We didn’t start out in business together. I (Meredith) started the business in 2018. I published my first book in 2019 and sold $100,000 in courses. 

Then the pandemic hit, and I was hit with an influx of demand for grant writing consulting services. That led to hiring several of the students in my course and spinning up a 7-person agency in two weeks. 

That was on top of running a course business. That’s when I asked Alex, the new cool girl in town, for help utilizing her hella project management skills. 

She whipped us into shape! She took my processes and systematized them. 
A few months in, Alex sat me down and said, “We need to talk…”

Alright let us spill the tea on the longer journey bringing us to this moment.

Want the Longer Story?

Quite to the contrary, she asked if she could come work with me full-time! 

I couldn’t give her the full $100,000 salary I thought she was worth, so I paid her what I paid myself at the time ($50,000) and offered the rest in “slicing pie” equity. 

We decided to close up the consulting business and focus on the course business entirely. Well…then we blew through every “good” idea I had and proceeded to lose thousands of dollars a month. 

You can only string together so many months in the red before the piggy bank empties itself. In November of 2020, I had hit rock bottom. I could taste defeat. I was so perplexed at why I couldn’t succeed when I felt entrepreneurship was in my bones. 

We need to talk means one thing typically…you’re getting broken up with!

This led us into an expensive program that was game changing.

Every major step up we achieved came from learning from others that have been where we wanted to go. 

In three weeks, we narrowed our customer focus into a scarily niche segment. We tripled our prices. We overhauled our offer and product. We built a new sales machine. Basically, it was a new business. 

Then we took a week off to be with our family’s over the holidays and sales started coming in. Evergreen sales! 

We went from losing $20,000 in the month of December 2020 to $7,000 in monthly recurring revenue in January. Which if you do the math, we booked $84,000 in business that first month and grew $5K in MRR each month thereafter. 

Where we didn’t do any work but learn from others.

Alex suggested we take a Learning Day,