I believe that when you know how you're wired, you have guidelines for making decisions about your business. Those guidelines unlock confidence, and they unlock velocity.
My guest this week is Amanda Walker, founder of The Best Damn Coach, where she helps coaches, consultants, and practitioners become better coaches and get more clients, too. Amanda is the first guest on this show who wasn't a client first. I was a guest on her podcast, we hit it off, and I asked her to come on mine. We were both teachers before we built our businesses. Her primary archetype is Digital Learning Architect at 45%, well past the 30% mark where I start paying attention, and Visual Thought Architect is just two points behind it. Having both of those at the top is not very common. She builds the sequence and she builds the picture, and for her they go hand in hand. Often the picture comes first: she will grab her iPad mid-session and say, "Let's sketch this out first." In her words, "You can Claude me all day, Fathom can take notes, but I still need my picture."
What I love about the way Amanda has built her business is how true it is to who she is. She designed her week before she designed her offers, she built her best resource with her voice, and when her clients get advice that doesn't fit, she sends them looking for the evidence of what is already working.
IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE:
⚡ Decide what you want your week to look like, then build the business around it. — When Amanda's business took off during COVID, she found out what her caseload was "by that word of exhaustion and burnout." An email asked her whether, if she could do anything tomorrow, she would still be running the business she was running, and her answer was no. So she sat down and mapped out her ideal week: three calls, one with her main group, The Best Damn Coach, and two with smaller cohort programs. Then she slowly said no to one-to-one work, which was hard "when there is money that's waiting for you," because group coaching is where she does her best work and what energizes her. This summer her son asked her, "Did you work this summer?"
⚡ Build your main resource in the format you're best at, and keep improving it instead of replacing it. — Amanda knows she is "way better at talking than writing," so when she built a resource for the problem her coaches struggle with most, getting clients, she built it with her voice. Her 21-episode limited series podcast sits on a main feed where people can find it by searching "how do I get clients," and its workbook sits behind an opt-in, so it builds her email list too. It has become the number one place people find her. Her warning is about the gap between expectation and reality: most of us expect a new free resource to take off in the first week, and when it doesn't, we start over. She hasn't launched a new one in a year and a half. She goes back and tweaks the sales page, or email number five, and keeps the main thing the main thing.
⚡ When advice doesn't fit, follow the path that's showing you who you already are. — If you keep trying something that feels out of integrity for you, Amanda's first move is to check whether it's a visibility block. Am I afraid to be seen? Am I afraid to be silly? Once that's ruled out, she asks a simple question: where did your last clients come from? If one approach gets a response half the time and another gets nothing, repeat what's working instead of forcing what somebody else told you could or should work. She has followed that path herself from the beginning. She knew how to teach, so she hosted workshops, more than she can count, and when the early ones weren't turning into clients, she tweaked and adjusted them instead of trading them for something that wasn't her.
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