When to burn it all down and how to rise from the ashes

This is a story about reinvention and setting better boundaries, even with yourself. If you’ve ever felt stuck, wanted to change, or felt scared that you can’t abandon everything and find something better, then this is for you. If you are a paid subscriber, I recommend reading Is it even possible to be a writer AND happy at the same time, How one hour of work can make you $100,000 a year, You don't have to like me as long as you validate my existence, and Everything is beige here... to help round out this article.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.

I made $50,000 more last year than any other year in my whole career, and I nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to keep it all together.

I don’t say that kind of thing lightly.

I’ve dealt with depression, anxiety, and a myriad of chronic illnesses for years. While I am prone to hyperbolize, I don’t ever joke about having a breakdown. The only thing that saved me was that I was so burnt out I became numb to how close I came to complete and utter collapse.

Fun start to an article, right? I’m not sure it gets more fun from here on out, but I sure do write a whole lot more words so that’s something, at least.

My Writer MBA business partner and I never set out to start a company together. In fact, when I licensed all my non-fiction work for her to use in her/our Book Sales Supercharged series, I never thought I would do non-fiction again.

I had worked in author service, book marketing, and courses for years by the end of 2020. While I loved the relationships I made during my time in author services, it was only part of my life that felt like a job. My clients consistently pulled focus from writing fiction books, so after we closed the deal back in November 2020 I was excited to work exclusively on novels for a while.

It was an amazingly productive time in my life. I was writing close to a book a month during the pandemic, and releasing 10(ish) books a year on Kickstarter. COVID was terrible for lots of reasons, but without doing 20-30 in-person events a year, my output soared.

Then, in October 2021, everything changed when Monica launched Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter on Kickstarter and the whole industry took notice. The campaign raised over $20,000 and laid the foundation for our legendary Kickstarter Accelerator course.

It changed again in March 2022 when Brandon Sanderson became the most successful project in Kickstarter history, making over $41 million.

Nobody expected that to happen, especially us. Suddenly, the whole indie publishing industry was clamoring for information on Kickstarter, and we happened to be in the right place at the right time to capitalize on that fervor with our book and Kickstarter Accelerator course.

When an opportunity presents itself, you have to act fast, so we pretty much put our lives on hold and launched the course by the time his campaign was over and interest was at its highest level.

The success we had with it completely changed my life.

However, we never set out to build a company. Both of us were successful authors with successful companies, and we both dropped an unplanned, fast-growth company into the middle of everything we were doing and it quickly ate every moment of our lives.

What they don’t tell you about fast growth success is that if you aren’t ready for it then it can destroy you. 

Monica and I had never worked together before beyond that first Kickstarter, and now we were launching multiple courses, dealing with hundreds of students, and trying to keep our other companies running at the same time.

I was burned out by last September, while we still had two big launches and two more huge conferences to attend. I barely pulled myself over the finish line (and got COVID as a reward, the effects of which I’m still dealing with today).

By the time the dust finally settled, we had our most successful year ever…but it certainly didn’t feel that way. It felt like we just worked harder than we had in our entire lives and had barely gotten anywhere.

In December, we basically decided not to talk for a month, enjoy the holidays, and regroup in January.

*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole 4,500-word article, then go to this website.***

In the early days of the pandemic, I brought a proposal to a group I was working with to market our podcasts. The idea was to host a virtual podcast convention to build our email lists and build our reputation in the business podcast space.

I’ve run several virtual conferences in my life, but never worked with so many people I barely knew. We spent about a month talking about it, planning it, and finally reached the stage where people had to do a bit of homework to move forward.

I asked, and everybody agreed, to spend the next week writing 1-2 possible guests for each panel for us to discuss at the next meeting.

It wasn't a big ask, but it did let me evaluate if they were good candidates for partnerships. I learned long ago that before you go all-in on a partnership you should set markers to evaluate whether your potential partners are likely to let you down.

I set this marker in secret. If people know about a boundary then it influences their behavior. I needed to know how they would work when there was no pressure on them to deliver. It’s my version of the shopping cart theory.

It's really important to get a baseline assessment of the person to know if they are trustworthy or not.

I’ve consistently found that if a potential partner can’t complete a simple task without supervision, there is no way they’ll deliver in the clutch. I’ve carried too many group projects over the finish line to babysit business partners. On top of that, three of my own companies blew up in my face because I chose the wrong partners.

So, what happened?

Only one of them did the homework. So, I sent an email that said I was out because people didn't do the work.

They gave several excuses and even more reasons, but it just didn't matter. Boundaries are important, and if somebody doesn't respect yours, you should find out early, and get them out of your life.

This is how I go into everything. Small steps of trust with lots of ways to shut down, because otherwise you'll go too far down a road, and it never ends well.

The problems we had at Writer MBA were at least partially about boundaries, just not the same kind.

Monica and I had a different kind of boundary problem. Both of us were so used to running solo businesses that we dug in and did everything…even when it wasn’t part of our ideal author ecosystem.

If you haven’t read about our archetype system yet, then here’s a quick overview.

This system was born from the inherent conflict that bubbled up at the end of last year.

You see, Monica is a grassland. She loves going deep on topics and writing about them from every angle. If you’ve ever seen Hamilton, Monica’s answer to most things is to write her way out. She loves content marketing, as long as she doesn’t have to be on camera constantly to deliver it.

Monica needs silence to work in her zone of genius and huge chunks of empty space in her calendar. Meanwhile, in 2022 we recorded 80+ episodes of our podcast and were in constant launch mode.

As a tundra, I’m more comfortable being on camera and recording live video because my superpower is excitement. However, I work best in short bursts with a lot of recovery time. My ideal schedule is a 2-4 week launch window with two months of recovery before the next launch, like a fashion designer.

When we sat down and talked it over, overstepping our own boundaries was a huge reason for our collective burnout. Monica works best in evergreen content mode, working moderately and adding pennies to the bank, while I prefer working in heavy, short bursts.

Instead of working inside our own ecosystems, we were trying to live in each other’s, and it nearly destroyed us. Not to mention we were trying to build a community like a forest, optimize everything to peak efficiency like a desert, and add different lines of business like an aquatic.

It nearly destroyed us, and it took us half a year to even start to recover.

Even before last year, I have taken every December off since 2015 to do a complete audit of my business and reflect on the previous year. I plan new initiatives for the following year and scrap anything that doesn’t serve me anymore.

If you’ve never done this before, then I highly recommend taking some time off to audit your own career. Here’s the exercise I do every year. It is a modification of the Eisenhower Matrix popular in productivity circles.

1. Write down all your responsibilities and tasks, no matter how small, either on a notepad, a spreadsheet, or a whiteboard. Really it doesn't matter where you write it down, but try to make it comprehensive.

2. Create two new columns with headers NECESSITY and ENJOYMENT. The necessity column deals with how important a task is to the day-to-day functionality of your business. The enjoyment column deals with how much you like doing that task.

3. Now, rank each of your tasks on a scale from 1-10. Something with high necessity can be monetary or functional, but not always. Some admin tasks are critical for a business, even if they don’t add any revenue to your business. Meanwhile, some monetary tasks might not be very necessary at all. The enjoyment level should be self-explanatory. Here’s the rub. You can’t use the number seven as an answer. Seven is the default when you don’t want to make a hard choice, so you can’t use it here. You must choose either a six or an eight, for reasons that will be clear very soon.

4. Once you have your list, it’s time to make a hard break between 1-6 and 8-10. This is why you can’t use seven. Everything on the 1-6 side falls on the DON’T LOVE/DON’T NEED side of the barrier. Everything 8-10 falls on the LOVE/NEED side of the barrier depending on the column.

5. Draw a grid with four quadrants. Mark the X-AXIS as ENJOYMENT and the Y-AXIS as NECESSITY. Everything you LOVE and NEED should end up on the TOP RIGHT QUADRANT. Everything you NEED but don’t LOVE should end up in the TOP LEFT QUADRANT. Everything you DON’T NEED and DON’T LOVE should be in the BOTTOM LEFT. Everything you LOVE but DON’T NEED should end up in the BOTTOM RIGHT. It should end up looking something like this when you are done.

6. Now, you assess. What is in the top right quadrant? Those should be your core products and offerings. You might even find some new services you could offer that more align with your passions. What is in the bottom right quadrant? How can you make those more important to your business? What is in the top left quadrant? How can you outsource those, or change them so you love them? What ended up in the bottom left quadrant? Cut those things ASAP.

What you should find are the things in your business that bring the highest return and provide a high level of satisfaction. You should immediately find ways to double down on those parts of your business. The more time you can spend doing those, the more your company will grow.

If you found that you don't have any high-revenue products, then you should spend your time testing some quickly. When you’re ready to move to the next step, you can do this exercise to help you plan your revenue for the next year.

No business can survive for long without bestselling products and/or services. If you've never done this before it's going to be painful and you are probably not going to like the result, which is okay.

When Monica and I met again after taking December off, we were still pretty fried, but we had a company to run so we had to march forward into the future.

It would have been easy to continue business as usual, even if it would have killed us sooner than later. That’s what most people would do, but the thought of that made me sick. I had finally made a life I was happy with, and being in constant launch mode just wasn’t how I we wanted to run our business.

If I wanted to be miserable in my life, I would just go get a job.

So, we took a bold step, scrapped everything we built, and decided to rebuild our business from scratch with intention.

In designing our perfect company, we decided it had several components that allowed us to dig deep with our students.

The first was a membership with an archetype system that created a framework for more of our students to achieve success quickly. That’s where the Author Ecosystem fits into our plan.

The second was a conference where our people could all gather together to talk about the future of publishing. This ended up morphing into the Future of Publishing Mastermind we launched earlier this year.

The third was a magazine to help direct the conversation. While we don’t have that third one in place yet, we are contributing editors to the October issue of Indie Author Magazine. If that works we hope to expand out into our own magazine.

Mostly, we wanted highly-skilled teams in place to help us grow while we focused on finding ways for our students to succeed. We couldn’t do it alone anymore. It’s literally taken all year to spin up all of these things, but after months of hard work, we’re finally seeing the fruits of our labor.

We could have kept falling into the same cycle that burned us out in 2022. Instead, we chose to take a step back and find a way forward that worked better for both of us, respected our boundaries, and reinforced our ecosystems.

I’ve helped hundreds of authors in my career and watched countless creators become successful. The one thing that unites them all is that they have failed more than other people even try.

They didn't get there overnight, but with consistent, focused, and intentional work they figured out what worked for them and what didn’t. One day they seemed to lurch forward all at once.

It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. You are given all the pieces in the box, but when you dump them out it’s a mess. Even though you are given a picture to look at, you only really learn how all the pieces fit together by putting them together.

I watched them fail, and fail, and fail, and fail—but they never stopped. Each time they fell down, they brushed themselves off, licked their wounds, and asked themselves these questions:

• What can I learn from this?

• What can I use next time?

• How can I make sure to never fail like this again?

It is that last word that is the most profound. Again.

They know they are going to fail, but they don't want to fail in the same way again. They learn from every failure, what not to do, and eventually built a toolkit for success, which they can use for the rest of their lives. Often, when I meet them they are one or two pieces away from putting it all together—but that is where most people stop.

The successful ones don't stop.

They break through those barriers and end up successful in the end, not because they are more talented than other people, but because they wanted it more.

Wanting it more doesn't mean working harder until you burn out. It means struggling against the barriers that prevent success, smashing through them using tools you develop, and learning from all the failures that pop up along the way. It means aggressively learning from everybody and everything around you so that you can soak up as much knowledge as possible, and add things into your toolkit that might help you.

Notice I used the word might. Most things you try won't help you at all, but some will. You can't discount anything from anybody because that might be the thing that breaks you through. Some of my biggest successes were from studying companies like McDonald's and Starbucks. I was open to learning from them because I was willing to learn from anybody and anything, even though most things I tried were horrific failures.

Most authors fall into three categories with their ecosystems - unhealthy, healthy, and evolved. If you've ever heard Becca Syme talk about basements and balconies or listened to Claire Taylor explain enneagram growth, then this falls along the same general guidelines.

When ecosystems are unhealthy, they are performing actions that don't fall into their natural tendencies. A classic example would be a forest trying to write to market even though they infuse too much of themselves into their books to have success working that way.

Meanwhile, writing to market is a perfect desert strategy for success because they are great at analyzing the market and quickly writing books optimized to all the trends.

The first step in moving your ecosystem from unhealthy to healthy (after identifying your ecosystem) is to nurture the actions that give you a competitive advantage in the marketplace. If you've looked at the overview of each type, then you've seen you can have success in every ecosystem. However, a grassland is going to have a nightmare of a time trying to launch like a tundra, because they want to spend years talking about and thinking about a single topic instead of launching well and moving on to the next thing.

This is the problem Monica and I identified above in our own business.

After you've identified the actions that lead to the best, most aligned results for you, then it's time to double down on them until you are not only healthy, but thriving. Once you're healthy, then it's time to evolve.

Once you have a healthy ecosystem and you're rocking and rolling, it's natural to want to expand. We call that evolution.

For instance, my Substack is about going deep into the intersection of craft and commerce. That's a grassland strategy I’m trying to bring into my tundra ecosystem. I’m also expanding beyond books into card games, RPGs, and merch, moving into becoming a brand manager like an aquatic.

If I tried to employ these strategies too early, they would have likely collapsed my ecosystem. In fact, I have tried to build memberships for years like a forest, and they have been disastrous.

It turns out I wasn’t expanding in a natural way for my ecosystem. As a tundra, it makes complete sense to grow my brand like an aquatic. I’m already great at curating experiences and launching, so it’s a natural fit.

My love language is acts of service, so writing articles like this also works for me. If I can learn to focus on one topic, then I can grow like a grassland as well. I’ve always done a lot of podcasts and content marketing during a launch. Now, I’m trying to simply take what I’m already doing and flatten it out to work over time instead of all at once.

This is equally powerful in building strong partnerships. Since developing this system, Monica and I have been better at growing our own healthy ecosystems that amplify, not diminish, each other.

Even if I can’t make content marketing work, that’s not my success metric. I’m responsible for building out a launch, making everything connect together, building excitement, and turning that into sales.

Monica and I have specialized in ways that reinforce our company’s ecosystem, making us both stronger in the process. Now, we’re looking for forests, deserts, and aquatics to help fill out our team and make us even better.

One of the biggest reasons authors fail is because they try to evolve too quickly, while one of the biggest reasons that successful authors stall is because they don't evolve beyond their ecosystem. It’s a delicate balance, but so is all of nature.

I left my last job (and hopefully the last job I will ever have) in June of 2015. That year, I made about $80,000, half from my old job, and another half from being out on my own.

It was pretty evenly split between my only job and entrepreneurial pursuits. However, only about 25% of my company’s money came from book sales. The other 75% of my revenue came from a Verizon dealership that I owned.

As a solopreneur, I made about the national average that first year.

In 2016, I made about 50% more than in that first year. Of that, about 50% came from the Verizon dealership, down from 75% the previous year.

Every year since then, my business model changed wildly with every passing year. My income doubled in 2017, but only 25% of my total sales came from that dealership. The rest of the money came from selling books.

In 2018, only 11% of my total income came from that Verizon dealership. Meanwhile, 56% came from book sales, while a full 33% of my income came from book marketing and course sales, two categories that didn’t exist until that year.

Since then my business has evolved and changed every year. In 2019, most of my income again came from book marketing clients, but in 2020 that income dropped by 85% and my Verizon income dropped to zero during the pandemic. However, I made up for it by making over $70,000 on Kickstarter.

Last year, crowdfunding accounted for over $90,000 of my income, while my Verizon dealership never recovered from the pandemic. On top of that, I added a whole new company into the mix with Writer MBA, which changed everything yet again.

In 2022, I made $50,000 more than any other year of my life, and it was the first year I felt like I had figured out how my business worked, even though I nearly killed myself in the process.

Never again. I’m not about destroying my body to make more money. I want to be happy. Like Kesha said: 

Monica and I proved our commitment to that maxim by blowing up our whole company and building it again from scratch.

It seems to be working, too. This incarnation of my business life feels the best it’s ever been, and new opportunities keep presenting themselves every day. That wouldn’t have happened if we trapped ourselves in old paradigms that no longer served us.

If any of this resonated with you, I encourage you to check out our membership, which will give you access to all the tools you need to build a more sustainable and successful writing business.

I seem to have a knack for reinventing myself out of the ashes of my mistakes and adding new facets to my business that serve me better with every passing year. The more successful I’ve become, the more I reinvent myself to fit that success into my life. In fact, reinvention is the key to it all.

If you’re not happy with how things are going, you can reinvent yourself, too. It's never too late, or too early. You're never too successful, or unsuccessful, to light it on fire and try something new.

If you got something out of this article, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to hear more from us. All our articles are free upon release and for a few weeks afterward. This is a story about reinvention. If you’ve ever felt stuck, wanted to change, or felt scared that you can’t abandon everything and find something better, then this is for you.

If you are a paid subscriber, I recommend reading Is it even possible to be a writer AND happy at the same time, You don't have to like me as long as you validate my existence, How one hour of work can make you $100,000 a year, and Everything is beige here... to help round out this article.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.