✊ Breaking down my business strategy for 2026

Happy Monday, friends,

It’s a holiday here in Spain today, which means it's a quiet morning at the coffee shop.

And with the Christmas lights twinkling, the Christmas playlist on in the background, and Christmas market stalls being assembled along the boulevard in front of me…

It’s a perfect vibe for some year-end reflecting and planning.

Over the past month or so, I’ve already filled up a notebook’s worth of journalling and scheming about the year that was and the year that’s coming.

But today, I want to boil it down into a more focused plan that hopefully gives you some ideas to mull over as you set your direction and make your plans for 2026.

Revisiting the Master Plan

Before we dive into the specifics, some context.

Two years ago, I published this post laying out some changes I was making to my business to align it with the life I wanted.

The high-level goals I laid out include:

$500k in profit
Lean 1-2 person full-time team (including me)
Limit calls to 2 days a week
4-day workweek as the default
Not reliant on launches or sales calls
Build the business to be a sellable asset (though I have no short-term intentions of selling)

Since first laying out this plan in December 2023, things have been proceeding more or less as planned.

👍 I’ve cut calls from 4-5 days a week to 3.

👍 I’ve set up my schedule and systems to start implementing 4-day work weeks in 2026.

👍 I only do “launches” when I legitimately want to, and my business doesn’t rely on them.

👍 I sell 75% of my $10k/year coaching program via email without sales calls.

👍 And business profit has increased from $75k (2023) to $140k (2024) to probably somewhere around $175k in 2025.

👍 All while maintaining a lean team of just me and a couple of contractors.

So far, so good, in other words.

The one major change to the plan is that I am no longer actively working toward building the business as a sellable asset.

The reason?

I've realized that instead of building a business I want to exit from, I want to build a business that I want to live in forever.

In short, I want my business to be a vehicle and sandbox for my creativity. What that business looks like will shift over the decades, but ultimately, it's going to revolve around me doing creative work I love doing.

2025 Progress Report

En route to achieving the initial big picture vision, a few smaller goals have emerged.

At the start of this year, I published this post with some specific sub-goals, including:

Spend Less Time Working
Increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
Update the Brand (Specifically the Messaging & Audience Focus)

Again, while there is still work to do, things are progressing nicely in the right direction.

On the time at work front, after working an average of 5.8 hr/day (including weekends) in 2023 and 6.6 hr/day in 2024, this year, I’ve dropped my average to 5 hr/day.

Over the course of the year, that’s 584 hours (or 14.6 forty-hour work weeks) fewer than last year.

All while the business has had its best year ever in terms of revenue and profit.

Part of that has come from eliminating work on weekends.

But another big part of it—a part I’m looking to build on significantly going forward—is that I took off the equivalent of 8 weeks of vacation, including two separate 2+ week stints.

On the customer lifetime value front, I made good progress as well, increasing the LTV by over $1,000 per customer this year by making changes to everything from my marketing, to sales messaging, to customer onboarding to ongoing client management.

This is essential as my goal going forward is to work with fewer and fewer clients, meaning each one needs to be worth more. More on that later.

Finally, the brand front.

While I didn’t make any major external visual changes to the brand as I had planned, I did make some significant messaging shifts that I’d been resisting for… well, forever.

Specifically: Develop of podcast marketing system that gets clients and drives revenue.

This is a departure from my previous messaging which was more focused on the audience growth side of things.

There are a few reasons behind the shift:

It’s a promise I can deliver on more predictably. Ironically, it’s much much easier to create a show that drives $10k–$15k/mo for your business than it is to grow a show with 10k–15k plays/ep. And if revenue is the end goal anyways, it makes sense to take the most efficient route to get there… which is often a micro show.
More than anything, I love complex problems and puzzles. Which means for me, the fun part of marketing is designing a coherent strategy that includes podcasting, product development and marketing, email, and the connective tissue that ties it all together. Given that I’m one of the few people with roughly equivalent deep expertise across all of these disciplines, that combination makes me much more valuable to the right clients as we can develop a cohesive system rather than a bunch of discrete siloed assets.
I simply no longer believe that “growing your podcast” is a useful goal for business owners. Instead, the focus should be revenue generation, which may or may not require you to grow your audience significantly. The reality is that a show optimized for growth will necessarily not convert clients and customers as well, and vice versa. Going forward, I prefer to view growth as a happy byproduct of doing other things well, not the be-all-end-all metric of podcast success.

So with this context, let’s talk about where I’m heading in 2026.

Market Observations & How I'm Responding

My plan for 2026 is largely informed by 5 observations.

Observation 1: AI is going to get better and better at creating shiny, exquisitely produced content.

Convinced that output volume and production quality are what really matter, most “creators” and business owners will join the AI Arms Race and pump out more and more impressively flashy content that is ultimately hollow.

By hollow, I mean lacking substance, rough, interesting, quirky human edges, and most importantly, genuine novel insight.

My Response: Lean further into the things AI can’t. In practice, this means 3 things:

Lead with Insight. The job of an expert is to identify problems and solutions no one else is looking for, and to ask questions others aren’t asking. This has always been the core of my strategy, but I’ll be leaning into it more heavily in 2026.
High Effort Content. In a world of content where everyone is trying to put as little effort into creating as much content as possible, the opposite stands out. While I’ll still publish my newsletters more or less daily, I’ll be augmenting that with some “more-effort-than-necessary” content that I publish sporadically… but which I suspect will stand out in a major way for my ideal clients. Plus, it’s just fun to do.
Anti-Scale. After much hemming and hawing over the previous years, last year, I made the decision to double down on building a craft or artisanal consulting business. In other words, work with a small number of people in a very in-depth 1:1 way. This will allow me to get them better results, charge more, and do less marketing… since I’ll only need a handful of clients each year. Of course, I’ll still have a scalable component to my business (courses, books, etc), but that is bonus money, not the main driver of the business.

Observation Two: The Show Don’t Tell Era of Content Marketing Is Here

In addition to the explosion of AI, the rise of the creator economy over the past few years means that there is now an effectively infinite supply of content and advice on any topic you can imagine.

Including yours.

If you’re an expert producing content in the hopes that people will hire you, the era of actionable, advice-based education content is over.

Because how is a consumer supposed to know that you’re the best option for them when there are 217 other creators all giving anything from similar to wildly divergent advice on the same topics?

The answer is to put your thinking and problem-solving ability on display.

My Response: Over the past two years, I’ve leaned heavily into “show don’t tell” content, whether it’s live podcast roasts on Roast My Podcast to teasing apart data points on Podcast Marketing Trends Explained or on real-time show concept development on Killer Concept or various other one-off real-time marketing strategy build-outs, and more.

This content doesn’t rack up the plays. But it racks up sales.

Specifically, high-ticket sales of discerning clients with sophisticated problems who want to know that you’ll almost certainly be able to solve their problem when they hire you.

In 2025, I’ve helped many of my clients develop Infinity Loop style shows my proprietary model for developing podcasts and connected content ecosystems that put your thinking on display and position you as the only viable option for your customers.

In 2026, I’m doubling down on this, and will be working with my clients to develop their Expertise Ecosystem.

Beyond their shows, this means refining their Brand POV, developing their Signature Model/Framework, Redesigning their Flagship Offer, and ultimately integrating everything with their podcast, email marketing, and sales process.

Observation Three: “Podcasting” is Fragmenting (and it Doesn’t Matter)

For better or worse, podcasting has always been a heavily fragmented medium. But over the past couple years, we’ve seen the very definition of what a podcast even is called into debate.

What’s more, with YouTube now the dominant consumption platform and Spotify ratcheting up both its video and algorithmic discovery features on their platform, the way podcasts are discovered and consumed is changing… maybe.

My Response: For me and my clients, podcasting is simple one tool among many to share our ideas, demonstrate our expertise, and build and nurture an audience of future buyers.

Some shows demand (or at least benefit) from video.

Others are best as audio shows.

At the end of the day, my goal is to develop, present, and distribute my insights and ideas in the method and packaging that is best for them. And help my clients do the same.

While most people will distract themselves with the delivery mediums and the tactics, I expect a big focus of my work in 2026 will be helping clients discern what their business and their shows actually need, and then building a tight, focused strategy around that.

Observation Four: The Market Will Only Get More Unpredictable

It’s been a hard year for a lot of coaches, consultants, and educators.

Part of it’s the relentless noise. Part of it’s AI. And a big part of it is uncertainty in the market.

And yet, despite the uncertainty, I know many people who are having their best years ever (including me).

How?

Adaptability.

The folks I know who are doing well are regularly testing new offers, new audience segments, and even whole new markets.

If there’s one law of the universe, it’s that everything changes.

And going forward, I predict that things are only going to change faster, leading to more unpredictability and more uncertainty in the market.

My Response: For my business and my clients, I’m focusing on developing highly adaptive offers that change with the world, their industries, their audiences, and them.

In practice, that means avoiding long-form flagship courses in favour of a regular stream of hyper-focused workshops and trainings, along with coaching/consulting/advisory membership spaces that are highly personalized.

If you know everything’s going to change, better to design to embrace it, rather than resist it.

Observation Five: The Social Media Exodus

Sure, most people are still regularly active on social media, but there’s lots of data (including the past two years’ Podcast Marketing Trends Reports) showing more and more people opting out.

Personally, I stopped both posting on and consuming social media two years ago with zero negative impact on my business (in fact, the two years have been the best ever), and major positive impacts on my creativity, original thinking, voice, mental health, and productivity.

And I’m far from alone, with more and more of my business owner friends making the same choice and experiencing the same results.

My Response: I’ve always felt a little guilty as a marketer for having so much disdain for and ignorance of social media. But in 2026, I plan on owning that as a feature, not a bug.

Because in reality, most of my clients don’t want to be on social media.

Instead, I’m going to double down on building anti-social marketing strategies for myself and my clients.

Because the reality is that for an expertise based business that might need anywhere from a handful to a few dozen customers a year to hit your revenue goals… there are waaaaaaaaay easier ways to get in front of those people, that are more fun and less time intensive.

My Roadmap for 2026 and Beyond

Alright, so let's recap and then spell out the specific changes I’m making in 2026.

Going into 2026, my current, up-to-date long-term goals are:

$500k in profit
Lean 1-2 person full-time team (including me)
Limit calls to 2 days a week
4-day workweek as the default
Not reliant on launches or sales calls
3 Months (12 weeks) off every year for surfing, cycling, snowboarding climbing, and motorcycling adventures (split throughout the year)

At the heart of the plan are three core end realities I want to experience: Creative Freedom, Time Freedom, Financial Freedom.

In practice, this means my business needs to provide the time and financial margin to allow me to pursue fun, ambitious (and sometimes risky) creative projects both within the business and outside of it.

So with the up-to-date goal in mind, here’s my plan to get there, starting in 2026.

Narrow my positioning further to helping expertise-based business owners generate $30k/mo. Specifically by developing Infinity Loop podcast-centric ecosystems.
Become more prolific with a ruthlessly narrow focus. Increase my output of offers, workshops, and content, with a hyper-narrow focus on expertise-based business owners.
Rebrand the PMA Membership, double the price, and put a hard cap on member count. The current name doesn’t reflect either the value or experience of what is, in reality, a highly personalized mentorship space with a lot of individual attention from me. This will be remedied in 2026, and the goal is to turn this into a $250k revenue stream with a hard cap of 50 active members. In addition to the cap, members who are not active regularly over the duration of their membership will not have the option to renew, providing space for new, hungry members who will make the most of it.
Default to “No” to all external requests & obligations. Unless there is an ultra-compelling reason, say no to all partnerships, collaborations, and projects that follow other people’s timelines and deadlines. They’re a distraction from the work that matters, and my business doesn’t need them.
Reduce my podcast audit capacity and increase the price. In 2024 ,I burnt myself out doing 53 podcast audits, charging $3,000 each. In 2025, I did 26 audits at $4,500 each. In 2026, I’ll further reduce the number of audits to 15 at a price (for now) of $5,000. Ultimately, I want to reduce my audit capacity to 8/year at a price of $10k.
Double down on the Craft. Average work is a waste of my time, my clients' time, and the audience's time. Instead, we’ll double down on creating truly exceptional content that gets the attention and trust of the right people.
Publicly Launch Overdrive coaching program. In 2025, I introduced a new coaching tier where I work with my clients directly to elevate their podcasting Craft by working with them hands on to develop their best episodes ever. For one episode each month, we identify themes, design the episode structures, sequencing and arcs, and identify questions, stories, and metaphors to incorporate. Then, I’ll provide a monthly post-mortem with notes on their execution. This is the most fun work I've done in my career yet and I'm excited to build this offering out further.
Launch Logic-Based Offers. A new training based on my work with my clients around how to design offers that sell themselves based on their obvious “internal logic” rather than persuasion or pressure.
Launch The Mechanics of Thought Leadership. A new training breaking down the path and practice of becoming a thought leader that changes the course of your niche or industry over a 10+ year period. Ambitious, long-term, anti-hype, not for hacks or wannabes. I’ve got it all mapped out and planned for release mid-2026.
Pour fuel on the fire via paid advertising. With the business generating a significant amount of excess profit, I want to reinvest significantly in advertising this year, specifically by hiring an ad manager so I don’t have to manage the ad creative myself.
Write and release at least two books on podcasting. One, on how to engineer word-of-mouth growth via your show design is already in progress. Another, on the mechanics of podcasting, is more or less wireframed.
Develop a highly exclusive, premium pricing business. My plan is to work with ~500 clients over the next 30 years. This narrow focus will allow me to develop deeper expertise in my specific niche than anyone else, leading to predictable, almost guaranteed results and zero alternative, interchangeable competitors. The result: I can be highly selective about who I work with and demand significant prices while delivering exceptional results.

There will be many other moves, but these are the highlights.

Some of these will likely pay off big. Others won’t. Some I’ll abandon as I, my goals, and the world change.

Such is life.

For the moment, however, this is the plan that excites me. That has me inspired, motivated, and fired up.

You don’t need to follow this plan.

In fact, you probably shouldn’t.

Instead, identify the goals for your life, your business, and your work.

Then, design a plan that lights a fire inside you.

Stay Scrappy,

Whenever you're ready to get serious about growth for your show and business, here are three ways we can work together:

Identify the hidden gaps in your podcast marketing & conversion strategy with the EARS Marketing Assessment

Complete this short 2-min quiz and get a personalized assessment of the biggest issues keeping you from more listeners, clients, and customers, plus recommendations on how to fix them.
Get the step-by-step playbook for your first 500 podcast subscribers

First500 is a short, highly-actionable course & playbook walking you through the specific steps to find your ideal listeners, boost your exposure, and convert them into subscribers. Stripped of complex marketing strategies, jargon, and fluff, the course can be completed in one sitting and will get you growing immediately.
Work with me privately

If you're a coach, consultant, service provider, or online educator who's been producing your show for at least a year, have a proven product or service, and are looking for help converting more listeners into clients and growing your show, send me an email with the subject line "Podcast Growth Engine". Tell me a bit about your show, your business, and what you'd like to work on together and I'll get you all the relevant details on how we can work together to add $1k-$5k/mo in podcast-driven revenue to your business within 8 weeks and then scale up from there.

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