Let Me Be a Cautionary Tale . . .

I’m writing this email to you on March 6, 2023. 

Today’s the day that I paid off a business loan that I took out in 2021 — for what I thought was my dream.

Spoiler alert — it wasn’t.

After a client inspired me to think bigger for myself, I decided to grow my business. 

Once I started advertising, marketing, and promoting my services, I got huge results. My social media and email began to grow consistently, and the clients I attracted were terrific. Some of the biggest book deals I’ve done in my career happened in 2020 and 2021.

But along the way, I had developed a bad habit that I see in my own clients, and among entrepreneurial women more generally.

I started to look to everyone else for what I should do next. 

Instead of turning inward and reminding myself of what I truly wanted out of my work — and my life — I decided that I wanted a million dollar business. I wanted to be like the women I admired, who are major players in online entrepreneurship.

I decided to host a live event. And by doing so, I went against my own instinct and experience. After attending writers’ conferences for years, I knew that what’s really needed to get a book deal is slow, consistent growth and developing ideas over time.

Not sitting in a room for two days being fire-hosed with information. 

But I went ahead anyway — because I wanted to be like the women I admired, and because I wanted to put on a big, flashy event and wear fancy clothes and hold a mic and fly in literary agents and drink Champagne with friends. 

I thought about all the benefits and the fun I would have, but not why I wanted to host the event or what I wanted the outcome to be for the people who came, other than to make me money. 

In the end, the event went well. Attendees told me they loved it, I got to spend time with literary agents that I love, and most of all — I learned so much about myself and my business.

Here are three important lessons I learned — so you don’t have to.

First, by focusing on what other people were doing, I lost sight of who I was and why I wanted to expand my business in the first place. 

Second, I was hella stubborn. I didn’t listen to my gut instinct or to the spreadsheet showing me that the event wasn’t going to serve my best interest. 

Third, impatience is a sneaky, sneaky B. I was in a rush to get where I wanted to be, and didn’t slow down to ask myself the hard but necessary questions about whether a live event was right for my business.

You may be wondering — Meghan, how the heck does this apply to me? 

I want to write a book, not run a live event. Well . . . . 

Do you know why you want to write a book?

Have you checked in with your intuition about becoming an author?

And are you pushing to make some arbitrary timeline with your audience growth, your overall author platform, or your book deal, or your book’s publication?

Because these are three issues I see all the time in the folks that want to work with us.