Hey Reader,

I said this to Jo in passing this week, but it's stuck with me. We're entrepreneurs, small business owners, and we definitely shouldn't have "red tape" to cut through when we get excited about things. Don't we make the rules? 🤔

Somehow, my MBA "container ship" business planning had crept into some of our Q4 planning, and we were revisiting if that really was the right approach for us. But first, what do I mean by this:

• Speedboats are fast, nimble, and easy to turn & pivot, mostly because they're small and can't fit that many people.
• Container Ships are slow, big, and don't do anything quickly, but they fit a lot of people/cargo, and on a per-unit basis, they transport things very cheaply (see how cheaply we get things from China).

They're both uniquely suited for what they're good at, but things go haywire real fast when you don't understand what kind of "boat" you have - aka putting a container on a speed boat would sink it, and a container ship can't get a wakerboarder out of the water.

Back to our conversation - why was I feeling this? - I've noticed that a couple of times recently one of us made comments like "next year we can..." or "we won't be able to until..", and yes I 100% agree that certain business things have time components like you could never do a black friday sale in November.. except for Amazon, a "container ship" size company that does basically exactly that.

The beauty of being a small business is the ability to try different things, experiment with new things, run tons of micro experiments, double down on the things that work, and swap out the things that aren't. This is what makes an ecosystem of offers such a great thing - once you know who you serve better than anyone else and what result you're uniquely qualified to deliver, that's your signature offer and everything else you can iterate and move quickly like a speed boat.

As business needs evolve, you can be one of the first people to incorporate new things, for example:

• Web designers have opportunities for people looking for AEO solutions right now
• Social Media Managers have opportunities to be front of mind as people, and figuring out the engagement drop happening on IG in the last couple of weeks (suspiciously close to when Muse & Meta Business One launched)
• Photographers have opportunities right now, as in-person events are all the rage right now, and people want to document/market them in a way that stands out from everyone else's events

A big business can't turn its "ship" as fast as we can to meet new needs as they emerge, and also experiment with the cool new tools as they pop up ("first mover advantage" if you're looking at business books).

Jo occasionally tells the story of the first reel she ever created. It was shortly after she'd pivoted her photo business into doing branding photography, and she'd flown to Phoenix for a new client that she was working with for the first time. And during that session, her client asked her what the deal with reels was, so obviously she recorded one for herself right after.

• That planted the seed - b-roll matters to our clients.
• Before too long, she had an upsell for branding sessions that included b-roll clips, because reels were taking off, and that's what people were using in their marketing.
• When I left corporate and joined full-time, my job during branding sessions was capturing b-roll because it was included in all our branding packages by that point - and at the time, we didn't know of anyone else doing that.
• By the end of our tenure as branding photographers, we'd upgraded from iPhone b-roll to higher quality & stabilized DJI Osmo b-roll, because we could move fast and test new equipment technology before it became mainstream for many people.

We paid attention to what mattered to our clients, and turned our "speedboat" before anyone else (that we knew of) because there was no red tape to stop us.

As we're going into Q4, we’ve had a couple of people ask about accountability support for following through with their goals for the year, so we "turned our speedboat" and put together a text-only weekly accountability offer that we're selectively accepting people to who already have their offers figured out (we'd recommend an ecosystem day to anyone who needs help with that first).

Will this replace 1:1 coaching as the signature offer in our coaching ecosystem - nope! But we can offer something in our ecosystem of coaching offers for a specific need that we're seeing people ask for, because we're small and nimble... and business is supposed to be fun when done right 🤷‍♂️

I'll leave you with 2 questions that have really helped me this week:

• Is there anything I've been assuming I had to make "container ship" decisions about in our business?
• What "speedboat" opportunities exist that I can do before anyone else?

See you next week,

Lyndon