TL;DR - Life-first business strategy, delivered weekly. One strategy you can actually use, a few resources worth your time, and a couple favorites we're loving right now. You in? 🕒 3-minute read.

Hi Reader,

I made a decision this month that I have not said out loud yet.

We are not doing a big formal launch this September.

No countdown. No cart open, cart closed. No five-day live thing where I show up in a blazer and talk myself hoarse. We are doing something completely different, and it looks nothing like anything we have ever done here.

I felt great about it for about four days.

Then I opened Instagram.

I am on there maybe an hour a week. On Sunday I gave it eleven minutes and spent nine of them in a comparison spiral.

Everyone is sharing their life-first model right now. The huge dahlia garden they planted, in their life-first model. The million dollar house they are buying, in their life-first model. Good for them, sincerely. But a life-first model looks very different when you already have eight figures behind you than it does when you are the sole income earner for your family just a few years in. Same words. Different math.

And here is the part that is actually a little embarrassing to share.

I have a dahlia garden. (That’s not the embarrassing part).

Scott (husband) plants them. I arrange them. Every summer I am out there with the clippers picking the good ones for the kitchen counter, and it is one of my favorite parts of the whole year.

The embarrassing part.
​
This week I caught myself not sharing mine. Because everyone else was sharing theirs, and it suddenly felt awkward, like I was copying something that has been mine the whole time.

That is what comparison does. It talks you out of things that were already yours.

Here's the shift.

Unfamiliar and wrong feel identical for about a week. Then one of them starts working.

And the thing I needed to hear myself this week:

You can still make money without launching. We are, or I wouldn’t have decided to do it.

There are no revenue rules. Some of my best revenue months have been the quiet ones, where nothing was being announced, and everything was still being sold.

So I decided this week that my dahlias were worth sharing. Along with the laundry that did not get done, because I wrote a few extra emails instead.

That is the model. Nobody photographs that part.

If you are staring down September, dreading the launch you think you are supposed to run, you have my permission to not run it.

Do the different thing. Let it be awkward for a minute. And post your dahlias.

XO,
Holly

P.S. Something is coming in October. It is the most fun I have had planning something in a long time, and I want to get it right before I get it public. You can get on the waitlist here.

✨Your Weekly Strategy Shift

Quiet Money

Instead of asking, "what should I launch this fall?"

Ask, "what could I sell on Tuesday with what I already have?"

Three places the money usually already is:

→ The people on your list who raised their hand months ago and never got a second ask.

→ The offer you already built and stopped talking about because you got bored of it before your audience did.

→ The conversations you are not having. Five real ones a week beats a launch calendar most quarters.

None of that needs a countdown timer. It needs you to make the offer.