Welcome! Over the next 14 weekdays, you’ll get one actionable growth move from a different expert. No fluff, just stuff you can actually use.
👉🏻 Don’t want daily emails? Switch to weekly here.
🏃🏻♀️➡️ Catch up on past issues here.
📅 Mark your calendar for the bonus Q & A on Oct. 6th at 11am ET. (Invite to come at the end of the series.)
Jessica Lackey read all the same advice you have: post more, send a weekly newsletter, follow up faster, build the funnel, batch your content, optimize your onboarding. She’s also watched it wreck her clients.
Jessica runs Deeper Foundations, where she works with established coaches, consultants, and service providers. They used to be able to do everything themselves; now they’re drowning in “shoulds.” She wrote about fixing exactly this in her book, Leaving the Casino, and built a framework from it called Building Blocks.
How It Works
Every task gets sorted into five buckets instead of one to-do list:
Deliver: the client work you got in business to do
Build: finishable projects that create infrastructure (a course, a CRM, a repeatable workshop)
Grow: repeatable sales and marketing habits (outreach, email marketing)
Run: the invisible admin (bookkeeping, taxes, your inbox)
Plan: dedicated time to see and steer the business
Plus two bonus categories…
Sparkle: research and learning that’s useful, but not urgent
Margin: buffer for when things go sideways, because they will
Why It Works
Most productivity advice assumes every business runs the same engine. Jessica’s take: it doesn’t.
The people selling you the advice are often running a different business than the one you’re running. A consultancy running on referrals and repeat contracts doesn’t need the same weekly content grind as someone still building visibility from scratch.
Most systems fall apart for the same reason. You pick your top three things for the day, and tasks end up competing for your time, so nothing gets done. Or you land in analysis paralysis, everything technically qualifies as important, and you end up hiding in your inbox instead.
Once you stop trying to run someone else’s business model inside your own calendar, you see the real issue: you’re trying to do too much that doesn’t align with the business you’re running.
Results
- The growth work that usually gets avoided (outreach, relationship-building…) finally gets done, because it has its own protected slot instead of losing to “urgent” client work every week.
- You start dropping “best practices” that were never built for your business model. A retainer-based business doesn’t need a weekly newsletter, no matter what the marketing gurus say.
- The real shift is realizing capacity, not willpower, is the actual problem, and capacity, you can do something about it.
And directly from the mouths of her clients…
- “As if on cue, with 6 months of protecting Sacred Sales Hour, my incoming project requests have skyrocketed.”
- “I’m doing ‘less marketing’ but have hit 3 $10K months in a row while having so much less guilt about the things I’m not doing.”
How you can do it
Knock this out on your lunch hour:
- Brain dump everything you’re doing or trying to do into the buckets above. Don’t sort for accuracy yet, just get it out of your head and onto a page.
- Take one honest look at your delivery ratio. How much of your week is going to actual client work vs everything else? You don’t need a spreadsheet. If Deliver is eating 90% of your week, that’s already the answer to why nothing else is moving.
In Jessica’s words: awareness first, and give yourself “a shit ton of grace.” Don’t let that awareness turn into shame.
When you have more time, here’s what to do next (and in case you’re wondering this task itself is part of your Plan time):
- Cap delivery at 50-70% of total time. The lower end if you need client volume to hit your numbers, the higher end if you’re low-volume and high-touch. Whatever’s left has to go toward the marketing and infrastructure that brings in your next round of clients.
- Prioritize within a category, not across them. Relationship building, admin, and business projects don’t compete for your attention. They need to all exist on your calendar, so prioritize your number one per category.
- Pick one or two Build projects and let them stay the priority until they’re done. No reshuffling the whole list every Monday. Active Build projects stay capped at one or two at a time, since you can only actually finish so much before everything sits half-done.
- Re-evaluate monthly or seasonally, not weekly. Vacations, school schedules, and slow seasons all change your container. Rebuild your ratios when your life does.
Tools
- Grab Jessica’s free Building Blocks Starter guide and put this into practice today: deeperfoundations.com/building-blocks-starter
- Or keep it simple with a five-column tracker: Deliver, Build, Grow, Run, Plan (plus Sparkle). (But if I were you, I’d grab the guide, it’ll save you the trial and error.)
13 more tips are coming over the next two and a half weeks. You don’t need all of them. Pick the ones that fit, skip the rest without guilt, and when you do pick one, you now know how to actually finish it. Keep that lens on as you go. We’re closing the series with a tip that comes back to it.
See you tomorrow,
Stacy
P.S. Jessica Lackey helps established coaches and consultants build businesses that don’t run on more hustle. Grab her free Building Blocks Starter guide (linked above) find her at deeperfoundations.com, on LinkedIn, or subscribe to her newsletter for more like this.
