✊ Breaking down my business strategy for 2025
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Hi Friends, It’s Día de los Reyes Magos (the equivalent of Christmas) here in Barcelona today, with a lineup down the block at churros stand across the street and people walking by with cakes and gifts and dogs in festive little coats and reindeer antlers, but it’s my first day back online after two weeks off over the holidays. I’ll be honest, while I had a good holiday, this is the first year I’m coming out of the time off feeling like I could have used another two weeks of rest to get fully caught up. For me, last year was a lot. It was a lot in both good ways (far and away my most financially successful year in business so far) and challenging ways (took on a lot of projects, published a lot of content, worked with a lot of clients, etc). Oh, and I got married and took a honeymoon in the middle of the year which added a whole lot more joy, excitement, stress, and exhaustion. As always at the end of the year, I’ve spent the past month reflecting, diagnosing, brainstorming, and strategizing about the state of my life and business, and to kick off the first new post of 2025, I want to share some of my takeaways as you might find them useful as well. Long-Term Goal UpdatesTo kick things off, let’s start off by revisiting my long-term goals for the business, which I laid out in this post a year ago. High-Level Goals I’m Working Toward
Now, these being the long-term goals for the business, I didn’t achieve any of these goals this past year. But I’m very pleased to have made significant progress toward them. ProfitSpecifically, 2024 was the first year I broke (and blew past) $100k in profit (before paying myself, and before taxes), up from a previous high of $55k. This is a huge milestone in and of itself, but it turns out that the assets, systems, and practices that helped me progress toward my profit goal also contribute significantly to the other goals. Time Spent WorkingAs of now, I still have calls three days a week (usually 6-8 hours of calls each day), but the more profitable the business becomes, the more selective I can be with the number of clients I take on, and the fewer the calls I need to take. Having raised prices three times over the past 13 months for my Podcast Growth Engine program (from $2,500 to $10,500 for the full 12-month program), I’m excited to start seeing more white space in my calendar as my active client pipeline thins out over the next 6 months to a more manageable level (ideally ~25 active clients as opposed to the current ~50). Having one fewer day of calls then enables the next goal, of working 4-day workweeks as a default. As of today, my Fridays are typically 12-hour long dashes to finish everything before the weekend—a product of the aforementioned three days of 6-8 hours of calls per week. Having a call-free day on Thursday will then allow me to (in theory) finish everything a day earlier, leaving Friday open, or at least less overloaded. With this in mind, I’ve already blocked off two Thursdays a month from calls in my calendar for Q1 and Q2, three/month in Q3, and all Thursdays in Q4. Slow but steady progress. Reliance on Launches & Sales CallsUp until mid-2023, my business was entirely dependent on the launch model, opening up two live cohorts a year with big public launches. And while I actually enjoy planning and executing launches (and had gotten quite good at them) in late-2023, I made a shift away from the launch model toward an evergreen model driven by lower-lift, less stressful sales campaigns. Since I was already writing a daily email, I didn’t need to adjust my content creation frequency for these campaigns. I simply selected a theme relevant to the offer I was promoting and wrote to that theme following a typical campaign "narrative arc". Paired with a well-written “offer doc” that spelled out the details of the program in depth, I had the best year of sales yet, without big launches, and with more than 50% of clients signing up without first getting on a sales call. Definitely moving in the right direction here as well. Structure the Business to be a Sellable AssetOf all the goals, this is the one that is furthest out of reach. If anything, I may have moved further away from it over 2024 as I further enmeshed myself as the face of the business with two new (video-first) podcasts, more newsletter & blog content written by me, and generally leaned further into my distinct personality and perspective across the board. All of these moves were good for the business in the short-term, but work against the goal of creating a sellable business in the long-term. While this goal will be more of a focus this year, to be honest, it's also the least important and furthest down the road as I have no immediate desire to sell the business. That said, if I want to have that optionality one day, I do need to start planning for it now. Alright, having checked in on the big-picture goals, let’s take a closer look at my goals and progress for 2024. 2024 GoalsIn 2024, I had four overarching goals for myself and my business:
Let’s take a closer look at each of them. Publish More ✅This goal was a roaring success, and (in my opinion) was the major driver of all of the success—and stress—of 2024. At the start of the year, I switched to a weekdaily publishing cadence for the newsletter which I more or less maintained throughout the year. As the old saying goes, “send more emails, make more sales”, and this certainly proved true for me. In fact, within two weeks of switching to the new cadence I saw an uptick in inquiries, sales conversations, and clients. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, businesses are built on email. But in addition to increasing my email sending cadence, I also launched two new podcasts, Podcast Marketing Trends Explained and Roast My Podcast (which emerged as a spin-off of PMTE). And the podcasts are where things got really interesting. I’d known for a long time that the real promise of podcasting (at least for a business) is not as a top-of-funnel audience acquisition channel but as a mid-funnel sales accelerant. And in 2024, I experienced that first-hand. While neither of the shows gets all that many downloads/views (350-750 on average), nearly 100% of new clients cited one or both of the shows (often with great specificity) as the reason why they had wanted to work with me. In addition to the success on the sales front, the new shows provided me a sandbox to immerse myself and play around with video podcasting. Through my experimentation, I was very pleased to find that my previous assumptions about video-first podcasting—that you had to spend extraordinary sums of time and money to have any success with it—were flat-out wrong. The content-related wins, however, came at a cost. Specifically, time. Work Less 💀💀💀I’ve listed some version of “work less” or “achieve better work-life balance” every single year for the past 5 years. And every year, I fail to achieve it. In fact, I seem to be moving in the opposite direction. In 2023, I worked 2,121 hours. In 2024, I worked 2,423 hours. That’s an average of 6.6 hours a day every day of the year, including weekends. But what makes it worse is that I took more or less 8-weeks off for various wedding activities, conferences, and vacations. Which means the actual daily average is somewhere closer to 7.9 hours/day for the rest of the year (again, including weekends). To repeat myself from last year: This is the goal that is most daunting to me. Largely, because I have an internalized belief that working more than other people is the reason for my success. And to be honest, that belief is likely true. Compared to many people I know, I work an extra 1-2 days per week, which adds up to 50-100 extra days a year. How does that not help me get ahead? Case in point: All the extra content that I believe moved the needle for me this year? I spend roughly 500 hours creating it. That time came at the direct expense of work-life balance… and yet it helped me make significant progress on my other goals. BUT… While it can be true that the amount of time I spend working has benefited me, it can also be true that it is not necessary to achieve the same or bigger results. We’ll come back to that shortly, but for now, let’s just say that the 2024 goal of working less was not achieved. Raise Prices ✅As previously mentioned, I raised prices three times in the past 13 months on The Podcast Growth Engine, first from $2,500 to $7,500, then $7,500 → $9,000, and most recently from $9,000 to $10,500. In addition, I finally completed a long (~3-year) overdue price increase of the Podcast Marketing Academy Membership from $1,000 to $2,500 for the annual membership. These increases have brought the pricing closer in line with the value clients get out of the programs and the time I personally put into them. They’ve also finally set the business up to be financially sustainable long-term, given the constraints of the podcasting market (ie. an extremely small market where I’ll never be able to acquire a large enough audience to sustain a business on low-ticket offers). This new pricing enables me to charge a lot to work closely with a small number of clients who will derive a huge amount of value from working with me, and then use that income to subsidize offering low-ticket offers to my larger audience who wouldn’t isn’t yet in a place to see positive ROI of working with me 1:1. Get Serious About Sales ✅Aside from the increase in content output, this was the huge win from 2024 for me. In fact, it might have been the biggest win, for two reasons:
In the end, as is so often the case, it turns out that I simply needed to find an approach to sales that aligned with my values, personality, and existing resources. And once I did, I was off and running. Today, my sales strategy consists of a few key pieces:
This system took a while (and a bunch of experimentation) to figure out, but now that it’s dialed in, I feel (for the first time in 10 years in business) hyper-confident in my ability to generate sales and revenue (more or less) on command. Super empowering, and a complete game-changer. What’s more, I’ve been able to take everything I’ve learned to build out the sales and revenue generation curriculum inside Podcast Marketing Academy which many of my clients are now using to see similar (or better) results, often in a matter of weeks. 2025 GoalsOn whole, 2024 was a roaring success for the business. But it also exposed some cracks in the foundation, the biggest of which is this: I have reached the ceiling of what I can do and achieve on my own in the business. Aside from my assistant, Brittany, who works just a few hours a week, I do everything on my own. There are a few reasons for this:
And yet, despite all this, I know that:
Said differently, I’ve squeezed every last drop I can out of myself and if I want to advance further towards my long-term goals, I will need to take a different approach going forward. With that in mind, here are my goals for 2025. 1. Free Up My TimeIn planning out potential projects for 2025, it quickly became clear that my limited bandwidth was the ultimate blocker. In fact, I realized that even without taking on any new projects, 90% of my working hours were already spoken for by my existing commitments. Hmmm… Facing this reality, finding ways to create more white space in my calendar has become my number one goal for the year. The first steps have been the previously mentioned price increases which will enable a lower client workload—and with it—fewer calls and the accompanying follow up and custom growth plans. In addition, I’ve set a cap of 26 one-on-one clients for 2025 (10 of which have already been booked up), cutting in half the number of podcast audits I performed in 2024, and thus freeing up several hundred hours over the course of the year. And then, there’s hiring. Despite my resistance, after a lot of journalling over the past few weeks, I’ve come around to the fact that bringing on support is not only necessary… but actually an exciting prospect. The easy first step is to enlist my assistant, Brittany to help with more of the existing admin work. But the big needle mover will be finding an A+ video/podcast editor to help out on the content front. I’ve already started prepping a job description and will be posting it within the next week as finding the right person is central to me freeing up the necessary time to work on all of my other goals and projects. Later in the year, I may consider bringing on an Ops person or Online Business Manager to assist further, but I'll take that as it comes. 2. Increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)Over the past year, I’ve improved my sales process and abilities tremendously. With a membership-style product, however, the initial sale is only half of the equation. The other half (the half with more long-term value) is in client/customer retention. Having only offered the annual membership for a little over a year, I’m just starting to get enough data to establish client retention benchmarks, but already I see a large number of gaps and opportunities for improvement. Specifically, my goal is to increase the number of Podcast Growth Engine clients who continue on at the 1:1 coaching tier after the initial 3-month sprint which includes their audit and two follow-up 6-week 1:1 implementation cycles. As of right now, roughly 15% of clients continue on at the 1:1 level, 50% downgrade to the annual PMA Membership level, and 35% choose to continue to implement the plan we’ve developed on their own. My hypothesis is that if I can improve the 1:1 client retention rate to 50%, I can double (or more) revenue without either growing my audience or making more sales. In fact, I can make fewer. There are a number of changes I’ve identified that will contribute to this goal, spanning the entire client journey from the program design and specific client touch points, to the marketing, messaging & framing, sales process, onboarding, and ongoing client experience. It will take time to implement these changes, measure the results, and then make adjustments, but due to its complex, multi-touchpoint, puzzle-like nature, it's the goal that excites me most this year. 3. Brand UpdatesFive years after first launching it as a standalone product under my agency, Counterweight Creative, Podcast Marketing Academy has developed into a standalone brand. And while I’ve been slowly piecing together the brand assets myself over the years, I’m starting to feel increasing excitement and urgency around bringing more depth, legitimacy, and cohesion to the brand. Much of this is driven by the fact that I’m finally getting clarity on what the “soul” of the brand really is and how to work that into the visual brand elements, frameworks, and languaging. Part of it is that I’ve reached the point where I feel embarrassed every time I see my self-designed logo. Regardless, it’s time for some updates, and this year feels like the year to do it. Once again, this is an area where I feel I’ve reached the ceiling of what I can achieve on my own, so will be looking to work with a brand strategist and designer to help flesh out and refine the brand. In addition to the visual brand updates, I’m also going to be playing with my messaging, tone, and content strategy. Specifically, I want to ensure that my content and messaging speaks to the people I am most excited to work with:
The gap in my messaging was first brought to my attention last year by PMA Alumni, longtime Scrappy Podcasting reader, and one of my very favourite podcasters, Michael Osborne, host of Famous & Gravy who pointed out that my co-host Justin and I tended to caveat almost every piece of advice we gave on our show. After some thought, I realized the reason: I was trying too hard not to intimidate and overwhelm newer podcasters and creators instead of giving the most honest, most helpful advice for savvy, experienced creators who already had all the necessary context and experience to be able to parse through and discern the relevant takeaways for themselves. I also realized this tendency showed up across the rest of my content. To be honest, I’m torn. On the one hand, I want to be inclusive and help as many podcasters as possible be successful. On the other hand, there are near infinite places to get beginner podcast advice and vanishingly few for more advanced, nuanced, and complex scenarios. What’s more, the advanced nerdy stuff, the stuff that is overwhelming and intimidating to newer creators is the stuff that I looooooooooove going down the rabbit hole on (as anyone who’s ever taken one of my workshops or courses can attest to 😂). To that end, this year, I want to be bolder and more unapologetic about getting into the weeds and saying it like it is without caveat. The fact of the matter is that succeeding in both podcasting and business is incredibly difficult, takes longer than you think, and requires uncommon levels of grit, determination, and persistence… not to mention irrational optimism and faith that it will all pay off one day. I want to serve the people who already know all that and are enthusiastically enrolled in the process in spite of—or perhaps because of—it. Core Themes for 2025Partly by design and partly by coincidence, my years tend to orient themselves around one overarching theme. 2023 was oriented around audience growth… which led to 4x-ing my email audience 2024 was oriented around sales… which led to 2.5x-ing profit. 2025 is orienting itself around the internal themes of operations, strategy, and brand. Given the successes of the past two years, I’m excited to see the result of spending more energy and attention on these aspects of the business that I’ve previously invested less in. In addition to this theme, I'll also be launching at least one if not two new podcasts, a new season of Podcast Marketing Trends Explained, several new deep-dive workshops, experimenting with ad funnels, and continuing to steadily add to the PMA playbook library. If you do some kind of annual planning process, I’d love to hear what your goals, obstacles, and strategy are for the new year. Oh, and if you’re interested in my help in pulling it all together, hit reply with “Podcast Growth Engine” and I’ll be happy to send over more info on how we can work together.
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