I know that now, but for a long time I assumed it was. I’d built a business, I had the qualifications, I had over 20 years of marketing experience. I’d built global brands. I could build my own website. On paper, I had everything I needed. So why wasn’t anything moving?

my assumption.

When I started my coaching business, I looked at what I’d already built and assumed the same approach would work. I needed a niche, a website, social channels. I had all of that in my Etsy shop. I had processes for content, working patterns that had served me well, a run blog that could transition into a coaching platform. I felt good about it. I knew what I was doing and I was doing it. Only, I wasn’t. I was treading water.

what etsy had that my coaching business didn’t.

It took me a while to see what was missing. My Etsy shop had structure built into it. Orders to be fulfilled by specific dates. Stock to manage. Accounts to update. Processes and systems I’d developed over years without even noticing I was building them. The next step was always obvious because the business told me what it needed.

My coaching business had none of that. No built-in structure, no obvious sequence, no external accountability. The deadlines I set for myself were arbitrary. If I missed one, there were no consequences that anyone else cared about. There was always next month. And next month kept arriving.

running before I could walk.

My default is to spend too much time getting everything perfect, and in trying to overcome that, I started missing steps. The more people I spoke to, the more opinions I gathered, the more things I tried, the less progress I made. I was a brand strategist with marketing experience, and I had no brand or marketing strategy. I had ideas, and I thought that was enough, even though I knew it wasn’t.

I spent weeks, not days, on a strategy document. I was still posting content, still learning new skills, but I wasn’t focused on where I was going. I was going round in circles and my frustration was growing.

The pull of my Etsy shop didn’t help. I’d had real success with it, and when things started to go downhill, I felt I should be able to turn it around. I didn’t do anything about it, but I couldn’t quite let it go either. It was taking time, energy and brain space I needed for something else.

what eventually had to change.

My Etsy business had a built-in process, structure and strategy. My coaching business didn’t, and I needed to build it. Not borrow it from somewhere else, not assume it would appear, but build it from scratch around the business I had now, not the one I’d had before.

Once I accepted that, things started to move. I closed the Etsy shop. I gave myself a clear timeline for the strategy work and I stuck to it. I focused on keeping the systems I’d already built ticking over, the content, the website, the social channels, while I put the foundations in place properly.

Previous success doesn’t transfer automatically. The skills do, the experience does, but the structure has to be rebuilt for the business you have now. Getting that wrong wasn’t a failure of capability. It was a failure of fit. And fit is something you can fix.

What do you have that’s working well right now, and what’s the one thing that still doesn’t have the right structure around it?

If you’re stuck despite having done it before, that’s exactly the kind of problem I work on. Book a free introductory call.