What Works

Hey, it’s Tara McMullin, and this is a special bonus episode of What Works, the show that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at how small business owners take decisive action to build a stronger business. This is the third and final episode in a series on how I’ve approached creating and delivering value through the products and services I’ve offered over the years. In the first episode of the series, I shared how my most recent offer, a live program called The Commitment Blueprint, started as a personal life change, grew into a free webinar, and then transformed twice into a paid product. In the second episode, I gave you a closer look at my other company, YellowHouse.Media, and shared how and why we’ve taken on the productized service model. And now, as I close out the series, I want to share how The What Works Network has grown out of a long line of products and services that package small business support in different ways. Earlier this week, I spoke with Michelle Markwart Deveaux about how she refined her voice coaching offer from a pay-for-service model into a value-pricing model, and what that did for how she packaged, sold, and delivered the value she was creating. Just repackaging the same offer in a new way made her business more enjoyable to run and more profitable too. It also gave her students a whole new perspective on what she was offering and how it benefited them. Refining, repackaging and re-messaging the way I offer support for small business owners over the last 10 years has given me the chance to build a stronger business model and find more valuable, more aligned, and more customer-centric ways of creating value. Now, to be clear, it would be easy to say the different offers I’ve made over the years are truly different products or services, but I see them as one long lineage of refining and repackaging, and that’s the key take-away I want you to have from what I’m about to share. Building a stronger business doesn’t mean throwing in the towel on what you’ve already built. It’s a process of building on what’s working, making guesses about what could work better, and finding ways to experiment your way to a more sustainable, profitable and effective model for everyone involved. Let’s, as they say, start at the very beginning. So first, did you know I used to design websites? It’s true. I used to run my blog during the day in between taking care of my new baby, and then I would build websites either really late at night or very early in the morning. And building websites was a really easy concrete way to create and exchange value. In other words, it was an easy way to make money when that was something that was super important, just figuring out how can I make money. But what I found was that what people really got out of the work that we did together was a better idea of how to structure their business. In the process of building a website, writing an about page, figuring out what needs to go where on that site, we’d have a lot of conversations about their business,