Ditching Revenue Spike Highs for a More Sustainable Business

In this episode we call out the hidden reason strong businesses stall: a lack of stabilization. We share how predictable revenue comes from systemized fulfillment, steady visibility, and a rinse-and-repeat sales framework you can run without burning out.

• why stabilizing beats constant pivots
• fulfillment systems, boundaries and SOPs
• marketing rhythms and sustainable visibility mix
• portfolio thinking for channels and content
• sales frameworks, qualification and follow-up
• leadership, decision speed and identity work
• nervous system safety and holding higher revenue
• how to assess capacity after record months
• when to add ads and when to stay private
• proof points from three stable revenue years

If this speaks to you, the next cohort of the Profit and Freedom Business Mastermind, is the Metamorphosis track which is specifically for people who are 150k to 400k a year in business. Find out more about this track here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YAh-MBkyo3IdQ32_LeazDW3YIQT6jqCDuhlcpqKQqQk/edit?usp=sharing

Enjoyed this episode? Come tag me and say hi on Instagram to let me know: https://instagram.com/cjdimmock

Transcript

The Case For Stabilization

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So even if you hit the goal, if the way you got there wasn't stabilized and it was chaotic, you're not going to be able to hold it. You will lose it. Today I want to call out a pattern that is honestly killing a lot of brilliant businesses. And that is the inability to stabilize. We really need to talk about this because most of the advice floating around out there is going to be about scaling, exploding, or quantum leaping your way to a seven-figure business. For the record, I do believe in quantum leaps. But nobody's talking about what it really takes to sustain any of it once you get there. And if you want a business that's truly sustainable, one that creates predictable, profitable revenue that doesn't chew up your life force and leave you burnt out on the bathroom floor, then you have to stabilize, not pivot or reinvent or jump ship just because something slowed down. You need to stabilize. I'm seeing this so much lately with business owners who had some success, maybe a big launch or a banner year or a streak of dreamy clients. And the second things feel like they might be slowing down or the market shifts or AI starts coming for their industry, they pivot hard sometimes and they launch something new. Sometimes they ditch the old offer or they rebrand their whole identity and slap a new aesthetic on their website, hoping that'll save them. But it won't because they never learned how to stabilize the business they already had. They never learned to stabilize in the first place. So they're always going to be chasing. I'm going to break it down. So my business has brought in between 410K and 490K Canadian per year for three years in a row. That's super uncommon to have revenue that is that stable and that predictable. And it's also really profitable. I'm not chasing shiny shit. I'm not rebuilding my offers every three months, and I'm not burning it all down every time Instagram tweaks the algorithm or some new AI, whatever the heck comes out. I focused on stabilizing, and I did that by going deep on three core areas: fulfillment, marketing, and sales. So let's talk about fulfillment first. Have you actually stabilized what happens after someone pays you? Do you have systems, boundaries? And are you good on communicating those boundaries? I mean, that's the biggest piece, right? A lot of people say they have boundaries, but then the moment it comes to actually having to have those conversations and step into being the leader that you have to be at that point, a lot of people crumble. Do you have templated fulfillment? Is your delivery process repeatable and clear? Or are you reinventing the wheel every damn time? Someone says yes. Now, if your work is highly bespoke, highly customizable, and it is premium price and position, then sometimes you can get away with some of that as long as it's really profitable. But over time, you do need to stabilize your fulfillment because if you don't, you're always gonna feel like you're drowning. And you'll be tempted to fix the wrong problem. I'll tell you that. You'll think that you need more clients or more reach or more engagement, but actually you just need to stop overdelivering to the point of collapse. You need fulfillment systems. And listen, a lot of people build this part based on sheer adrenaline. And I get that, I've been there. I'm the queen of saying yes and then I'll figure it the fuck out. I built a lot of my success on doing that in the early days, I won't lie. And a lot of people can throw together the systems as they go and white knuckle their way through the delivery. But the difference here is that that doesn't scale, right? That'll help you grow. That'll help you build the momentum in your business initially, but it doesn't scale. And it certainly doesn't stabilize. And it just you're building a house of cards essentially. So it's great. Build it, but once you're there, you got to stabilize. Secondly, let's chat about marketing. So, what does visibility look like for you? Is it consistent? Or do you panic post every six weeks when your inbox goes quiet? So, stabilizing marketing, it doesn't necessarily mean that you post daily. Okay, I don't post daily. Sometimes I don't even post in a week. I'm actually currently recording this, taking an entire weekend off of social media. The apps aren't even on my phone. And I can do that because I know what visibility looks like for me. I know what my mix looks like. I know what I need to do, the frequency that I need to do it at in order to have stabilized marketing and visibility. I know what kind of content actually converts for me. I know what visibility opportunities convert for me, and I know how many of them I need per quarter, per year, whatever. And I plan for that. I do not reinvent my entire strategy every time someone else goes viral, or every time I see someone posting on threads who is new in my space and has a lot of magnetism around them, right? I don't get caught up in that shit. My blinders are on because I know what works for me. My marketing is stabilized. So my marketing gets to be simple, and yours can be too. If you've stabilized it, okay. You you need to figure out what that mix looks like for you, and then it gets to become predictable from there. And you don't need a ton of followers or a huge audience, trust me. Like you certainly don't need 10,000 followers to make six figures a year. You definitely don't need that. What you really need is you got to get your messaging aligned, you got to know what you're marketing, and you have to have the discipline to show up even when it's not sexy. And now that doesn't mean that it needs to rely on your energy. Okay. Well, that's one reason why I personally absolutely love ads because I don't want to show up constantly. I mean, years ago, I loved showing up every day. It felt exciting. And now at this stage of my business and my life and the maturity that my business has and that I think I have grown into as well, I like being a little bit more private. I like being a little less accessible, you know? So, what does that look like for you? What are those pieces that you know work for you and that you can sustain? And if you don't have them yet, it's your time to try some new ones. Okay. So if you're not doing any sort of speaking, maybe that's something you should get into or at least try it, see if it works for you. If you haven't dipped your toe into ads yet, it's probably something you should try. Figure out what this mix looks like for you. And then lastly, there's sales. So is your sales process rinse and repeat? Do you have at least, at the very least, do you have a loose framework that you can rinse and repeat? This doesn't have to be a fully automated system, whatever the fuck. It just has to be a framework that you rinse and repeat. I know I've got mine. I developed an entire method around this because the methods that I was seeing out there weren't working for me. They weren't sustainable for me, and I couldn't stabilize my business with them. And I see this so much. I don't just see this with business owners who are earlier on or even around the same stage that I am. I see this with seven-figure a year business owners where they have not stabilized this process and they are still doing these massive launches that are completely exhausting. They gear up for them, their adrenaline goes through the roof, and then they crash for weeks after because it's not stabilized. And some of these systems that are out there are really difficult to stabilize because people are trying to execute these huge launches without having the proper resources. So it does a number to their nervous system, their cortisol, and then they spend weeks, sometimes months recovering, right? My process, I know, is a lot, it's a lot different than that. I've labeled it the chill launch method because it is, it's chill and it works for me. It relies a lot more on me having conversations with people, and that's something that a lot of people don't want to do. So that's another thing, too. I mean, if you're super early on in business, you may not be super comfortable with sales, but that's gonna make you break your business at some point, right? There's no CEO out there who's grown a successful and profitable company who is not comfortable with sales. So you got to become comfortable with sales, but then you got to figure out what your process is. You have to know how do you qualify your leads. You have to have a process for that discovery phase. It doesn't necessarily have to be calls, but you got to have a process around it. And what does your follow-up process look like? Are you tracking things? Are you automating things? What's all this look like? Or are you just winging it every time someone shows interest? Because that's not a stabilized sales process. And sure, you can do this and you kind of need to wing it at first, I will say. Like if you're a little bit earlier on, or even if you are around that 150k, 200k mark, like you're probably still winging it a bit. And that's okay because you're gonna learn really quick like what works and what doesn't. But when you're learning what works for you, you need to document that shit. Don't just do something that works, and then the next time you're in this process, you're flailing. Like, what the heck? Like, what am I doing here? No, like document things, make things easier for yourself. Okay. So here's what I'm gonna say overall. If any of those three areas, the fulfillment marketing sales feel like a hot mess, then your business is not stabilized. And it doesn't matter how good your offer is or how many people say they love your content in that scenario, because when those foundations aren't strong, like everything else is gonna feel shaky. And there's no amount of new offers or branding or repositioning that's gonna fix that. You're probably gonna be repositioning again in six months. So if you're at a place in business right now, and especially talking to the people here who are 100k plus, and especially if you're like 150k, 200k plus, all the way up to that half a million a year mark, you got to stabilize now because there's no way in hell that you're gonna be able to sustain a higher revenue level profitably if you can't stabilize and sustain what you have now. The biggest proof that you are ready to go to the next level is if you have figured out how to stabilize where you're at now. And so for me, for example, I know that if in 2026 I said, okay, you know what? Like, let's go to 600k, 700k, I know that I could do that because I've stabilized. I just proved that. I proved that three years in a row, we're stabilized. You look at other businesses, and sometimes it's okay, this year 200k, next year 800K, the next year 300K, the next year 400K. That sounds like hell. That sounds like hell. Like you deserve stability. Like, sure, there's a part of entrepreneurship that is fun and it's a bit of a gamble and there's a risk. I mean, we all have to admit here, hey, like we kind of like the risk. It's fun, right? It's exciting. A lot of us, like myself, have ADHD. We're drawn to that shit. But over time, that does something to your nervous system. It does something to your hormones. It's not sustainable forever. You might be listening to this. If you're 25 years old, you might be like, what the fuck is she talking about? But if you're listening to this and you've been in business and you're, let's say, mid 30s or older, and especially if you're a woman and you've been in business for five years or more at this point, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't been in your business for five years yet, you may not know yet. But trust me, it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. And I see this all the time. I see this all the time in the real world. I see people who will have a first big month. Let's say they have like a 30K month or something when previously they were having like 10 to 15k months. So they have a 30k month, right? And then the next month, they almost burn the entire thing down. They almost burn their whole business down because their fulfillment systems weren't built to handle that level of volume. They don't have the SOPs, the standard operating procedures. They don't have the onboarding automation. You know, they're writing every single client email from scratch, having to make every decision in their business from scratch. Sometimes it's the decisions that are really wearing us down. It's not the actual doing. Once you get to a certain point, you really need to step into being the CEO. And that means that you have to become impeccably fast at making decisions. It doesn't mean you're always gonna make the right decisions and you have to let go of that, but you have to become fast at making decisions. So if you don't know how to make decisions quickly because you don't know what's working, and you're doing every single decision from scratch and trying to figure it out and spending 10 times longer on it than you need to be, you got to figure that shit out. This is leadership work, right? This is leadership and identity work. These people often don't have marketing rhythms either. They don't actually know what's working for them or they go all in. I almost think about this like a stock market in a sense. So for me with marketing, I don't just go all in on one thing. Like I got my hands in a few different things, which is very different than you're gonna see a lot of people do. A lot of people will preach email marketing, email marketing, email marketing, other person will preach speaking gigs, speaking gigs, another person will preach Instagram, Instagram, Instagram. And I think about it kind of like a stock market. And I know this because I'm a really fucking great investor. That might sound cocky, but I'm a really good investor. And when I first started learning how to invest really well, you look almost at, oh, where can I make the most amount of money fastest? Right. And people do this with their marketing. They think, oh, what's the hot thing? What can I get on right now? What do I really need to focus on? And they put all their eggs in that basket. And then when the market shifts or their energy shifts, it slides. Andor they look to jump to the new hot thing, the new hot platform, the new hot method, right? But just like the stock market, if you put everything on one thing, it's high risk, high reward, and it's very seldom sustainable. Sure, you might get lucky, you might blow up on one thing. But really, if you spread out your efforts and uncover what that marketing rhythm looks like for you, and you have your hands in a few different things at a sustainable level, that's where the magic is. And that's just like investing. That's exactly like investing. Give me an ETF over an individual stock all day, every day. Any good investor knows that that you know, like that's the play. That's the play, right? Sure, you can have some play money in some individual stocks. It's great. I do that. But the ETF, like spreading out the risk, that's more sustainable in the long run. Okay. No more sprints driven by panic and dopamine and hopping platforms and hopping this and that. And your sales process too. It can't just be 100% vibes. Yes, magnetism is a lot when it comes to selling. We can't deny that. Half of selling, honestly, is just can you convey the excitement and the conviction that you have and the confidence you have about what you're selling to somebody else? Can you transfer that emotion? That is like half of it, you know? But you've got to have a structure. You've got to at least have a little bit of a structure, or else you're doing three times more work than you need to be every single time. You're gonna, you're gonna become exhausted, absolutely exhausted. And then you're gonna become more desperate in the sales process because you're so exhausted. So now you need more people to say yes because you're spending so much more time on that. When I work with people to stabilize what they're doing, they can hold higher levels of revenue more profitably than ever before. It's wild. And I don't see anybody else teaching this system like this. Like this is something that I learned through building my own business so wildly sustainably and helping so many other people build theirs. And I've helped people be able to hold the person who has their first 30k month. There needs to be a big check-in. If you have a record-breaking month, you have to schedule like an entire day with yourself to do a check-in on everything. You're also probably gonna need like a coach or a therapist or somebody because there's gonna be a lot of internal shit that comes up too with that. Because again, this is a new identity that you're stepping into. And that alone can sabotage it, right? Because if our identity doesn't feel safe to our nervous system, well, I mean, it's gonna try to get rid of that identity. Safety is everything to the nervous system. So let me ask you this: do you actually feel like you're ready for the level of revenue that you say you want? Or do you just want the rush of a spike? Even though everything might crumble again. I know that's an intense question, but you gotta be real with yourself here. I've had to ask myself this question every year. I ask myself this question every year. What do I want? What do I actually want? To be honest with you, too, I'm quite content with where I'm at. I really like this. It feels sustainable, it feels easeful, it feels good for the phase of life that I'm in. When my daughter's young, I want to be able to enjoy that as much as possible. When she's older, if I want to grind again or whatever the heck, I can do that. But you got to realize that just because you say you want a new level of revenue doesn't mean that you're actually ready for it because your nervous system is gonna sabotage anything that doesn't feel safe. It will. That's just the name of the game. So even if you hit the goal, if the way you got there wasn't stabilized and it was chaotic and it's not gonna be sustainable moving forward, you're not gonna be able to hold it. You will lose it. I remember my first 60k month, which happened is like two, two and a half years ago. When I hit that, I knew because of everything that came up around it, I knew I wasn't gonna be able to hold it. So pretty much immediately I went back down to those 30 to 40k months. And that makes sense because yeah, I wasn't ready to hold it. And that's just how it is sometimes. It doesn't have to mean anything, it just means that like that work hasn't been done. And the truth is that most people don't know how to stabilize because no one ever taught them how. I mean, this conversation we're having right now, nobody's ever had this conversation with me, and I've never heard anybody anywhere else. When I'm having it with you right now, we're at least opening this conversation. Because most people out there, they're learning launch strategy and like viral hooks and aesthetic design, and like that's all great. That's awesome. That's great. That's needed. We need to fill knowledge gaps in order to build businesses. But the boring yet brilliant stuff is often what actually lets your business breathe. Whether you're hyped up or you're on your period curled up with a heating pad. Been there. And if any of this is resonating with you, like this is exactly why I created the Profit and Freedom Business Mastermind. Because it is not just about hitting your next income goal. That's great, and we want that. Absolutely. But it's about building a business that doesn't eat you alive. A lot of people's businesses do, and they're not showing it, they don't show that because it's not profitable to show that. Trust me, I've been behind the scenes on so many businesses, and there's people out there who their business looks great on social media, but it's eating them alive. So my mastermind, it's all about creating these strategies and looking at stabilizing your business in a way that actually allows you to enjoy what you've built. Because what the fuck is the point if you can't enjoy it? So, this is where we do things like we're gonna audit your fulfillment, we're gonna chat about leadership and how you're showing up in your business, how you're holding the spaces, how you're communicating your boundaries. We're gonna chat about the uncomfortable pieces that come up around identity. And we're also gonna talk about all the other things that are important here too, like creating the marketing systems, building the sales processes, and doing the damn nervous system work so that you can hold the next level. So, anyway, if this is something that speaks to you, the next cohort is the metamorphosis track of the Profit and Freedom Business Mastermind, specifically for people who are 150k to 400k a year in business. It's a group space, but it also comes with one-to-one. This is new, but at this level, I want to work with people one to one as well. I want to go real deep. Three months long. So if that's something that interests you, look in the show notes and you can find the information about that. The track for earlier stage entrepreneurs from 50k to 150k, we'll be releasing those details soon as well, so keep an eye out for that.

unknown 19:59

But yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

Yeah. All in all, I just need you to know that if your business feels like it's slipping through your fingers right now, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's broken, right? It just means that you're kind of in this like in-between phase. You haven't stabilized it. It doesn't mean that you can't stabilize it. Everybody can stabilize their business, but it's not as sexy. It's not as risky. It's not as fun. But I guarantee you that if you focus on stabilizing your business instead of repositioning and pivoting every time you feel something slipping or every time you feel threatened by your competition or even feeling threatened by AI, like you are going to have a much more sustainable business long term. And you're going to be able to enjoy it a lot more because of that, too. So when things get messy and you get uncomfortable and you're tempted to throw it all out, I want you to pause instead. And I want you to assess and I want you to look at your foundation. I don't want you to get desperate. Okay. I want you to stay grounded because you've already validated something. Like if you have had a really great year in business at any point in time, you know that your business is validated for the most part. Right. If you've had the 30K month, but you couldn't hold it, there was something there that was validated. So it's often not really about the offer and whether or not your business has legs. Even if you've had a 10K month in business, it's not about whether or not your business has legs. Like you've validated something there. You're just not stabilized yet. But when you are, like you'll become unstoppable. And that is the flex. Like that is the flex. Anyway, thanks everyone for listening. If this hits home, come find me on Instagram. Check out my mastermind. That's the space where we're gonna turn your chaos into calm. We're gonna turn the success that you've had so far into something you can actually sustain. And I can't wait to see it. I want that for everyone. I've had that in my business, and I want that for you too. Alrighty. We'll chat soon.