An Honest Accounting, Part One

My best efforts weren’t good enough: reflecting on a semi-failed business area

Four years ago this month, a storied American retailer reached out cold through a contact form on my website, asking if they could license the Pivot workbook. They wanted to distribute it as a career development resource for full-time employees.

Why yes, you can!

And also: Yessss! It’s working!

Photo by Austin Hervias on Unsplash

Four months ago, after getting The News from My Favorite (Former) Client, I shifted my perspective from loss to one acknowledging all that I—we—had gained.

There was much to be proud of, including tens of thousands of lives we touched and all that we co-created when launching seven and a half years ago, landing one of the biggest companies in the world as my first client, funding my life and business for all those years, the many relationships I made along the way, the amount of information I gathered on how to license IP, the many instructional materials I created and refined, the lessons I learned for onboarding future licensing clients, and shedding light on an extremely opaque business area for fellow ideapreneuers—all of this was a huge success.

But if I’m taking full stock, as we do here at ‘doh, I may as well give an honest accounting of this business area more broadly:

I did not succeed at it, despite my best efforts.*

*I may have also subconsciously sabotaged myself, so there’s that.

In 2015, I set out to remove myself as the stressed, overworked, creatively-blocked bottleneck in my business. I retired from time-for-money trades like 1:1 coaching, shifting intentionally toward scalable, one-to-many recurring revenue streams (with the exception of keynote speaking which paid well and that I enjoyed tremendously).

This took several forms: royalties from book sales and LinkedIn Learning courses, a private community for small business owners, a team of subcontractor coaches for whom I generated clients that we billed on monthly retainer, and the most lucrative—licensing my Pivot IP to companies through annual subscriptions. This was the big kahuna quadrant—the sweet spot of revenue, ease, and joy—where even just a small handful of new clients could change my life.

And yet, after landing my first two licensing clients with global brands in 2017 and 2018, I stalled—just short of my third.