and why she’d do it again.

Year 2: building a “whale” delivery model with enough whales so you’re not overly dependent on any one.

Why she pivoted from a 1-1 delivery model to group and membership options (and it wasn’t because she had a large email list).

The pros and cons of running multiple revenue models as you pivot vs. making a faster shift.

How building interchangeable assets allows you to leverage your authority faster.

LINKS

Jessica Lackey Website | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Jessica Lackey is a strategy and operations advisor who blends business strategy, practical application, and a human-centric approach to create sustainable businesses.

With a background in corporate leadership, McKinsey & Company consulting, and a Harvard Business degree, Jessica knows a thing or two about hustle culture and what it feels like to judge success by the bottom line…at all costs.

Now, she combines her deep experience in consulting, Fortune 500 operations leadership and coaching to help businesses grow without sacrificing the well-being of their clients, team, and community.

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00 – 00:19
Jessica Lackey: I had a social media team, but I actually dropped Instagram in 2023 and I stopped doing as much LinkedIn. And I really focused on those marketing platforms that took more time, but had a bigger result. So again, I write once a week, I guess teach once a month. And people are like, you do that for free? I’m like, well, yeah.

00:24 – 01:05
Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rochelle Moulton, and today I’m joined by soloist Jessica Lackey. She is a strategy and operations advisor who blends business strategy, practical application, and a human-centric approach to create sustainable businesses. With a background in corporate leadership, McKinsey & Company consulting, and a Harvard Business degree, Jessica knows a thing or 2 about hustle culture and what it feels like to judge success by the bottom line at all costs. Now she combines her deep experience in consulting, Fortune 500 operations

01:05 – 01:15
Rochelle Moulton: leadership, and coaching to help businesses grow without sacrificing the well-being of their clients, team, and community. Jessica, welcome.

01:16 – 01:17
Jessica Lackey: Yay. I’m so glad to be here.

01:17 – 01:29
Rochelle Moulton: Well, I feel like we’re kindred spirits here, like escaping from big firm consulting and evangelizing on building sustainable businesses without buying into hustle culture. So let’s just dive in.

01:29 – 01:31
Jessica Lackey: Sounds Good. First, your

01:31 – 01:43
Rochelle Moulton: resume reads like a who’s who of American business. Harvard, McKinsey, Nike. You even interned at Apple. What made you decide to leave all that to start your soloist business?

01:44 – 02:14
Jessica Lackey: When you work in firms like that, there’s, as you know, there’s a real upper out culture. And these are places that will suck the life out of you if you let them. And in my 20s, like I did, McKinsey and Company Consulting, I was on the road, as you know, you are Arthur Anderson, 4 days a week, sometimes 5 days a week. Like I gave up my Sundays, I gave up my Fridays. I didn’t have roots in town. All my friends were working. And that kind of moved with me to business school and that moved with

02:14 – 02:46
Jessica Lackey: me to Nike. Nike, it’s so cool as a campus, there’s the gym, there’s restaurants and beer on campus, but it’s really kind of designed to keep you in the berm, as they call it. Literally, they have a track and things like that. I was working 12 hours a day. The 1 job I was in, I was working weekends. And I realized at some point I had a health crisis and I realized, I’m like, okay, I have no life. I was making good money, but I didn’t want the next step up on the ladder. And so I

02:46 – 02:51
Jessica Lackey: hit kind of a wall in 2015 and decided, all right, it’s time for me to do something different.

02:51 – 02:55
Rochelle Moulton: Well, yeah, because it doesn’t get any better when you go higher up the ladder. It usually gets harder.

02:56 – 03:18
Jessica Lackey: They tell you it gets better. And really, what’s interesting is that you end up with more responsibility. But a lot of these places, you end up with more politics, you end up farther away from actually doing the work and much more Pushing powerpoints around and that wasn’t I didn’t want to play the politics I didn’t want to be mucking around a PowerPoint our day I wanted to solve real problems in the the farther up the organization I got, the less I got to do that.

03:18 – 03:36
Rochelle Moulton: Well, preach, sister. That’s exactly what it was like being a partner at a big firm. And the minute I got there, I was like, oh, finally, I’ve arrived. And then you look around and you go, oh, crap. It’s like, now I have to do this every day. Yeah, it’s a bit of a change, isn’t it?

03:37 – 03:44
Jessica Lackey: Definitely. I’m thankful I had the experience, but at some point I was like, this is not the life for my second chapter in my professional career.

03:45 – 04:12
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, exactly. So 1 of the reasons that I wanted to have you on the show is that you’ve done some really intriguing Experimenting with your business model as you’ve grown. It’s it’s like you’ve served as your own Petri dish Which I love especially for soloists. So year 1 if I have this right so you started coaching but you subcontracted to a consulting firm to keep the cash flowing. So talk us through how that worked and why you made the decisions you did.

04:13 – 04:40
Jessica Lackey: Yeah. So a little bit of backstory. I tried, I got certified as a life coach because I thought I wanted to be a life and leadership coach in 2018. And I tried to build a coaching business as a side hustle 2019, 2020. And yeah, I mean, you know, I was working 1 of those big jobs where I was, you know, I didn’t have time. I didn’t have the mental mind space. So in 2021, I knew I was going to leave. I hadn’t really done any biz dev. I had connections, but I was like, I don’t really

04:40 – 05:11
Jessica Lackey: know what I want to do for my personal business. I was like, I just don’t want to be at my job anymore. And so I quit thinking, I was like, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll figure it out. And so I did my first year was all the subcontracting through a bunch of those matching platforms and with another firm. So I was through some connections. I got connected with, again, I did project management for a rebranding company. I did sales and operations consulting through, I got matched on a platform. I didn’t actually know the firm

05:11 – 05:42
Jessica Lackey: I was going into. It was 1 of those like a BTG or Catalan. I think I was with Graphite there. And then some of my former colleagues from Nike started up a consulting firm. They didn’t have a huge book of business, but I got to be part of some of those projects, which was really great because I got to show up and be an analyst associate from a consulting perspective without having to do any biz dev. It certainly wasn’t the top money, but it was a way for me to get paid in fractional part-time work, which

05:42 – 05:44
Jessica Lackey: was fantastic for the first year.

05:44 – 05:51
Rochelle Moulton: Well, yeah, it’s kind of like an easy glide path into seeing what it’s like. And if you hadn’t liked it, it wouldn’t be so hard to go back.

05:52 – 06:22
Jessica Lackey: Exactly. And I’m super thankful that I quit during the pandemic where everyone was at home and it was normalized to be fractional. It was, You could do part-time, you could show up for the calls you need to show up to, do your work, but not have to be on site. I don’t know if this would have been as doable of as an opportunity 2019-2018 before it got normalized that we worked from home, But I was thankful that it happened when it did. I didn’t have to do a ton of my own biz dev during the first

06:22 – 06:26
Jessica Lackey: year and ended up making money. It was great.

06:26 – 06:30
Rochelle Moulton: Well, of course, that’s the question I’m gonna ask. How long did it take you to hit your first 100, 000?

06:32 – 06:34
Jessica Lackey: I hit my first 100, 000 in my first year.

06:34 – 06:36
Rochelle Moulton: With those contracts? Those contracts, you

06:36 – 06:57
Jessica Lackey: know, when you’re billing a hundred dollars an hour on a 20 hour a week consulting project, even if that’s not nearly the kind of money you want to be making, It was easy to do in the first year, but I didn’t. 70% of that was all through these contract jobs. I think I made 30K in my first year from business coaching and consulting under my own

06:57 – 07:08
Rochelle Moulton: brand name. Okay. So that was going to be my next question. So you were doing both. You were doing some business development for yourself, but the big kahuna, the big percentage of your revenue came from these other deals.

07:08 – 07:39
Jessica Lackey: Exactly. So I think I got my first business coaching client. I quit in March. I got my first business coaching client in June or July. That’s not bad. Yeah, and I got my second 1 in September and then I got my third major 1 in December. So it took me quite a while to, I work on a retainer model for many of my clients. So once I get 1, then it’s not a 1 and done type of project for my own business. So I kind of built 1, then the second and the third. But it took

07:39 – 07:48
Jessica Lackey: me, you know, if I hadn’t had these other consulting jobs, I’m not sure what I would have done with my time, honestly, because there’s only so many hours a day you can do networking when you’re starting.

07:48 – 07:56
Rochelle Moulton: Well, and you don’t want to have that sense of desperation, because people can smell it on you. So it sounds like it was a nice balance of those 2 for year 1, right?

07:57 – 08:19
Jessica Lackey: Yeah, and my husband actually told me, I was terrified about how I was going to get my first client, but I was like, okay, well, I have enough money. I made a bonus right before I left. So I was like, okay, well, I can, you know, I have an extra 3 months of salary. And then I got a call from 1 of the, my friend put me in touch with a matching platform and They said, hey, do you want a project? I’m like, okay, I was planning to take some time off. And then of course I

08:19 – 08:25
Jessica Lackey: didn’t. Resh respect, I probably shouldn’t have taken the time off, but I was terrified I was never gonna get that first client, so I jumped right in.

08:25 – 08:38
Rochelle Moulton: You’re not alone, that happens a lot. Okay, so take us forward. We’re gonna go to year 2. So do you still have these consulting contracts in year 2? Are you still doing that or do you stop?

08:38 – 09:12
Jessica Lackey: So I am not doing the subcontracting anymore through the matching platforms. That was year 1. But in year 2, What happened is 1 of the consulting, I was working again with some colleagues from Nike, they had some projects so I did those. But interestingly enough, 1 of the clients that I picked up in year 1 from a business coaching perspective, they let go of their CLO, they were a seed stage startup, and they said, will you step in to do fractional COO? So I went from doing subcontracting and doing strategy work to now actually being a

09:12 – 09:28
Jessica Lackey: fractional COO for 6 months. So I worked, I had like a part-time job, not even doing consulting, but doing in the business, running reports, running an account management process. I ran a fractional COO for a startup for 6 months with an existing client.

09:29 – 09:35
Rochelle Moulton: Let me just make sure. Do you still have your 3 retainer clients that you had from year 1?

09:35 – 09:48
Jessica Lackey: I did. I’ve had 3 of those. I picked up some additional coaching clients at that point in time, but 1 of those retainer clients, we went from, I think, a thousand dollar a month retainer to a $5, 000 a month fractional COO gig.

09:48 – 09:55
Rochelle Moulton: The fractional. Yeah. Okay. Got it. And how many clients did you have total? Just roughly.

09:55 – 09:58
Jessica Lackey: I think at that time, like 6 or so clients at that time.

09:59 – 10:25
Rochelle Moulton: Well, here’s why I’m asking is because a lot of people get stuck with this idea and they stop when they get to the 2 or 3 whales because they’re like, that’s all I can do. I can’t do anymore. And when you have 6, you’ve insulated yourself quite a bit, even if half of them drop off, you’ve still got a decent book of business, what I call a whale model. You don’t need 60 clients, you need 6 or 10 or whatever your magic number is.

10:26 – 10:53
Jessica Lackey: Yeah. And everyone asks me how I managed to have, for my first 2 years, I had 1 whale client at a time and a bunch of other little ones, little as the eye of the eye of the holder, but you know, 1 like 5 to $8, 000 either fractional COO gig or consulting gig. And people are like, how did you manage having a bigger client and like a bunch of small ones? And the nice part about it is because it’s flexible, I could manage in the pockets of time that I had. And so, you know, as

10:53 – 11:18
Jessica Lackey: a soloist, sometimes the time where I get to do focus work on my COO client was on a Sunday morning because that’s when it made sense. I could really focus. And on other times it was sometimes hard for me to do a lot of like deeper dive work on when I had like coaching calls that day. So I structured my calendar to say, when can I serve my big client and when can I serve more of the in and out context switching coaching clients?

11:19 – 11:38
Rochelle Moulton: So if I had to sort of summarize year 2 from a big picture perspective, you got away from these matching relationships. You basically doubled your client base, but you also significantly expanded 1 of those relationships in particular and discovered the glories of fractional work.

11:39 – 11:39
Jessica Lackey: Yes, I did.

11:39 – 11:46
Rochelle Moulton: Yes. So should we go to year 3 or was there anything else that you kind of, some seeds that you planted in year 2?

11:47 – 12:16
Jessica Lackey: Yeah, So year 2, I actually started my first round of a group business coaching model. So it was in the fall of 2022. I realized that, again, in order to keep growing my revenue, I wasn’t going to be able to take on, I thought at the time I was going to be taking on more clients, we’ll talk about your 4, but I couldn’t take on more clients at the price point I wanted to serve for that audience, which is small business owners. So I started a group coaching model, coaching program. And this 1, it was, there

12:16 – 12:41
Jessica Lackey: was no big launch. I think I invited, I had like 200 people on my list at the time. And I think it was 8 loom videos. They were like 5 to 10 minutes talking about some concepts. And then it was 6 weeks of teaching and 4 months of Q&A. And I had like 5 people sign up and they were all people I knew and they were all people from my local network who said, yes, I’m in for this round. There was no big launch. There was no fancy tagging or anything like that. There was no course

12:41 – 13:00
Jessica Lackey: platform. It was here’s the link to register. And I taught live. Love it. Did you record? Oh, I recorded and I posted, I think I had a Mighty Networks at the time. So I recorded, but I didn’t have worksheets. I didn’t have templates. I just had like a 5 minute loom video where I taught about some concepts and then we did it all live.

13:00 – 13:17
Rochelle Moulton: I love that because it’s starting with, I mean, think about it. Not having to do all that other stuff meant there wasn’t really any pressure on you to fill, and I use that word in quotes, to fill your class, right? You just get a chance to try it out and see what works and your investment is fairly small.

13:17 – 13:32
Jessica Lackey: It was great. And I know what it takes now to put a whole program like that together, which was year 3. But it was so, it was low effort. It really was just an opportunity to, and I didn’t sell hard. They all came from personal limitations. I didn’t have a fancy sales page.

13:32 – 14:01
Rochelle Moulton: I was like, here’s a Google doc. It was just really nice to step into that with low effort on all sides. I’m just loving this. Your experimentation is just genius. So now we’re in year 3. So you’ve got this group program now, you’ve experimented with that. So in year 3, how do you see the business evolving? I mean, did you have a plan at the beginning or were you kind of waiting to see what would happen with all these different revenue streams you’ve set up?

14:01 – 14:25
Jessica Lackey: So in year 3, I thought I wanted to scale through an agency model. I was like, I’m gonna have a group, but everyone’s like, you know, to scale, you need to have a team. And so I was like, I have the author. I’m gonna be an operations agency. I didn’t really know what that meant at the time. So I stopped, I moved from my big, my whale client, I said, we’re gonna go back down. You need more than fractional at this point. You need full-time role So I trained that team we ramped back down to advisory

14:25 – 14:58
Jessica Lackey: work, but then I picked up 3 Fractional COO clients that were under my brand name where I was still working. We’d have a live call every week. I would work 3 to 4 hours a week on their work. So it was smaller hour commitment, but I had now even more clients through Fractional COO for again, service-based businesses and more coaching and consulting clients that are just straight up business advisory. And then I started to grow my group offerings even more around instead of running 1 round, I ran a round in the spring and a round in

14:58 – 15:17
Jessica Lackey: the fall. So at that point in time, we went from having 6 clients to having 10 plus enrolling 30 people, you know, maybe really 20 into a group program. So we went from, you know, 6 to understanding the business mechanics of 30, Which was a big jump there, which meant I

15:17 – 15:29
Rochelle Moulton: had to fully let go of all my corporate consulting gigs at that point. This is so interesting. So at that point, did you hire contractors to help you or were you still solo at this point?

15:29 – 16:04
Jessica Lackey: I was still solo in the delivery. At this point, I hired a podcast pitching agency. I hired a social media firm. I hired a tech team to help me with administering the course. I was still doing all of the client-facing work, but I had teams, what I call the adjacent parts of the business, doing some of the more repeatable marketing and course platform activities. I do recognize that it’s so funny. I probably spent as much on the team as I made money in the group programs in some cases. Yeah. But then I had them. They did

16:04 – 16:16
Jessica Lackey: other things like they helped me, you know, not just like set those things up, but set the foundation for some other tech back end in the business. But yeah, I there was no way I could keep all of the marketing going in all the places with that kind of client load.

16:17 – 16:29
Rochelle Moulton: And so what was happening with your email list at this time? So you said you had 200 when you pitched your first group. Has your email list been steadily growing at this point or has it kind of topped off?

16:29 – 16:57
Jessica Lackey: Yeah, it’s been growing. I think we’re at like a thousand now and I write every single Sunday. It goes out once, you know, it’s super consistent. It goes out 10 AM on Sundays. I’m teaching a free class once a month. Because I recognize that you have to, if you’re, if you do anything with kind of any kind of scale or leverage, you have to have the audience for it. I didn’t have the audience for it because I spent the first 2 years doing the consulting side where I could rely on 1 to 2 matching platforms and

16:57 – 17:07
Jessica Lackey: be fine. So I was going super hard on audience growth in 2023, which is why I had the social media team and the podcast pitching team and the tech team.

17:08 – 17:40
Rochelle Moulton: Your tech team. Well, and I think, you know, what I want to point out for the audience, if they haven’t figured this out yet, is that it is possible, depending on your model and how you approach building your audience, that you can sell some of these things with a relatively small email list, right? Because you sold what 5 spots with a 200 person email list. That’s not a bad percentage. It’s about average, I guess. What’s that? About 2%. So it’s a little bit better than average. 1% to 2% is usually typical. So you can have a

17:40 – 17:55
Rochelle Moulton: really good result with a surprising number of people on the list if you’re keeping them warm and everything’s consistent. A lot of stars had to align here, but I can feel the work that went into this.

17:55 – 18:27
Jessica Lackey: It was really focused on how can I get, do more? I had a social media team, but I actually dropped Instagram in 2023 and I stopped doing as much LinkedIn. And I really focused on those marketing platforms that took more time, but had a bigger result. So again, I write once a week, I guest teach once a month, and people are like, you do that for free? I’m like, well, yeah, that’s not for everybody, but for me, it was, I’m like, I don’t have a list. So I’ve gotta do more and have more depth and more

18:27 – 18:45
Jessica Lackey: relationship with the people who do know me. And I’ve joined a bunch of communities and met a lot of people. And again, all those things took a lot of time, but that meant I didn’t have to wait quite so long to start some of these more leveraged offers because people saw that I was consistently showing up and deepening the relationship with the people that were in my orbit.

18:46 – 18:50
Rochelle Moulton: And so social media wise, LinkedIn, is that 1 of your platforms?

18:50 – 19:20
Jessica Lackey: Yes, I mean, I’m there. I show up. I have a post or 2 a week. But I found that most people don’t find me on LinkedIn. They find me from some other place, like someone else has mentioned me and they go see me on LinkedIn, but I don’t have, LinkedIn is not a real discovery platform for me, just because at that time that was when the templatization of LinkedIn was really kicking in and the feed started to get real funky. So I’m like, I’m here, I’ll participate, but I’m not going to count on LinkedIn as a

19:20 – 19:24
Jessica Lackey: discovery platform. I did a lot of other things that get my work out in front of people.

19:25 – 19:36
Rochelle Moulton: OK, so this all makes sense. So year 4, because I know you have a membership program. So was that year 4 or did it start in year 3?

19:36 – 20:00
Jessica Lackey: No, it started in year 4. What’s so interesting is that, you know, they always say, especially as you’re I don’t know if this is a common statement, but like the best customers are the ones that have already paid you. Because once if someone’s already said, yes, I opt into not just hearing from you, but learning from you and investing in you in some way, shape or form, that they’re paying attention. And so I was teaching these free classes once a month and people were asking me for replays and bringing their friends. And I said, you know

20:00 – 20:30
Jessica Lackey: what, how can I serve the people that show up to these every month? So I’ve created a membership program where it’s all the replays, it’s extra bonus templates, and it’s a small community. I don’t want to cannibalize my group program too much by over teaching in that section, but it’s a lightweight, it’s kind of like my version of a sub stack subscription, but on a membership platform. So it’s very lightweight community, but it’s more focused on like more of a content membership and it’s great. We’ve had like, I launched that in June. I have 30 people

20:30 – 21:01
Jessica Lackey: now is part of the membership plus a all of my students, all my one-on-one clients and my program students get access for as long as their clients of mine. And the great part about the membership is that there’s a real community that’s been building around people who want to not use social media for marketing, who like the way I talk about my work, who are past clients and present clients and in my orbit. And it really makes people feel like they’re a part of something and which makes selling the group program a little easier and actually

21:01 – 21:03
Jessica Lackey: provides a nice compliment to my one-on-one service.

21:03 – 21:35
Rochelle Moulton: Gotcha. I love how they’re feeding each other. So 1 of the things I found really intriguing about your membership program, I wanted to ask you about this, is that it looks like you have this 2 level offering. There’s the deeper business membership, which has a much lower price point than, frankly, than I would have expected. It’s $30 a month, at least that’s what’s still on your website. And then you have this higher level, 2 times a year program at 10 times that price point. So how did you look at the positioning and pricing for these 2

21:35 – 21:38
Rochelle Moulton: programs? What was that thought process behind that?

21:38 – 22:06
Jessica Lackey: Yeah. So the membership is really, again, it’s my equivalent of a sub stack membership and subscription. So $20 a month feels really nice for that. It’s a class once a month, it’s a Q&A. I could probably charge more for it when I add more things to it, if I add more things to it. But I also didn’t have the capacity to make it a real community right now because I have still a fair amount of Legacy, like higher touch clients. But I wanted it to be something that was a no-brainer for people to be like, yes,

22:06 – 22:36
Jessica Lackey: I totally want to hear more from you. And it’s a super, I don’t want to say an impulse buy, but it can be. And the Deeper Foundations program, many other business building programs are priced around the $2, 000 to $5, 000. Mine’s on the low end, but I want it to be something where I’d rather get more people in. It’s capped at $15, 000, but I’d rather get more people to say yes. And I’m also just personally tired of like, I’m like, if you’re, if you’re someone who’s making $5, 000 top line a month or less,

22:37 – 22:58
Jessica Lackey: I know what your business finances look like. I know you don’t have the money to like, I mean, the people that have like a $6, 000 or $25, 000 mastermind drive me bonkers. I’m like, They don’t have the money for this. Why are you charging this? This is ethically irresponsible for me. That’s just my point of view on it. So I was like, I kind of actually serve… 1 time I served in my audience, I said, what do you want to pay for this? And they said about $200. I’m like, great, that’s what the price is

22:58 – 23:02
Jessica Lackey: going to be. And then I bumped it up a little bit from there. But my goal

23:02 – 23:20
Rochelle Moulton: is to fill the program, not at the price that feels as like a mutual exchange. So with the people in the higher end of the 2, do you see those people becoming one-to-one clients or is your long-term goal really to build these group programs and adjust over time?

23:21 – 23:48
Jessica Lackey: So I find that the business owners for the deeper foundations a lot of times are soloists but not in a consulting capacity. They’re soloists that are doing more, I would say hands-on, I call it the craftsman style of work. Some of them are coaches, but some of them are graphic designers and copywriters. And depending on who you serve, there’s a hard cap on the amount of money you’re going to make and the levers you’re going to be able to pull. If you’re a graphic designer working with other small business owners, there’s a market rate for that.

23:48 – 24:18
Jessica Lackey: So I want to be like, all right, how can we focus on the business foundations there? For my one-on-one clients, I’m hoping to transition a lot of that to a hybrid one-on-one plus group model where we’re doing more, now that you’re established, probably serve a higher end clientele with a more consulting or some other kind of expertise based model where there’s a potential for more scale or at least a bigger footprint. So it’s the business owners at the strength and stage. I’m hoping to serve with like a one-on-one hybrid model where maybe I do, there’s some

24:18 – 24:27
Jessica Lackey: like course material on how to hire and how to write SOPs and how to think about more formal marketing system at that level, but still with a lot of one-on-one support.

24:27 – 24:37
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, so what’s so interesting about this is probably, if we had asked you when you first started your business if this is what it would look like in year 4, you would have said no.

24:39 – 25:04
Jessica Lackey: I looked at my first 1 of my first proposals was for fractional chief of staff work. It was for someone who was a couple years ahead of me in business and his business back end was kind of a mess. And I said, I can help. And I was positioning myself. I thought I was going to position myself as like a project manager and as a, a doer, like a true chief of staff, right? I’m going to manage your team and I’m going to take on 2 to 3 well clients at a time. That was kind of

25:04 – 25:27
Jessica Lackey: what I thought I was going to do. The more I got into it and the more I started learning, the more I realized there’s some gaps in the marketplace about I love and I reference your work all the time on the business of authority. And then my kind of pitch is like the business of business, but that’s all my corporate background. No 1 was teaching some of the more business systems concepts that I was teaching. I was having to learn it myself and I’m like, well, no one’s teaching this. And I love teaching and I love

25:27 – 25:59
Jessica Lackey: writing. Thought I was going to be a services model And it turns out I want to be a creator. And so I’m in the middle of making the pivot. I’m kind of in that weird tension point of like, holding on to my services while I’m doing the creator style work and building audience, doing both at the same time, would not recommend for most people because I outsource a lot, but I’m also paying with my time, recognizing that I’m in that threshold point crossing from 1 business model to the other where I’m trying to make a hard

25:59 – 26:01
Jessica Lackey: pivot. Again, I

26:01 – 26:34
Rochelle Moulton: want to point out to the audience that this is what’s so interesting about the first few years in a business because we can go into this thinking we know exactly what we want and then we start doing it and we’re like, oh, maybe I don’t like this. Maybe this doesn’t fit my genius.” Or you see changes in the market, which you did, and you say, I like to do that with these kinds of people. So I love the openness. And the flip side is, yes, it’s probably harder the way that you’ve done this pivot, but you’ve

26:34 – 26:44
Rochelle Moulton: also had a safety net underneath you from the way that you did it, right? A financial safety net. So I think everybody has to make that decision for themselves in their situation.

26:45 – 26:45
Jessica Lackey: Oh, yeah.

26:45 – 27:26
Rochelle Moulton: Well, there’s something that’s been a thread throughout this conversation that I wanted to bring up because you started this wonderful conversation on LinkedIn about the difference and you’ve just alluded to this between creator led businesses and delivery led businesses. So to summarize, creator style businesses lean more heavily on creator style tactics, like ads and social and lots of content creation and sales. Delivery style businesses tilt towards delivery style tactics like one-to-one relationship building and personalized follow-up. So I think the point you were making is that if you’re not 100% in either camp, it’s hard to figure

27:26 – 27:31
Rochelle Moulton: out exactly what will work. I just think not enough people are talking about this.

27:32 – 28:02
Jessica Lackey: Yeah, I think what’s interesting about this is that they go together, but I think it’s important to recognize, am I playing a relationship game right now? Or am I playing a delivery game? Or am I playing a creator game? Now there are things that I call them interchangeable assets that are going to be helpful to you, no matter if you’re trying to build 1 business, the other writing a book, for example, or at least writing the blog post and the methodology for that. That’s both really great content if you want to turn creator, but it’s also

28:02 – 28:33
Jessica Lackey: fantastic thinking if you’re a service delivery based business. So I think there’s a lot of things that can cross over if you’re trying to sell 1 on 1 consulting and you have no content, long form evergreen style pillar content on your site to prove your authority, it’s going to be a much harder sales process. By the way, that stuff can also go on social media. So I think there’s… But recognizing what purpose does this play and can I create multipurpose assets? But if I were trying to create a delivery style business, I’m like, there’s no way

28:33 – 28:51
Jessica Lackey: in heck I would spend time on short form video editing with reels and clips and things like that because that’s not, I don’t think that’s establishing authority for a consultancy. That’s just my point of view on it. But I think recognizing what tactic am I pulling out and where does this fit in my system is really helpful.

28:51 – 29:02
Rochelle Moulton: Oh, yeah. I mean, I thought it was really interesting when you said, yeah, I let go of Instagram. What was your thinking about that? It just wasn’t performing for you or Was it the whole video thing was just overwhelming?

29:02 – 29:32
Jessica Lackey: It’s funny. I ditched Instagram because it was single purpose and it was actually not meeting my client. So I stopped Instagram, put up a static grid and used the money to hire a YouTube editor. I spent like a year making my studio look awesome, which I’m actually really proud of. You can’t see it on the video. But I said, if I’m gonna be running 4 different business models, then everything I do needs to be an explicit part of a system and it needs to do multiple things. So YouTube has great discovery and also it’s bingeable content

29:32 – 29:58
Jessica Lackey: so that if people find me from referrals, they don’t have to wait for the next thing to show up in the feed, they can go look at the playlist. I have an illustrator that’s creating some graphics for the videos. And by the way, those are graphics that I use in my teaching. They are graphics that I use in the book I’m writing because of course girls got to have a book. I’m trying to put like 7 years of business growth in like 3 years. It’s would not recommend for anybody, but nothing is single purpose. And so

29:58 – 30:07
Jessica Lackey: when I have clients that I say, Oh, watch this YouTube video on a topic that I taught and it goes multiple places. So it doesn’t just like show up in the feed and die.

30:07 – 30:37
Rochelle Moulton: Yes. Weirdly, that is a thing that I love about YouTube. I find my audience isn’t really on YouTube. But what I love about it is that the assets never go away. Like on LinkedIn and Twitter, try finding something, unless you’re a celebrity who did something terrible, right? Try finding something that was 3 months old or a year old or older. So yeah, the whole idea of having bingeable content really works. Do you have an audience there or are you sending them there from someplace else?

30:37 – 31:03
Jessica Lackey: So, I have a whole 190 subscribers on YouTube right now. So, it’s been 6 months or a little more than that. I know I’ll post that often. Every 2 weeks is about the cadence I can do. But I have like, some people find me through LinkedIn. I did a takedown of Slow Productivity by Cal Newport and that video got some views. But I’ve had at least 1 person say, I watched a bunch of your YouTube videos. They were really helpful when they booked a call with me.

31:03 – 31:20
Rochelle Moulton: Excellent. OK, well, I know you listen to the show, so you know what question I’m going to ask you next. So if you could go back to who you were 4 years ago when you first started your business, what is the 1 thing that you’d advise her to do?

31:21 – 31:48
Jessica Lackey: Well, the good news is that the thing I would have advised me to do is the thing that I did, which was have bridge jobs. I didn’t know this at the time. I didn’t have language for it at the time, but I had no idea how long the business cycle would take for new business. So I kind of, that was my safety net, but I would have made that my plan. I would have assumed that it was going to take me, it took me 3 years with all the expenses involved. It took me 3 years to

31:48 – 32:16
Jessica Lackey: build a sustainable book of business. When I say sustainable book of business, this was I have people reaching out for inquiries who I have not personally talked to. That’s what I define as like sustainable book of business for me is that it wasn’t my personal network, it wasn’t people I knew. It took me 3 years for that to become a reliable source of income for me. I’m so thankful I did that. The other piece of advice I’d always give is you can have a banger of a first year, but if you’re not doing consistent network development,

32:17 – 32:23
Jessica Lackey: your second and third year are challenging. And if you can get in front of that, that would be the better option.

32:23 – 32:45
Rochelle Moulton: Oh, yeah. Preach into the choir. That second year can be hell if your first year was basically 1 client that was a referral who wanted to help you out in your 1. Because in a way, it’s like the worst case where you’re thinking, wow, this is awesome. I’m running this great business. And then you realize, oh, this is 1 whale and they just kissed me goodbye.

32:46 – 33:10
Jessica Lackey: Yes. My first couple of clients were all people that wanted to be, I mean, they wanted me to work with them, like my first clients I got under my own name, they were clients that wanted me to work with them through my personal network, kind of out of the goodness of their hearts. And we did great work together. I’m not going to say that we didn’t do good work together, but it took me a while to get the messaging down and what my positioning down. And I’m so thankful that I had jobs that kind of relied

33:10 – 33:39
Jessica Lackey: on my past corporate experience to fund me as I figured that out, because I would have freaked out and probably gone back and gotten like a job job. If I had only made $30, 000 in my buy myself like that wouldn’t cover my bills that wouldn’t cover my rent. I’m so thankful I had that like diversification back in now that does mean you have to be way more conscious of like the time management and saying like, okay, well, I’m not going to be all sucked in on my corporate consulting gigs. I need to do biz dev.

33:39 – 33:41
Jessica Lackey: It needs to be a solid block of time. This is non-negotiable.

33:42 – 33:51
Rochelle Moulton: Yes, totally agree. So Jessica, we’ll be putting all sorts of links to you and your content in the show notes, but where’s the best place for people to learn more about you?

33:51 – 34:03
Jessica Lackey: They can learn more about me at jessicalackie.com backslash welcome that has a link to my newsletter, my YouTube channel, my what stage of business quiz are you in and ability to learn a little bit more about what I do.

34:03 – 34:28
Rochelle Moulton: Awesome. Well, Jessica, thank you so much. I mean, I really appreciate your transparency about the challenges and the pivots of starting the business. And I love that you’re 4 years in, in a good place, but you’re still figuring it out. Because I think that that’s, that’s where a lot of us wind up, right? We’re always experimenting as we figure out what the next best step is. So thank you.

34:28 – 34:40
Jessica Lackey: I always say this is my the longest job I’ve ever had. And the first job I haven’t wanted to leave. And so I’m 3 years in, I’m like, what do I do now? Oh my goodness, what do I do? This is like the longest I’ve ever been in a particular role. So it’s, it’s exciting to be on the journey.

34:41 – 34:57
Rochelle Moulton: So as we wrap up this episode, if you haven’t joined my email list yet, now is the time Your soloist business and your future self will thank you. The link is in the show notes. That’s it for this episode. Please join us next time for the soloist life. Bye bye. Bye bye.