Entrepreneur Tips, Business Metrics, Coaching Strategies, Service Business Growth

Business Metrics That Actually Drive Entrepreneurial Growth for Coaches and Consultants

If you call yourself a coach or consultant but don’t know your numbers, you’re not running a business—you’re running a hobby with invoices. It’s time to get unapologetically serious about Business Metrics so you can unlock real Service Business Growth, not just survive month to month on referrals and luck.

Stop Guessing: Metrics Are Your Unfiltered Truth

You coach clients to face reality, yet too many coaches and consultants hide from their own. Business metrics are the unfiltered truth about whether your offers, prices, and Coaching Strategies are working—or bleeding you dry. When you track the right numbers, you stop operating from emotion and start operating from evidence. That’s where real entrepreneurial growth begins.

The Four Core Metrics Every Coach and Consultant Must Track

Ignore the vanity metrics. Your follower count won’t pay your taxes. These four hard-hitting metrics will.

1. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) – How much predictable revenue lands in your account every month from retainers, memberships, or programs. If this number isn’t growing, your business isn’t either, no matter how “busy” you feel.

2. Client Acquisition Cost (CAC) – The real cost to win a client: ad spend, tools, and your time. If you don’t know this, you’re guessing every time you launch a campaign or raise ad spend.

3. Lifetime Value (LTV) – The total revenue an average client brings in over the full relationship. High LTV gives you permission to invest boldly in marketing and sales without flinching.

4. Conversion Rate – The percentage of leads that become paying clients. This is the litmus test for how effective your Coaching Strategies and sales conversations really are.

💡 Entrepreneur Tip: Track these four metrics weekly for 90 days. If you don’t see a story emerging, you’re not looking closely enough.

Turn Metrics into Moves: From Data to Decisions

Numbers without action are just digital decoration. The power of Business Metrics lies in the decisions you make because of them. If your MRR is flat but your calendar is full, that’s a pricing and packaging problem. If your conversion rate is low, that’s a messaging and positioning problem. If your CAC is high and LTV is low, that’s a client-fit problem. Bold entrepreneurs don’t just observe; they adjust ruthlessly.

Here’s the hard truth: every metric that frustrates you is a mirror reflecting a decision you haven’t been brave enough to make yet. Raise your prices. Kill the offer that drains you. Double down on the channel that actually converts. That’s how Service Business Growth stops being a slogan and starts being your new normal.

Metrics-Driven Coaching Strategies That Scale You, Not Just Your Hours

If your revenue only grows when you work more hours, your model is broken. Smart Coaching Strategies use metrics to design leverage, not just labor. Start by tracking revenue per client, revenue per offer, and revenue per hour worked. Any offer that drags those numbers down is a candidate for redesign or removal—no matter how attached you feel to it.

Build group programs, VIP days, or hybrid consulting packages where one unit of your time serves many clients. Measure the impact ruthlessly: higher MRR, higher LTV, and more white space on your calendar. That’s not just entrepreneurial growth; that’s freedom engineered through numbers.

💡 Entrepreneur Tip: If an offer doesn’t improve at least one key metric—MRR, LTV, or revenue per hour—don’t launch it. You’re not in the “nice idea” business; you’re in the profit business.

Build a Simple Weekly Metrics Ritual That Forces Growth

You don’t need a CFO to act like a serious CEO. You need a non-negotiable, metrics-driven ritual. Once a week, same time, no excuses, review your numbers and make one bold decision based on what you see. This is where Entrepreneur Tips stop being inspirational quotes and start becoming operational discipline.

• Open your dashboard or spreadsheet with MRR, CAC, LTV, and conversion rate.

• Ask: What moved up? What slipped? What surprised me?

• Commit to one concrete action: adjust pricing, refine an offer, tweak messaging, or shift marketing focus.

This ritual is the backbone of sustainable Service Business Growth. It pulls you out of reactive mode and forces you into strategic leadership. No more “let’s see how this month goes.” You’re steering the ship with intention, not drifting with the current.

The Entrepreneurial Growth Mindset: Numbers Over Narrative

Your story about your business doesn’t matter if your numbers disagree. Bold entrepreneurs let Business Metrics rewrite the narrative. If your “best” offer has the lowest LTV, it’s not your best offer. If your “favorite” marketing channel rarely converts, it’s not your best channel. Metrics cut through ego, nostalgia, and fear. They show you exactly where to press the gas and where to slam the brakes.

You coach your clients to embrace discomfort for growth. Apply the same standard to yourself. The discomfort of facing your numbers is the price of stepping into your next level of entrepreneurial growth. Pay it gladly. The return is clarity, confidence, and a business that finally behaves like the asset you intended it to be.

Your Next Bold Move: Declare Your Metric Targets

Don’t just nod along and bookmark this. Choose three numbers right now: your target MRR, your ideal conversion rate, and the LTV you’re committed to building. Write them down. Build your Coaching Strategies and offers around hitting those targets. Let every decision in your business answer one question: Does this move me closer to those numbers, or not?

That’s how serious coaches and consultants operate. That’s how real Service Business Growth happens. Own your metrics, and you’ll own your market.

How to Unlock Business Growth with Data-Driven Decisions

Most business owners eventually hit a season where the playbook stops producing. The webinars that used to convert go quiet, the networking that used to fill the calendar slows down, and the clients who do say yes take three times longer to get there. It is tempting to point at AI, the economy, or politics and conclude the game has changed for good.

In this episode of The Amanda Kaufman Show, the tables turn. Co-host Rebecca Kaufman interviews Amanda herself about what is really going on when a business stalls, and how data-driven decisions unlock the next level. Amanda is the founder of Clairvenu, a former corporate consultant, and a coach who helps service-based business owners gain clarity so they can do less and earn more. Here is the framework she laid out.

The Real Problem Is Usually Misdiagnosis

Amanda hears the same conversation over and over: what used to work does not work anymore. Her first observation is that the trend is real, but the explanation usually is not.

How It Matters: When the cause gets assigned to AI, the economy, or politics, the control and agency get assigned there too. Those things are true, but they sit outside a business owner's influence, so the prescription defaults to working harder. More events, more channels, a new Substack, all stacked on a foundation that was a little rickety to begin with.

How to Do It: Separate what is true from what is actionable. Before adding a single new strategy, ask whether the old strategy was ever actually measured. The most useful diagnosis starts with what is inside the owner's control.

Common Mistake: Most owners respond to a slowdown by adding strategies on top instead of diagnosing the foundation underneath. The wrong prescription for the wrong problem just produces more exhaustion.

Check the Facts Before Trusting the Story

Amanda compares the “it used to work so well” narrative to how people describe a relationship right after a breakup: suddenly the whole thing was terrible. The story changes based on the emotion, not the facts.

How It Matters: Without metrics, the first real signal most owners get is a screaming bank account or mounting credit card debt. That is late, and the guilt and shame that arrive with it taint every look backward. The story becomes “it is out of my control,” and that is exactly where people get stuck.

How to Do It: Pull the actual data. Look in the CRM, look at the transaction history, and check the facts of the story. Exactly how many people were in the room, exactly how many converted, and what specifically changed. Good metrics show a business drifting off track long before it becomes an emergency.

Common Mistake: A lot of owners reference their results anecdotally. Sales are “taking four times longer” or conversions are “half of what they were,” with no numbers behind either claim. Very often the stable, high-performing past was actually a one-hit wonder that was never sustained in the first place.

Start With the Bare Minimum Metrics

Nobody needs a data science team to run a data-driven business. Amanda recommends what she calls the bare minimum set of metrics, and it starts somewhere surprising: the calendar.

How It Matters: An owner without visibility into their own time is living in reaction to inboxes, social media, and opportunities, bouncing around like a pinball. A business run erratically will never produce predictable results, no matter how good the offer is.

How to Do It: First, track time with one calendar (one, not six) that describes where the focus is going. Second, track input activities: posts published, minutes of video, podcast interviews booked, networking events attended, whatever feeds visibility and exposure. Third, track outputs: the number of calls booked, the number of yeses, and the magnitude of those yeses, meaning both total contract revenue and cash actually collected.

Common Mistake: Most entrepreneurs judge success by glancing at the bank account at the end of the day and waiting for a magic number with enough zeros. That metric sits at the very end of the business, with zero visibility into everything that happens in between.

Run the Action, Track, Review, Adjust Cycle

Metrics are not the goal. They are what make better questions possible. Amanda describes a simple loop: block time with intent, act, track what happened, then review and adjust.

How It Matters: Every hour on the calendar had a purpose. Reviewing whether the time produced the intended result is what turns a fixed investment, like eight hours a month on content, into a lever that can be optimized instead of a cost that just recurs.

How to Do It: Look for the one move that makes everything downstream easier. Amanda noticed she kept sitting down to record solo episodes, stalling, and draining herself, half a dozen times in a row. Her adjustment was to bring in a co-host for accountability, which is why Rebecca is on this very episode. That single fix produces a finished conversation that becomes short form clips, transcript content, and caption content all at once.

Common Mistake: Letting the to-do list get filled by marketers, family, and friends, all well-meaning, until the whole week is reaction. Research time has the same trap: a little competitive scrolling is learning, but most people let it quietly expand to fill the whole block.

Pop the Hood, Skip the Shame

Stuck is stuck, whether that is stuck at zero or stuck at $250,000. Amanda's closing advice is about what to do with the feelings that come with it.

How It Matters: Shame and guilt about past decisions are useless emotions except for one thing: signaling that something has to change. Owners who stay in the shame spiral keep telling the “out of my control” story instead of opening up the data that would show them the way forward.

How to Do It: Pop the hood on the business as it exists today. No new software, no data scientist required. Export CSV files from the CRM or payment processor, drop them into a folder with an AI tool like Claude, and start asking powerful questions. What has the highest-revenue client actually paid, and what did they buy? What reasons did people give for saying yes? For saying no? Sales call transcripts hold a goldmine of answers.

Common Mistake: Looking for an easy answer to a hard problem. If it were easy, peasy, breezy, beautiful to solve, it would already be solved. Give the problem permission to be hard, then read more, ask for more help, and get into community with people who have solved it before.

Conclusion

Growth gets unlocked in a sequence: diagnose accurately instead of blaming the weather, check the story against the actual data, track the bare minimum metrics (time, inputs, booked calls, and yeses), run the action, track, review, adjust cycle, and pop the hood without shame. None of it requires a bigger audience or a fancier tech stack. It requires visibility, and visibility is a decision. You owe it to your dreams.

To hear the full conversation between Amanda and Rebecca, listen to Episode 334 of The Amanda Kaufman Show on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Frequently Asked Questions

What metrics should a small business owner track first?

Start with three things: time (one calendar showing where focus actually goes), input activities (posts, videos, interviews, networking events, or whatever drives visibility), and outputs (calls booked, yeses, total contract revenue, and cash collected). These reveal what is happening between effort and results.

Why does it feel like my marketing used to work better?

Sometimes it did, and sometimes the memory is a story rather than a fact. Without recorded metrics, most owners reference results anecdotally, and emotion shapes the comparison. Checking the CRM and transaction data often reveals the “stable” past was less consistent than it felt.

How can I use AI to analyze my business data?

Export the data already sitting in the business, like CSV files from a CRM or payment processor, and load them into an AI tool such as Claude to build dashboards and ask questions. Sales call transcripts work too: AI can surface the reasons people gave for saying yes or no.

What if I am stuck no matter how hard I work?

Working harder is usually the wrong prescription because the diagnosis was wrong in the first place. Stuck at $250,000 feels the same as stuck at zero, and the way out is the same: change the inputs, measure the results, and adjust, rather than adding more strategies on top.

Where can I learn Amanda's approach to using AI in a real business?

Amanda teaches it in her free webinar, “How I Finally Got AI To Help Make Me Money: A Comedy,” available at https://clairvenu.com/training. To go deeper with Amanda and her community, find out about Clairvenu's Inner Circle at https://clairvenu.com.

Transcript of the Episode

Rebecca Kaufman (00:00)

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Amanda Kaufman Show. We are so stoked to have you listening today. if I sound a little bit unfamiliar, it's because you were on the ball. my name is actually Rebecca and I am coming in to co-host with Miss Amanda. Hello.

Amanda Kaufman (00:17)

Hello,

I'm so glad you're here.

Rebecca Kaufman (00:19)

I am too. This is gonna be so much fun. So we had the idea that when it comes to Amanda, you know, spreading her wisdom and giving you guys all the good information, it might be helpful to have someone to interview her for a change. So we're gonna try this out. Let us know how you like it in the ratings and you know in the reviews. If you hate it, let us know that too. It's all helpful. but yeah, we're just gonna start this thing off. You ready?

Amanda Kaufman (00:45)

I'm ready. Born ready.

Rebecca Kaufman (00:47)

Okay. Amazing. Well, Amanda, like when it comes to your person that you are helping, first off, can you just like give us a little bit of a description of like who that person even is?

Amanda Kaufman (00:59)

Yeah, so I'm usually working with an entrepreneur who is pretty successful already in terms of having made sales. They might have kissed six figures or they're getting really close to six figures in a service business. I like working with coaches, consultants, agency owners, service providers, you know, people who help people for a living. and especially people who help people use it and are using like a consult to close.

I love helping those folks because you probably have a premium service and you probably are doing something that's pretty impactful, which justifies the premium price. And so that's usually the person I'm working with, somebody who maybe they built mainly through networking and referral base and they're moving online, and you're just kind of feeling like you should be getting more enrollments by now.

Right. Given your effort, given the time, given the money, given the different strategies you've tried and the amount of energy you've put into it, I love helping that person to gain clarity so that they can do less and earn more.

Rebecca Kaufman (01:59)

Do less earn more, that sounds like something everyone would be kind of down for at this stage. Okay, that makes sense. And so when you are helping people out these days, like what's the thing that's coming up for your clients and for your person this week?

Amanda Kaufman (02:05)

Mm.

So what I'm noticing is coming up, especially in the last 12 months, is a lot of conversation around, hey, what used to work doesn't work. so for example, maybe you did webinars before and they worked and now it's not working. Or maybe you were doing local networking and hosting events and that's not working. So I'm hearing a lot of entrepreneurs who formerly had success and the old tricks aren't working anymore. Yeah.

Rebecca Kaufman (02:41)

okay. And from your, you know, vantage point, like what would you say is the number one reason? Is it just that the methods are outdated? Is it something to do with their messaging? Like what's the diagnosis or is it pretty like niche for each person?

Amanda Kaufman (02:56)

You know,

there are some universal things that I'm hearing. And the first thing I think is actually misdiagnosis. So what I mean by that is people are are noticing, like, hey, the webinars aren't working, my email marketing's not working, nobody's booking the calls after my speeches. Like people are noticing that data and that trend. And then what they're doing is they're attributing the cause to factors that are way outside of their control. So it's like, well, it's because AI came out, or it's because of the economic class.

climate

or it's because of what's happening in politics. And so, you know, I'm I'm seeing a lot of readiness to explain this with, you know, honestly, you know what's really tricky about it? Is there things that are true. It's true. AI is here. It is disrupting everything. Right? It's true. The economy is what it is and the politics are what they are. Like all of that stuff is true. And I think like when people are looking for like more firm certainty in their business.

Rebecca Kaufman (03:39)

Yeah. ⁓

Amanda Kaufman (03:54)

They're pointing at these things that are true, but the problem is that it's it's assigning the control or the agency to things that are outside of the business owner's control and agency. So what I'm noticing is because of that misdiagnosis, the then the prescription becomes work harder.

Right. So it's like go to more events, hustle more, do another social media channel, open a substack. That's huge right now. Right. So like people are adding new strategies on top of a foundation that was a little rickety to begin with. So I think it's like misdiagnosis, and then of course, like the wrong prescription for the wrong problem. And what

I think is usually happening. So yes, like is it a niche specific problem? Like, is everybody a snowflake? Yes, your business is unique. You are completely unique and you are so, so, so, so special. But also, there are some things that I notice that if we just address these, it really unlocks the next level. So one of those things is just checking in on like, did that strategy work so good in the first place?

So, for example, let's say you've been doing speaking and you're used to people signing up with you really quickly after the speech. And now lately you're finding fewer people are opting in, fewer people are willing to have the conversation, and fewer still are saying yes. And the ones that are saying yes, they're taking like three or four times longer to convince to say yes than ever. So I think one thing is a lot of these business owners, they're anecdotally referencing.

Their results, right? They're saying it's four times longer, or it's taking twice as long, or it's half as much. And the truth is they don't actually have any metrics in their business. So they don't know for sure exactly how many people were in the room, exactly how many people were converting, and exactly what has has changed and what is different. They're speculating, and because they're in an emotional state, they're like, it's worse than it's ever been before. And it's like, well, maybe it was actually kind of bad before, you just didn't have.

Rebecca Kaufman (05:51)

Hmm.

Amanda Kaufman (05:59)

You know?

Rebecca Kaufman (06:00)

And so let me just like translate that for a hot second. So essentially the business isn't performing or doesn't feel like it's performing the way that it used to, or it's not growing at the same trajectory, right?

Amanda Kaufman (06:11)

Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Kaufman (06:12)

And so people are, you know, externalizing why that could be happening, you know, just to blaming it on, you know, the state of politics, the state of the economy, and like Lord knows, like the price of eggs these days, my God. But what you're saying is that actually they don't have like accurate kind of analysis of their business beforehand. So they don't really have any way of really doing a fair comparison. Is that is that right?

Amanda Kaufman (06:31)

Mm-hmm.

So, like, think

about it this way. So, this is the metaphor that just came into my brain is imagine you've broken up with a guy, right? And I think we've all had a relationship. We have the breakup, right? What do we do right after the breakup when things got bad enough that we had to break up? We basically look at the entire relationship and we're like, the whole thing, the whole thing was terrible.

And that's an example of what I'm saying is like sometimes depending on the story we want to tell in our mind, we see the data differently, right? And like before the breakup, you wouldn't look at the whole relationship as being off.

At the breakup, you're like, wait, the whole thing didn't work, right? I think the same kind of thing happens when people are talking about their business. Like, number one, if you've got good metrics in place, you're gonna see some of the indications that things are off track way before it's an emergency. Like, way before it's an emergency. But because we don't have those metrics in place, when it when people usually realize it, unfortunately, is when their bank account is just screaming or they're

the amount of credit that they've got and trying to keep up with paying the credit back starts to really become painful. And at that point, I'm not saying it's too late, but I'm just saying it's like it's kind of late. So then what ends up happening is there's a lot of guilt and shame that comes with that. And so then when we look back on the past

Rebecca Kaufman (07:56)

⁓

Amanda Kaufman (07:58)

It kind of kind of taints things. It's like, well, it used to be so good. It used to be so working. It used to be this. And I I'm saying, like, do you know that for sure? Like, do you have the data that says exactly that? Because the story sounds really good of it used to be good. It just got really hard. And then I worked really hard to try to fix the hard thing. And now here we are. And like I just

I I know that story because I've lived that story personally, but I also know that story because I've worked with so many business owners that are telling me something pretty similar. And what's so interesting is when you start looking at the the data, like you look in their CRMs, you look at the transaction data, and you check the facts of the story.

So often, what sounds like it was so stable and performing so well in the past, it was actually kind of a one-hit wonder. You know, it wasn't a sustained performance, or it didn't, you know, maybe you had that one sale that was really rocking, but then everything after that, there was a little compromise in it. And because of that, I think that the story then becomes it's out of my control and I can't do anything about it. And that's that's where people get stuck.

Rebecca Kaufman (08:48)

Yeah.

So here's a question for you, because like I already kind of know the answer to this, because working in sales metrics is like massive, but they're also the thing that any sales manager will have to pull teeth to get people to accurately do on a consistent basis. ⁓ why the resistance to metrics and if you had to recommend like a bam, bare ass minimum level of metrics that you record, like what do you what would you p say to that newbie entrepreneur?

Amanda Kaufman (09:17)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely.

I would say to like both the newbie and also the more established entrepreneur who is encountering a ceiling. Like stuck is stuck. Like if you're stuck at $250,000, it can feel exactly the same as stuck as zero. Like stuck is stuck. So if you're stuck, it's because we're not taking the actions that are going to affect the outcomes that you're looking for. That's it. That's all it is. It's v like.

In some ways, business is incredibly simple. The issue is that we think it's not. We think that we have to have vi you know viral posts that are going out. And we have to be famous. We have to have a New York Times best-selling book. And we have to be on all the different newsfeeds. And we have to have to have to have to have to have to have to. And if you're drowning in all these have

Half-das become gonna's like I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that, right? And what ends up happening is we make more promises about what we're gonna do or how the future is gonna be different than what it is today. And we skip over the things that you know, but really, really have to do. So getting back to your point about the bare ass minimum, the bam is what we call it around here, of metrics, I would say number one, as a business owner, you must track your time.

And like when I say must, and I know that was so dramatic how I dropped that, but most entrepreneurs are so living in reaction to their inboxes, to social media, to opportunities. And they're like they're just like, you know, that that pinball game where it's like bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, ping, bing, bing, bing, bing. And so they're they're operating like the Tasmanian dang devil.

And they're trying to figure out like, how come I don't have a predictable business? And it's like, because you are behaving erratically, right? So the first thing is to pull it in with a one calendar, one, not six, but one, one calendar that describes what is happening with your focus. Right. So right now I am with you, Rebecca. I am not coaching somebody else. I am not in my car driving somewhere.

I tr I tried to speak to a lead today and you know, like she she was juggling a thousand things at once. We had to reschedule the call. You know, I think the average entrepreneur is so chaotic because they don't have visibility to how they are spending their time. And if you don't have visibility to that, then you won't have the power to make a new decision. I think the second big piece, getting back to like business metrics, is

Rebecca Kaufman (11:51)

Hm.

Amanda Kaufman (12:00)

Every business is gonna have a different set of activities that they perform in order to generate more revenue. So, like for me, it's gonna be content, right? So I can measure how many posts am I posting on a given platform. I can measure how many minutes I'm I'm putting onto the YouTubes, right? I can measure how many podcast interviews I'm booking. You know, I can measure all of these input things and

As part of my process, it goes content into middle funnel, into lower funnel. And in the lower funnel, that's where the conversion conversations are happening. I can measure activities all the way along the way. So I would say like your input activities to whatever it is you're doing for visibility and exposure. So if you're doing networking, it's like how many networking events did you go to this week? Simple, right? It doesn't have to be crazy. So those are like the inputs. Then you need to have your outputs. So

I think one of the biggest mistakes I made for years and that lots of business owners do is they look at their bank account at the end of the day and then they say, Am I successful or not? And they're looking for like this magic number that has enough zeros that they're finally gonna feel good about themselves and that day never comes. And then they're like, What? I'm working hard as hell, and like I'm not, I'm not, I'm not getting the traction that I want. And the reason is that you're looking at this end of the day metric.

That is so deep into your business activities, and we we don't have any visibility in between. So I would say number of calls that you're getting booked at the beginning of your sales process, the number of yeses, and tracking like the financials, all of that is good. But if I was to just do like the three big things, it's my time, it's the number of input activities, number of meetings that are getting booked in the case of a consult business.

And then of course the number of yeses and the magnitude of those yeses. So meaning translation for myself. Magnitude being how much are they paying you, right? So we wanna actually track what's the total contract, you know, for revenue. And we also want to track the cash that was collected.

Rebecca Kaufman (14:06)

Amen to that. Mm-hmm. That sounds sounds right on my end. Okay. And so you've you're starting to track these metrics. You might be discovering some things that were a little bit less stable in your business that you weren't as aware of in the beginning days. You know, fair. What now?

Amanda Kaufman (14:08)

Є

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, once you have the metrics, you're empowered to start asking questions about what's going on, right? So if we start with, for example, your time. What is the purpose of every block of like every hour that you allocated in your business? What was the intent of that time? So for example, like let's just say I've got I've got a good chunk of time booked for the next day or so around content for the next few weeks, right? So when I look back on that block.

What did I do towards content? And so I kind of think of it kind of like a action track review adjust cycle. Right? So first I've blocked the time to do the content. I'm gonna do a thing in that time. When I was a newer entrepreneur, it looked a lot like scrolling, right? It looked like a lot like watching what other people are doing.

And hey, you gotta start somewhere and that is a place to learn. And if you want to get damn good, you probably have to do a bit of scrolling to just stay on on you know what is new in content. I totally get that. But we don't expand into the eight hours to fill that time, right? We're just we're doing it very discreetly, we're taking our notes and then we are moving on. but you're gonna be doing action that's gonna produce a result that whole time. So just track like what did I do?

How many, how much? And then what was my expected outcome from that? So when we're recalibrating, we can ask the question. It's like, hey, okay, so I've already committed that I'm gonna make the investment of say eight hours a month into my content. Now I'm empowered to make different decisions about what I'm doing inside of the eight hours to affect more of a result. So for example, when I was examining my content strategy, I was like, dang, I keep sitting down.

opening up a recording to do a solo episode and I'm getting stuck and I'm getting drained. And I let myself do that like half a dozen times. And then I was like, I need a solution for this. So I used some of my time to say, well, what can I do to help me finish? And one of the ideas was to invite a host to ask me questions so that I would have more accountability in the conversation. So the conversation would conclude. So that's the reason Rebecca's here and

It's going pretty great so far. and like we could iterate from here as well. So like when I think about the game of business, it it really is like examining your time and the money that goes with that too, of course, but really examining like, is there a way that I can make one move that makes everything else downstream easier? And the strategy of focusing on this is this particular video, this very one that we're watching.

Rebecca Kaufman (16:42)

Awesome.

Amanda Kaufman (17:05)

can become short form content, can be transcript content that can be re-engineered into caption content, you name it. I can create a a huge ton of content by fixing this one bottle.

Rebecca Kaufman (17:16)

Well, and I think the thing that like really strikes me about that example is that like you're taking time out of the doing in your business to really analyze like the why you're doing things in the first place, which I think can be really tough for someone who's in the thick of it where you feel like you're just hopping from thing to thing to thing to thing, like you were saying, and like intentionally taking that time to like actually assess, like what is gonna be the needle mover here? What do I actually need to adjust to get this better result that I'm after?

Amanda Kaufman (17:41)

Absolutely. Yeah. To become very reactionary. And I'm not even talking about your attitude being reactionary, although that's also a thing. But I just mean your to do list, you know? It's

It's so easy to have the marketers fill it up, your family fill it up, your friends fill it up, you know, and it's all well-intended and well-meaning. And I I really believe like if you have something bigger to do, like you have a vision and of your purpose and impact that you really want to have, it is so important that you get real about how you are using your time and money and to be more intentional. So then when things aren't working, which things don't work 99% of the time.

then you're empowered to say, well, huh. You know, like if I was to make a change, what would I change? And then test it and then try that. And then just keep going. You owe it to your dreams.

Rebecca Kaufman (18:37)

Thousand percent. Thousand percent. Okay. So I think to kind of wrap up this episode, you know, when you're talking to that entrepreneur who finds them spots that themselves in that space of just being stuck, whether that's their first hundred thousand dollars that they're ever making or they're on their like fifth million, like wherever they are on that spectrum, like what's your like biggest takeaway that you hope someone takes from this episode?

Amanda Kaufman (19:01)

Yeah, so stuck is stuck, like we said. So the thing I didn't say that I wanna also say is that I shame doesn't really get you too far, right? So feeling shame about being stuck, feeling guilty about the decisions you made that that led you to being stuck, like all of that, generally a useless emotion except to tell you that something has to change.

Right. So once you acknowledge that change, it really is like it's so surprising when you do pop the hood on your own business, how much data you can actually extract from your business right now today, without buying another software, without hiring a data scientist, without doing all this crazy stuff. And especially now that you've got like AI and Claude, you can like grab extracts of s kind of downloads of CSV files and things like that, like data exports.

And you can pop them into a folder with Claude Cowork and you can you can how tell Claude like let's go to work, let's build some dashboards, let's do a review of our history and ask really powerful questions. So if you've been stuck, I I think some of the questions might be like, what h how much has our most revenue generating client paid us and what did they buy?

Powerful, right? You could analyze transcripts from your sales conversations. again, you can use AI to help you. but you can you can grab those transcripts and you can ask, like, what were the motivating reasons that people decided to say yes, or what were the reasons that people gave that they said no? You can use all that data and synthesize it to gain insights that give you ideas about what to do about the bottleneck. I think one of the the third big thing I'll say.

Is stop looking for an easy answer to a hard problem. So if it was easy, peasy, breezy, beautiful to solve, then you would and you wouldn't be listening to me right now. So I think like permission for it to be hard and permission for you to not already have the answer, and therefore the permission to seek from again, like that introspection of the data, but also read more books.

Ask for more help, get into more community with people who've solved problems like this. Like where there's a will, there is a way and somebody has solved it. So that's my three one thing.

Rebecca Kaufman (21:21)

I love it. I love it. But honestly, I think that that is golden. And if your mind was just like a little bit blown by the different questions that Latimando was asking or the applications of the AI, you are not alone. Just as someone who is not data brained as much as all that. Like, if you don't have that innately in you, don't shame yourself on that either. Like she said, get the help. Like quite literally just getting a different perspective on your business, just like having someone be able to be

removed from the business can be massive. So yeah, I think I just wanted to lay that out there 'cause you lay it out s like it's so easy to think of those questions, but I'm like, I wouldn't have done that.

Amanda Kaufman (21:57)

Well, okay, and like to be fair, I didn't know how to do any of these things either until somebody taught me. So, you know, like I was I was with a client earlier today and she was feeling bad about not being organized. She was feeling, you know, like the overwhelm and, you know, just

Yeah, she let's put it this way. She had a system that worked for her in a different context that when she goes to do it in business, it just it doesn't work. She ends up being the Tasmanian devil. And she was feeling really, really bad about it. And I said to her, I'm like, I did not come out of the womb organized. Right? Like I had to learn.

I had to learn that it was an issue. I had to learn my options for solving that problem. I had to practice with a couple of different solutions. And even then, like Rebecca's smirking right now, because she knows that in some ways I'm a hella organized. And in other ways, I am also a Tasmanian devil.

Rebecca Kaufman (22:48)

It's all a spectrum, you know?

Amanda Kaufman (22:49)

It just depends on what, you know? And I I love business, so pretty organized in business, but

Rebecca Kaufman (22:55)

Fair enough, fair enough. Well, guys, I think we're gonna wrap it up there. I hope you guys got a lot out of this episode. If you have any follow-up questions or things that you want to hear Amanda's like opinions on, if she has any knowledge that you want to pick her brain about, leave us a question in the reviews as well. We do keep a c pretty close eye on those. So if you have anything, bring it to the pod. We would love to kinda hash it out for you and see if we can get some things answered.

Amanda Kaufman (23:21)

I love

it. Great job on your first interview.

Rebecca Kaufman (23:24)

Huzzah.

Amanda Kaufman (23:26)

Ha ha ha.