Business trends are everywhere this time of year—but not all of them are worth chasing. In this episode, co-hosts Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo break down the top business trends that will shape 2025, from AI and automation to human-centered leadership and simplicity over scale. Together, they unpack what’s hype versus what’s helpful, sharing practical decision-making criteria to help you focus on what truly builds your business instead of what breaks it. Whether you’re tempted by the next shiny tool or simply want clarity for the year ahead, this episode will help you lead with discernment, strategy, and confidence.
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Sorting Business Trends That Build Vs. Break
It’s that time of year, like it or not, when business trends are flooding our inboxes, our feeds, and mastermind conversations. Every chorus group program you’re in, or when you go to a networking session, you’re hearing about the latest trend. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, spoiler alert, you’re like a couple of weeks away from it. Seriously, this is the time of year when this all happens. The truth is, some trends that you hear about are complete game changers. Others are new, bright, shiny distractions that, if you chase them, or if you chase them at the wrong phase of your business, they will break you.
They might break the whole business. They may send you into a corner, curling into a ball, rocking back and forth. What Gwen and I are going to do is we’re going to cut through all that noise for you. We’re going to talk about the three trends that we see emerging. We’re going to talk about how you can figure out which ones are worth your attention and which ones are better left behind so that you can keep building the business you really want. I’m going to steal Gwen’s thunder here for a moment and say context matters.
Why do I say that? Why am I being silly? It is because I know if you’re reading, what you want us to do is tell you to do this and don’t do that. The reality is it’s a decision you’re going to have to make for yourself. What we can do is give you some decision-making criteria so that you can figure out, based on what you know about you, what you know about your business, what makes sense to chase, and what makes sense to ignore. With that, Gwen, I want to kick us off and talk about the problem with trends. When somebody tells you, “Did you see the latest trend? Are you doing this? You know it’s the latest trend,” what is the problem that immediately comes to mind for you?
Trend Vs. Fad: Business Hype & Identifying Trends With Staying Power
For me, the first thing is that it’s not a trend. It’s a fad. It’s somebody who others have deemed important is saying, “This is what I need to do,” often because they did it, or it’s working for them. It’s like, “That’s going to make the same thing happen to me,” which we talk about all the time on this show. Just because it works for Fred doesn’t mean that it’s going to work for Paul. It’s not the way that this game actually works. Back to, as you said, context matters. That’s always my first thing. When it is a trend, is it a trend that’s useful, or is it a fad that somebody has gotten excited about and some amazing marketing person has put so much hype around? It’s like, “That’s the thing that we have to do.”
You teed up my issue. My issue with trends, and this isn’t 100% true 100% of the time, but in general, I see that most trends are all about visibility. They’re not about business viability.
I love that.
Most trends we hear about, it’s like, “This is how you get out in front of new people. This is how you grow your audience, grow your client base, grow, grow, grow, visible, visible, visible, amplify, amplify, amplify.” Very rarely do I see some big trend touted from so-called experts that actually is about making a business sustainable, ensuring that a business remains profitable, or helping a business fatten its margins in some way. As you said, it’s marketing smoke and mirrors in many cases. Now that we have our thoughts on what we love and don’t love about trends and what we see as the problem, I’m curious, though, when do you think trends are a good thing? How do you pay attention to trends?
I love the way that you framed it. It’s more about, “Is it moving the needle?” Is it moving the needle consistently enough with enough different types of people, businesses, situations, that we’re seeing it as something that is viable, that isn’t just a flash in the pan? A lot of the things that we do now that we take as best practice or common practice were a trend at some point, but it’s been long enough ago. For me, part of it is, is this going to have staying power? For me, staying power is exactly what you were talking about. Is it making a difference? Is it moving the needle? Are we increasing margins? Are we getting better profits? Are we able to do more with less? It is all of those things.
I don’t want to be overly dismissive, but a lot of times, what I feel like is a lot of what gets touted as a trend or gets a lot of headlines as a trend is something we’ve been doing for a long time, just in a different outfit and a little bit different window dressing. We’re calling it something different. We’re packaging it a little bit differently. For me, when I’m looking at trends, does this align with what I know to be true? If it doesn’t align with what I know to be true, then what is it speaking to?
Staying power is about making a real difference — moving the needle, increasing margins, improving profit, and doing more with less. Share on XWhat is it showing me evidence of or giving me a hint at? That’s usually where I can go, “This is something I’m going to watch. This is something I’m going to ignore unless it becomes unignorable. This is something I’m going to pay attention to, but cautiously. I’m not going to spend hours. I’m not going to go down a deep rabbit hole. This is something I do need to explore and do need to look at either implementing for myself or considering implementing for a client.”
AI And Automation: A Skeptical Look At The Elephant In The Room
We’re going to talk about three key trends. I feel like the first trend is, you can’t have a trend episode in 2025 or 2026 without talking about the gigantic elephant in the room, which is AI. Specifically, I would say automation. It is AI and automation because they go hand in hand. A lot of times, automation is done with some version of AI. Why don’t you talk to me about what you’re seeing with AI?
Let’s first put all the disclaimers of I am the ultimate AI skeptic that comes in, but it’s only because I started many years ago in the IT world. Most people who are getting excited about AI think AI just showed up in the last few years. We were talking about and dealing with some level of AI many years ago. I come at it from this very skeptical, lots of background, historical. I don’t think about it in the same way. That’s an important disclaimer to put here in the first spot.
One of the phrases that we used way back when was garbage in, garbage out. To me, the biggest concern with AI is garbage in, garbage out. One of the things when we first hit whenever the first ChatGPT came out and everyone is excited about it, part of it was that they’re pulling from the internet, and there’s no one that says what’s on the internet is true.
Sorting Business Trends That Build Vs. Break Share on XHonestly, if you’re pulling from all of the internet, the average content quality on the worldwide web is pretty crappy.
My first thing was that I feel like there’s a lot of garbage in this situation. It’s not all garbage, for sure. I’m absolutely positive. At the same point, I think there’s a fair bit there. What are we getting out of? That was my early stages. We’ve gotten further along now. We’re making a lot of progress. Where I see the challenge is still a version of garbage in, garbage out. The problem is that we aren’t recognizing what we’re using it for or what we’re providing it. What we’re individually providing is garbage because we wouldn’t classify it as garbage. We’re giving it bad information, so it’s going to do “bad things.” It’s not going to provide what we need.
The other concern that I’ve seen with that I’ve had for a long time with all types of automation is that we get into the mindset of we set it and we forget it. There are too many elements that are out of our control that we can’t just forget them. We need to at least check in on it occasionally. That’s the other big risk. At the same point, there are a ton of things that work so much more efficiently when they’re automated and when they’re done well. There are a whole lot of use cases for AI that are super valuable. It’s not like it’s all bad, but it’s also not all roses, unicorns, and rainbows.
The “Garbage In, Garbage Out” Reality Of AI
The most meaningful thing is the garbage in, garbage out, because I know that people were saying that when ChatGPT first came out in 2022 or 2023. Great experts were talking about that. Everybody was like, “I’m going to have ChatGPT write my next book, my sales page, and my love letter to the person I’ve been crushing on.” You’re like, “No, I do all that.” That’s back when I asked ChatGPT out of curiosity to write a bio for me. It had that I had a PhD in IT from Vanderbilt. Just so we’re all clear, not only do I not have any degrees in IT, but I had to google to find out which state Vanderbilt was in.
I definitely wasn’t a graduate, but I have to say it did make me look good. It was all a lie, but it made me look great. There’s the garbage in, garbage out. That is still true. Unfortunately, anybody who is active on LinkedIn, I see a lot of ChatGPT-generated content out there. I will say that the upside is that it makes some of us who actually know how to write and know how to human online look good without much effort. As it’s moving from a novelty, “Let me see if I can get AI to do this. Let me see if I can get AI to do that,” we’re seeing it used for content generation, analytics, and operational efficiency.
We’re even seeing it used a lot for decision support. I know that’s what I do. I give it all the information I have. I say, “Tell me my blind spots. What am I not thinking about in this decision?” It is super useful there rather than me having to spend a bunch of time talking to coaches and talking to different people. I can get pretty far in figuring out what the core challenge I’m trying to solve is. Back to garbage in, garbage out, the question is, what are you feeding it to get those outputs? Too often, what I am encountering, and you and I have talked about this offline, I have now been hired twice by ChatGPT. Let me tell you what that means. I’m going to give you a tip.
Don’t do this ever. This is bad. Somebody talked to ChatGPT about a problem they had and how to hire somebody. They sent me a cleaned-up version of what ChatGPT told them. They were like, “Can you do this for me?” I’m reading through. They’re using all the right words. I’m like, “Let me make sure that I understand you. You’re looking for this, this, and this.” They had no idea what anything I wrote meant. They fed that into ChatGPT and said, “What do I say to this?” I’m moving quickly. Unbeknownst to me, this whole conversation, they want to hire me for something that they have no idea what it is I do, but ChatGPT said it sounds like I knew what I was talking about, so they should go ahead and hire me.
Can you imagine, briefly, how frustrating that professional relationship might be when you get into it and realize the other person has no clue what you do? Pretty soon, they stopped trying to clean up the AI. They’re copying and pasting direct stuff. You’re like, “We cannot work like this. We have to backtrack.” All I can say is they wasted a lot of money because it’s like, “You didn’t even know what you were getting.” That blind allegiance to AI is terrifying. It’s terrifying to me, not from an ethical perspective. It’s terrifying to me from a business perspective because I can see a lot of people running their businesses into the ground and having absolutely no idea they’re doing it. They think ChatGPT knows more about their business than they do.
Blind allegiance to AI is terrifying from a business perspective. People are running their companies into the ground, believing ChatGPT knows their business better than they do. Share on XThe other thing that you said early on was that you’ll use it to say, “I’ve got this issue. These are all the things I know. What are my blind spots?” It’s helping you with that. What if the problem you’re trying to solve is the wrong problem? How do you have that discussion? It doesn’t know how to read your body language because it’s not seeing your body language. That’s one of those places where I know you well enough to know that that’s not what you’re doing. That’s another case where it could be you’re not putting garbage in, but because you’re not asking the right question, it’s still garbage in.
That’s the thing. AI can only help you as much as you are self-aware. That’s what you’re pointing out right now. If you don’t know the things that you do that sabotage your own success or get in your way, you can’t tell AI about it. AI doesn’t live with you 24/7 to see those things. AI can’t say, “Three years ago, you had this same problem in this other context.” That is something I don’t hear a lot of people talking about yet. It is that lack of self-awareness. Everybody assumes that all AI needs to know is everything they know, not recognizing that there are other things.
The whole subconscious side is a huge side that AI can’t know. For the most part, we can’t know either because it’s back to the subconscious.
Strategic AI Applications: Where Automation Truly Supports Your Business
Let’s take a quick step back. In which cases do you see AI, and especially AI-driven automation, supporting a business’s success?
The places where it can support are when you’ve got things that you know work. This is where automation is. It’s one of the things that I’ve talked about a lot to a lot of people over time. They’ll say, “I want to get this so we can automate it.” It’s like, “You don’t have the process refined yet.” The problem with automating something that’s not refined is that you have to re-automate it time and time again. This was one of the things early on, when some of the first strong automation tools that would allow you to link various programs together, people got very excited.
That sounds cool, but if you have to change something, that changes everything. Now, we have to go in and redo all of that work until you’re not making a whole lot of edits to this. When you get to that point, that is a beautiful point to put in automation. The AI aspect of very specific kinds of problems with very specific kinds of constraints is a great place to get feedback from AI on things because you’re giving it enough of a container that the chance that the information coming back is pretty strong.
One of our friends, Ashley, has created a chatbot that is for creating the rough outline of an SOP. She talks about how to use it. It’s not every detail of the SOP. It’s about giving you some framework to then build the SOP from. There’s enough of a container here. We’re not saying it’s going to be the end all perfect thing, but it’s giving us a good starting point for that.
That to me is another great example where instead of having to think through all of those pieces and do all of those pieces, you can say, blah, blah, blah. It’s like, “What we think is this.” It gives us a good starting point. Realizing that the container can be useful by giving you a place to jump off. As we all know, it’s way easier to edit than it is to write from a blank page. It’s a version of that. What do you see?
I see benefits. Data aggregation is probably one of my favorite uses. On the marketing side, it’s hard to get apples-to-apples comparisons on social media platforms. Everybody counts views and content differently. It is nice to be able to download raw data from all the platforms, feed it in, and then ask some questions. Back to constraints. For instance, we are optimizing for conversations and engagement. Based on how we have performed on Facebook or LinkedIn, what is our strongest platform? What are you basing that evidence on?
It is having that conversation about the data versus me having to pull everything into spreadsheets and spend hours going blind, trying to get the numbers not to all swim together. That’s one. I do love it for data, but it screws up data all the time. I still have to check its work. Sometimes, it generates information in the wrong column or on the wrong row. It’s like what we learned in journalism school. When your mom says she loves you, you still check that out. You fact-check everything. I don’t feel like it saves me any time in fact-checking, but it does save me time in pulling all of that together.
There is templated content. People I know, for instance, have show notes. Most people who podcast have a very specific template they follow for their show notes or a specific template they follow for outlining episodes. I do that. In each of our episodes, I don’t know if people can tell or not, but we follow a standard format. It’s great for me to go into AI and say, blah, blah, blah, or upload a transcript of a conversation you and I had about episodes we want to do, and have it chunk it in there for me. All I have to do is go, “I would never say that and change that up. We don’t agree with that. What’s the opposite of that?” I find that being useful.
When I say some reporting, I’m not going to ChatGPT, having it do reporting for me, but I am benefiting from some third-party apps and tools that use AI to support more advanced reporting. Those are the things that are great because these are things that we used to have $10 an hour or $15 an hour humans do who didn’t have a background or understanding to contextualize the information anyway. Having a tool do it then allows me to come in and add that context. I’m starting from a better raw place than I would have before.
That is the piece. One of the things that we haven’t said, but is important, is to know that to do all of these things well takes an investment. That’s the piece that we miss sometimes. “Just throw it into ChatGPT. Any way that you throw it in, you’re going to get good information.” That’s not true. The investment time of learning how to use it, which tool piece, and all of those things, is something that you need to put into the equation. We assume because it’s AI or because it’s automation, it’s going to be faster. At some point, it’s going to be faster, but it’s not going to be faster immediately, not when you’re starting from ground zero.
The Hidden Cost Of AI: Investing In Training And Avoiding Blind Allegiance
Everybody I know who relies heavily on AI for their businesses or for whatever has spent hours training their AI tool or tools of choice to give them desirable outputs. It’s not, “I opened my account today. Instantly, gold is dripping from the screen.” It doesn’t work that way. This is something that you have talked about before, but I don’t know that you’ve talked about it on the show. It’s important to bring up. I’ll say it, and you can tell me if I’m wrong. It’s a certain age group.
Oftentimes, it’s the business owner over the age of 50 who adopts tools almost as a knee-jerk reaction in an attempt to stay modern. They want to be perceived as modern. They want people to think of them as cutting-edge. They adopt the latest greatest thing, but they don’t have clarity. They don’t know what is fair or reasonable to expect to get in the ROI frame. Because they don’t have that clarity and they don’t have that deeper understanding, they throw it at their teams. Their teams aren’t sure what to do with it either.
The other piece is figuring out when it is actually a useful tool, keeping in mind that it is a tool. When is it not as useful as you need it to be? At the same time, assuming that you don’t have to pay attention to it at all is also foolish. You have to be aware of it. If you’re going to play what I’m going to call the Gwen game, which is, “I do not want to have to learn this,” that’s okay. Know that you’re probably going to have someone on your team who is willing to be the one to learn it and to help you understand when, how, and where you can be using it within your own organization. This is, as you said, the top trend.
You can’t be talking about anything without hearing about it, but it is not the end-all that most of the headlines are saying that it is. The biggest caution is, am I actually putting in garbage? It is not using the internet or any of those other places that may not have good information, but am I the one putting in garbage? Either I’m not asking the right question, or I am trying to do things before I’m ready to get to that point. Am I asking the wrong question? Am I trying to do things in ways that aren’t useful at this point?
To summarize this piece, I’m going to add three more questions to what you gave. If you’re a business owner and thinking about what place AI has in my business in the coming year, or should I take this AI tool or that AI tool, the first question is, is the AI tool, whatever it is, going to reduce time or energy on tasks? Second, and this is totally a Gwen thing here, can I pilot it on a small workflow first? Is there a small piece of the business that I can test out before I start eliminating everything that has always worked and following a new thing?
Human-Centered Leadership & Emotional Intelligence: The Pendulum Swings
The third, and this is a repeat of what you said, but it bears repeating, who is going to own the adoption of it? Who is going to own the implementation? Who is going to own the maintenance? Like everything, it will break. As we all know, human error is a guarantee. As long as you work with humans, you’re going to have mistakes of some sort. Tech breaks. It always breaks. Some breaks more than others, but it will always break. You have to have a plan of action to protect yourself from that. Moving on to the next trend, Gwen. I am going to say the trend. I want you to tee it up for us. It is human-centered leadership and emotional intelligence.
It’s interesting because this is the other pendulum swing of what we were talking about with AI and automation. Their leadership can’t happen by AI. Leadership has to happen with humans. Part of the human equation is the emotional intelligence piece. How are we bringing the human element in? Are we actually doing it in an effective way? The answer in a lot of cases is no, unfortunately. Part of it is because human-ing is hard.
We talk about it all the time. The people aspect of anything we do, family, life, business, work, play, it doesn’t matter, is actually the hardest aspect because we all have these things we call brains and the free will that goes along with it. It means all the things that are going to happen, that should happen, or that we know will happen, don’t happen necessarily. Sometimes, they do, but not always. Bringing in that emotional intelligence and leadership piece, and where I’m seeing it, and what is my watchword for it, is accountability. It’s not the accountability that we’ve come to know and love or hate, quite honestly, which is the wagging the finger, hassling people, hounding people, shaming people, or saying, “Did you do it? Great. Move on.”
It’s the actual real accountability. Are we growing? Are we moving the needle consistently? Are we reflecting on our decisions and not just saying good or bad? What was the decision? It’s not just the result, but what the decision was. Going through that true accountability process, accountability isn’t yet the watchword, but I anticipate accountability being the watchword somewhere between ’26 and ’28. All of a sudden, you’re seeing everybody, all of the gurus that you currently follow who are not using the word accountability, will be using the word accountability in the next several months.
It’s interesting you bring up the accountability piece. Where human-centered leadership thrives and where you see that truly turn around an organization is when you see an integration between trust, vulnerability, and culture. We are actually walking the talk. We say this is our culture, and this is what you experience. We say these are our values, and we live them out every day. We have honest conversations about whether this decision aligns with the values or doesn’t align with the values. We all hold ourselves to a high standard of performance. When you have all of that integrated, that’s where I see human-centered leadership do well.
Here’s the thing. When it doesn’t happen, we own that we missed the mark.
Where this “human-centered leadership” breaks a business first and foremost is when vulnerability becomes like drunk crying on our coworkers’ shoulders. Seriously, we’re talking about things that don’t need to be in the workplace. As a CEO, we’re dumping insecurities and stuff that our direct reports do not need to shoulder. That’s not their job. They are not paid to be your therapist. That’s not what vulnerability is. Second is when this human-centered leadership becomes code for no accountability. It’s like, “We accept everybody as they are.” We say we’re a human-centered organization.
We understand you have family, you have life, and you have this. I love that. I want to work with clients who have organizations like that, but also, that doesn’t mean that everybody has permission to have an eighteen-minute workday because life got in the way. “I was tired. I had to sleep. I had to take care of myself.” Business has to get done. Standards have to be met. It can’t be that nobody is held responsible for their actions. Nobody is held to a standard of any sort.
We have a mutual friend, Rachel Allen. This is something that happened to her a couple of years ago. Remember when self-care was the big trend? It was self-care among CEOs and emotional health. She had a $50,000 invoice that went unpaid. When she was following up on it, the person was like, “It’s important for my mental health to not face the bills I have to pay. Self-care for me right now is not being in my bank account and focusing on visualizing what I want my future to look like.” Rachel is like, “I am all for self-care. I am all for emotional well-being. Get a therapist, do this, and do that, but my bills don’t care about your mental load.”
Hire a bookkeeper. If you don’t want to be in your bank account, hire a bookkeeper.
The Human-Centered Leadership Test: Balancing Empathy With Business Health
What I am, in much different words, saying what you’re saying is that when this idea of being a human-centered leader or a human-centered business becomes code for we don’t hold people responsible for their actions, and we don’t practice accountability, we’re teetering into dangerous territory from a sustainability perspective. If somebody is reading right now and thinking, “Am I practicing human-centered leadership? Am I a human-centered business? I don’t even know. If I am, am I a soft leader? Am I bad?” What questions would you ask them to help them figure out where they stand on this?
The first thing is, do you listen and care about your people? I said, “Listen.” I didn’t say, “Talk to.” I said, “Listen and care about your people.” It’s hard to listen to your people, know what’s going on, and be able to talk about how we make space for the things that they need. We had an example of our assistant that we work with. She needed to take maternity leave because she was pregnant. That was a pretty obvious one.
Human leadership is the balance between hearing your people and recognizing your responsibility to keep the business healthy. Share on XWe talked with her. “What do you need? How do we make this work for you?” We didn’t force her to take more time off than she wanted, but we also didn’t force her to come back and do anything before her maternity leave was done. To me, this is the thing. Are you listening to what they need in the way that they need it for all of the pieces? It’s also balancing what you, in this case, the business, need. It can’t be just about them.
I find that one of those questions is, am I doing things for the benefit of the person that damages the business? Human leadership is that balance between I hear my people, but I also understand that part of my responsibility is to have a healthy business. I can’t support that person in lieu of having a healthy business. Are we actually listening? Are we really communicating and understanding the difference between “I like this person” and “This person is the right person” for what we’re doing? To me, that’s the first question.
The second question is related to the first question, which is, are we still getting positive results? Are we still moving the business in a positive direction? Whatever that means. Sometimes, that’s downsizing. Sometimes, that’s upsizing. Sometimes, it’s growing. Sometimes, it’s pivoting. There are all sorts of things that are in the right direction. That is something you internally have to choose. Are we as a team, however big your team is, a little tiny team or a big giant team, still moving in the right direction? If we’re listening and we’re moving in the right direction, then we’re probably doing this pretty well. If we find that we’re not going anywhere, then maybe too much of our human-centered leadership is on the human and not on the leadership piece of it.
The third thing that plays into this is, and this is more of the emotional intelligence piece, how much am I making it about me versus understanding the whole environment? Am I doing things only for me, or am I doing nothing for me? Both of those are wrong. Am I being totally the martyr? I’ve seen that game. I’m totally the martyr. Is everything about me? It doesn’t matter that all the other things are going on. Where is that emotional intelligence? Am I able to manage my emotions, do the things that need to be done, but also be aware of my energy, my emotions, and all of those pieces?
Your number one job as CEO is to ensure the health and sustainability of your business. We can love people, but not at the expense of keeping our doors open. Share on XIf you feel like, “Everything is happening to me,” that probably sounds like you’re being the martyr. You’re on that side. If it becomes like, “No one is doing anything. I’m doing all of the work,” that can also be martyr, but it can also be very much, “I’m centered on me and not focusing on what’s happening in the business as a whole.” Those would be the questions that I would ask. You’re going to summarize them way better than what I said because you’re good at that.
Those are all exactly what people need to ask. It’s what you have always said. It’s the crux of this whole show. Your number one job as CEO is to ensure the health and sustainability of your business. We can love people. We cannot love people at the expense of keeping our doors open. If you have a large company of investors, you can’t love your people at the expense of meeting the expectations of your bosses, whoever your bosses are. That could be a nonprofit board, that could be a board of directors, or whatever.
The only thing that I would add is if you are wondering if this is you, or if you’re like, “I want to be human-centered,” I would encourage you to always partner empathy, whatever your version of empathy is, with clarity. There are very clear expectations, clear summaries, and clear deadlines. You can never go wrong with clarity. That’s the piece back to that idea that human-centered is soft leadership. We don’t want to give deadlines. We don’t want to give any must-dos. The must-dos are the greatest gift you can give to anybody you’re assigning work to.
This comes down to if you’re doing accountability well, it has all of those things, but it still has grace in there to deal with where things go astray, because they will. Part of true accountability is you’re also being willing to be held accountable.
Most of the time, cutting something out is the fastest way to improve, so long as it's the right thing to cut. Share on XSimplicity Over Scale: Redefining Success And Avoiding Self-Sabotage
We are running out of time. We’ve got one more trend to talk about. This one is quick because I don’t think this one is a big surprise. I’m hearing it everywhere already. Simplicity over scale. I love it. Less doing, more being. This all sounds great. Here’s what I love about it. I’m going to summarize it, and then I want you to talk about where it can help build a business and where it can help break a business. I love seeing businesses push back on this idea that success means you must scale at all costs. You’re not a successful coach unless you have a leveraged offer. You’re not a successful CEO unless you’re on the golf course twenty hours a week and only in the office ten.
I love that transparency. Some of us like to work. We want to work. Success is working. I love all that. I love seeing people simplify their offer stacks. It’s easier for clients. It’s easier for you. It’s easier on your team. I love it when people are making decisions that make it easy or easier for them to show up well and exceed client or customer expectations. I love seeing businesses that have a clear idea of what’s inside their sandbox and what’s outside of their sandbox. Sometimes, this whole simplicity over scale can be a little bit of self-sabotaging. Here’s what I want you to do. Tell us your experience because you definitely have way more experience with scaling businesses and such than I do.
It’s absolutely true. Most of the time, cutting something out is the fastest way to improve, so long as it’s the right thing to cut out. What we end up doing too many times is a version of cutting off our nose to spite our face. We’re grabbing the wrong thing to cut out. It’s risky. Am I grabbing the thing that needs to be cut out, which is extraneous, wasteful, no longer serving, or whatever? Am I cutting out the thing that’s hard that I don’t want to face, that is my growing edge, or any of those places?
It’s a version. It’s a little bit different, but we keep talking about the pivot. “You need to pivot.” A lot of times, what I find is people are pivoting. What they’re really doing is they’re cutting out, doing the hard thing to take them through to where they actually need to go. “I got to this place. It got hard, and so I’m going to pivot a little bit.” What they’re cutting out is their learning opportunity. I also find that a lot of times, we cut what’s working to go do the thing that’s new and shiny.
Trends tend to be a sound bite, and that sound bite isn't enough to really encompass the whole concept. Share on XAs someone whose mind is technically an operations mind, I know that doing the same thing in the same way for as long as possible, as boring as it is, is also the fastest way to profitability, consistent results, etc. In this entrepreneurial space, a lot of times, we cut what feels boring and what is working for the pivot or for the new thing, which is a shiny object. Getting permission to simplify, it’s like, “I’m going to simplify by getting rid of these three core offers that have been the thing that’s been making me money the whole time because I’ve gotten tired of them.”
Maybe we can refresh them or approach them in a slightly different way. We don’t necessarily have to completely cut them and start over. That’s a place where we have to be cautious because it’s not just about cutting. It’s about cutting the right things. That’s the piece that gets missed. Whenever we talk about any of the trends, they tend to be a soundbite. The soundbite is not enough to encompass the whole concept.
Right, especially when you’re looking at simplification, because what is simplified for me is not necessarily simplified for you. There are so many variables, starting with what it is that I like to do and don’t like to do, what the skillset is on my team, and the skillset that my team doesn’t have compared to you, and everything else. What is the standard of excellence my clients expect versus yours? What’s my price point versus your price point? I could make my price point equal to you, but because we serve different audiences, my people are going to still expect something different for that price point than your people would expect for you. It’s how it is.
If you’re thinking of this idea of simplicity over scale, and maybe I don’t scale at all costs, I’m going to summarize what Gwen shared about where it’s good and where it’s bad. Here are the questions to ask yourself. First and foremost, if you’re thinking about simplifying services or products, you want to look at which products or services drag your margins. Where are your thinnest margin services and products? Let’s say margins on revenue or profit, especially, but also, margins on joy. If you truly hate it, that’s okay to cut things you hate, but you need to be looking at what the margins are, both financially and energetically.
Second, kick the can down the road. Before you start slashing and burning anything, take some time to say, “What would my business look like if I removed my lowest performing offer? What’s it going to look like in six months? Where do I see changes? Does that mean I let two people go because that’s their whole job? Does it mean that I have to redirect some investments? Who knows?” You should know, though. When you kick the can down the road, what is it going to look like in the next six months to a year if you remove that lowest performing offer?
Simplifying doesn't mean you can't scale; sometimes it makes it easier. Share on XThird, ask yourself the hard question. Would less variety sharpen my brand? Would it make me more referable? Would it make it easier for people to know when to call me and when not to call me? I will tell you from personal experience. Fewer sales calls with people who want things that you don’t do automatically increases your profit margin.
When it’s simple, it does work, but you need to make sure that the simplicity is the simple place that you want to be. It is back to just because you simplified doesn’t mean you can’t scale. Sometimes, it makes it easier to scale.
Final Thoughts: Filtering Trends For Business Health And Sustainability
There’s the mic drop moment right there. That’s the mic drop I’ve been waiting for. First of all, maybe you’re seeing a trend that we haven’t mentioned. I’ll give you three more questions. Ask yourself every time somebody talks to you about a trend. Does it align with your vision and values? That’s first and foremost because if it doesn’t, if your vision and values are all human all the time, I don’t care who is touting AI, it may not work for you. Two, does it support my team and clients, or does it distract them? Three, will it simplify my business, or will it complicate my business?
Ultimately, to wrap a bow around the whole episode, trends aren’t bad. Trends are actually neutral. The difference between those who build your business and those who break your business is how you personally filter them according to your specific business. Back to what Gwen says all the time, as a CEO, your role is not to chase trends. Your role is not always to be on the cutting edge. Your role is to ensure the health and sustainability of your business so that you can make payroll tomorrow, next year, the year after that, and the year after that, so long as you want to.
I will tell you that if you are feeling overwhelmed by all the advice, the predictions, or the trends that get thrown at you this time of year, let’s not cut through it all together. Why don’t you cut through it all with Gwen? You can have a clarity call with Gwen. It is a perfect protected space for you to sort through what’s hype and what’s helpful in your specific context. Figure out what strategies will actually build the business you want and which strategies you can safely and with confidence ignore because they’re not for you, or at least not for you right now. All you have to do is get on Gwen’s calendar by going to EverydayEffectiveness.com/Clarity. You can book directly there.
Mentioned in This Episode
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
