How Your Friends Can Help You Earn More Money
Start an Accountability Group
Tomorrow
October Money Sprouts Meetup-Holiday Sales Marketing
This will be a mastermind conversation specific to your sales goals for the 2024 Holiday Season. Get feedback, ideas and encouragement from the Money Sprouts Community.
When: Tuesday, October 8, 2024 at 6:00 pm MTN/8:00 pm EST-Zoom details will be sent Tuesday morning.
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Do You Need an Accountability Group?
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2025 has been on my mind a lot in recent weeks for various reasons. This is the time of year when I begin looking forward to taking time off in the front facing parts of my business. If I were doing social media or a lot of in-person work, that tapers off from November through mid-January. I also do a crazy amount of behind the scenes work during those months. Right now I’m thinking about expanding a couple of income streams in 2025 and adding a new platform that I’ve been reluctant to start.I’ll keep you posted on that if I move forward with it. My primary interest in 2025 is to wildly outperform the goals that I’m setting for next year.
I plan on being AGGRESSIVE.
Last week I shared that I met with some friends via Zoom to talk about our online businesses. The primary context of that conversation was what wasn’t working in our business and the things that we were concerned about. The second half of our conversation was centered around the type of work that we wanted to lean more into. Several of us expressed an interest in building more speaking clients, others had income streams that they’d stumbled upon and loved and needed more encouragement, guidance and information to build momentum with that particular income stream.
My friends are high earning content creators and freelancers who’ve designed some pretty incredible spaces, resources and content. I loved that we all were candid that we didn’t know everything. We needed help and that we needed support as we leaned more into doing work that felt a little bit scary and exciting to us.
What was interesting about this conversation was that there were three key parts to it.
Noticing a pain point-I’d noticed throughout the year that my friends expressing concerns about the changes happening in the digital business landscape. We’re still very much in the early stages of this industry and paying attention to headwinds that could harm our businesses is a huge part of sustaining and maintaining a healthy business.
Addressing the elephant in the room-I was so happy to share my concerns with my friends. We talked about our fears, our overwhelm and some of the underlying tensions that were affecting our ability to focus on growing other income streams-even though this was clearly an urgent priority. We were really thinking about what would actually motivate us beyond just making money.
Inspired solutions-A couple of days later, one of my friends came up with an idea on how we could achieve our goals and was inspired by some of the ideas floated around during our conversation. We’d noticed that we were having some difficulty figuring out “then what” What do we do once we’ve identified what we wanted to do? LOL!
Today I’m sharing the third part of the conversation and some ideas on how you and your business friends can support each other. Especially as you grow into a new part of your business.
Why Start an Accountability Group
My friends and I have similar interests but we speak to different audiences. This provides a huge opportunity as we build smaller accountability groups to support our work.
Share Your Expertise-At least one member in your group should have expertise in the thing that you don’t. In my little group, I’m the person who has expertise in building a newsletter. Other expertise that my friends and I have to varying degrees depending on the person:
Podcast production
Event production
High earning freelance writing (pitching/finding clientele)
Community building
Speaking
Partnerships with brands
Sponsorships
Voice and Validate Your Goals-It was so nice to share my goals and what I was trying to make happen. I felt heard, seen and validated. And by sharing what I was needing help with my friends were able to share the following with me (I also did the same)
Solutions
Resources-Who to contact for certain types of projects
How people found their expertise
What didn’t work for them
Set Up Systems for Success-This is one of the most important aspects of a well-designed accountability group. For the goals that my friends and I would like to achieve we recognized that there were things that we could do that are in our control.
Clarify our offerings-Is it clear what we do, our expertise and who we serve?
Audit our platforms to make it easier for in-bound lead requests
Focus on pitching a certain minimum number of pitches each month. In fact, I’m going to suggest that we pitch during our meetings so that it’s done.
Get feedback-Talk about the language of your offering, the pitches and how to approach pricing.
How to Start an Accountability Group
It’s pretty straightforward.
Recognize a shared pain point or interest
Post that you’re looking to connect with 3-7 other creators who are interested in working on similar outcomes
Decide on a meeting cadence. Should you meet once a month, twice a month, etc.
What are the ground rules around participation in the accountability group
Show up for most of the meetings?
Provide support?
Uplift the other members
Respect for privacy
Collaborate vs. Compete-Ideally this is the ethos of the group and in order to avoid accidental competition, the members should have similar yet different audiences.
Trust-You have to trust the people who are in the group to respect everyone’s privacy.
You want people in the group who believe in you more than you believe in yourself. They are fans of you and the work that you do. These are serious, focused and fun people that you want to be around.
A Few Things to Watch Out For
Here are few issues that I thought about when working on today’s newsletter.
Members who don’t celebrate your success-No bueno. You need people who are excited for you and your successes and cheer you on!
Avoid participating in too many groups-If you’re in too many accountability groups then you may have too many goals that you’re working on concurrently. Work on a few goals at a time, achieve them then join another group.
Thoughtful feedback vs. critique-There’s a fine line between the two. I’ve always had the good fortune of being given thoughtful feedback about what is and isn’t working as I work on building my brand.
Too many rules vs. too few-You want people to be excited about participating in an accountability group. If it’s too intense or too chill, participation will drop off.
Not communicating metrics for success-It’s important in an accountability group to share what you consider success to be. Here are some examples:
Booking a minimum number of paying coaching clients at a specific rate by a specific business quarter.
Giving a certain number of paid talks at a specific rate each month.
Growing a newsletter to a certain number of subscribers per month.
Converting at specific metric consistently
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Financial Hardship Requests
If you’re dealing with a financial difficulty and would like to become a Money Sprouts member-DM me via the Substack platform or email me at:
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What I’m Working on for 2025
Each year I try to push myself professionally in new ways. One of the benefits of being your own boss is that you have professional autonomy. You can build and explore skills and interests without someone else saying “no” to you exploring that interest. Here is what I’m (tentatively) thinking about doing in 2025.