Just because the market is shifting doesn’t mean you should completely change your business model. In this anniversary episode, Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo revisit the show’s most downloaded episode in its first year, “Are High-Touch Services Making a Comeback?” While the answer is yes, that doesn’t mean it’s the right choice for you. Listen to the hidden costs of chasing every business trend and why constantly pivoting could be draining your energy and profits.
You’ll learn how to evaluate whether a trend is actually worth pursuing, the real difference between market shifts and buying behavior changes, and how to creatively adapt what you already do well instead of rebuilding from scratch every six months.
Stop exhausting yourself trying to keep up with every “should” in your industry and start building the business you really want.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Stop Chasing Trends: Why Following Market Shifts Could Be Killing Your Business
Why High-Touch 1-On-1 Is Trending
Gwen, in 2024, we launched The Business You Really Want, and our audience has made it clear which conversations matter most. In this episode, we finally reached the end of our countdown, where we are going to talk about the number one most downloaded episode of 2024, which, once and only once that I get to say, “Of all time.”
I have to add all this drama because our number one most downloaded episode was only ten episodes ago. Not a lot has changed, but we had noticed back in the early part of 2025 that there was a shift in the market and people were moving away not just from seeking, but also from selling group programs and some of these big self-study courses toward high-touch one-on-one work.
What we discussed initially when the episode went out, I believe it was June 17th, 2025, was that this is evidence of what we’ve been seeing emerge over the last couple of years, which is that people are tired of getting shoved into one-size-fits-all frameworks. They want a customized level of service. They want to do business with people who they feel see them, truly understand who they are, who they serve, what they want, and are willing to provide a customized solution to that end.
People are tired of getting shoved into one-size-fits-all frameworks. They want a customized level of service. Share on XPart of it is because of AI. You, as well as I, have seen so many people churn out these AI-generated courses, which could be the worst of the worst when it comes to a cookie-cutter solution. It leaves people hungry for human connection. We talked all about that episode 46 was dropped in June, but when we were revisiting the episode, we were going, “That’s interesting that that’s our most downloaded episode, and it hasn’t even been out that long.” You pointed out maybe one big gaping hole that we didn’t discuss. I’m going to let you, Gwen, take it from there and tell us what we missed in that episode.
We probably mentioned it, but probably not in any depth. The one thing that we didn’t talk about, at least not in any depth, was that just because the market is moving to one-to-one services doesn’t mean you necessarily should move to one-to-one services. The reason is that we get so caught in following and flowing with the market that we forget it’s important to do the thing that makes us happy, that we are good at, and the thing that we want to show up to on an ongoing basis.
I’ve been offering these custom one-on-one services. I’ve been getting all of these congratulations on LinkedIn on my anniversary. I must have used this date as my start date because it wasn’t an absolute formal start date. I think 12 is what it’s showing on there. I think it’s closer to 14 or 18, quite honestly. Years ago, I was offering one-on-one services. Why? It’s because it’s what I love doing, and having a calendar like now, where I will be on calls or recording from 8:00 in the morning until 3:00 with zero break, no little five-minute run to the restroom, makes me happy.
She’s right. It does make her happy.
I know I’m a weirdo, and I’m okay with it. That’s also why I’m okay doing one-on-one services because I can have 10, 12, 15 one-on-one clients and still be servicing them on a very regular, constant basis, because that works for me and my personality. I know that for you, having fifteen one-on-one conversations with clients that you needed to deal with every week, combined with everything else we would do, you would need to be poking your eyes out.
It also depends on the type of service you deliver.
In this case, I’m saying me having fifteen hours of one-on-one meetings every week, minimum, plus all the other things. It does depend on the type of service you’re delivering. Are you delivering customized service but not necessarily having to meet with people? That may still work for you.
What I was going to say is that an hour-long call usually yields three hours of offline work for me. Fifteen hours of calls means that I’m not sleeping. When I worked for an online education company as a coach, I did well up to about six calls a day. Those calls didn’t require extra work, but there were six calls, plus the admin associated with the calls, which was my limit because we, introverts, only have so many people we can do.
I think that’s the important piece that we often miss, and I’m not just saying it for this particular shift, but for every shift, because this is the shift that’s happening now. There’s going to be another shift that’s going to happen again in the next whatever. There’ll be another shift, and there’ll be another shift, and there’ll be another shift. We will cycle back around because those of us who’ve been doing this for 40 years have seen these cycles in some form or another happen multiple times again and again.
Internet dinos, that’s who we are.
When we see that, what I think we do is we lose a lot of energy trying to keep up with the shift as opposed to saying, “What is the thing that I love?” Maybe tweaking it toward the shift, but not necessarily making this big giant shift. Using the example of if you love creating and delivering courses, and you’re saying, “The courses aren’t selling.” Instead of saying, “I’m going to go to one-on-one consulting, but I don’t want to be on Zoom calls every day,” maybe you think about how we shift the course to feel more customized without me having to do this thing that I hate.
For me, the opposite has been true. I haven’t created a whole bunch of courses when courses were the thing because I like doing the one-on-one work. I think that’s an important piece that we didn’t discuss. Just because the market has shifted doesn’t mean you need to completely change your business model if it doesn’t work for you.
Don’t Chase Trends: What Makes You Happy
We need to unpack this a little bit because you shifted there for a moment, and it was nuanced enough that I want to make sure that people don’t miss it. Yes, to the point of if the trend toward one-on-one high-touch services works for you, by all means, jump on that. Go for it if it’s good for you. If it doesn’t, don’t take an hour, a day, a week, a month, or whatever, reconstructing your whole business around the trend that you’re seeing. To your point, you do that, and you could make a career out of chasing trends without ever getting any traction.
That right there, Gwen, is what we need to be talking about next. That piece is not what we got onto the call necessarily today to talk about, but I think it’s important because you’re all about effectiveness. It’s the amount of wasted time, energy, and potentially investment of money in chasing trend after trend. First of all, have you ever seen that work out well? If you have, we should know about that. Second, what is the cost that we don’t realize when we’re doing that?
I’ll tell you when it works out well. It’s when you chase a trend and discover that the new trend is the thing that you love, so it can work out well, but that’s typically a one-off, occasional thing. You may have jumped into this industry when everything was about courses, and you were able to do it, and then all of a sudden, you start doing one-on-one. It’s like, “I love this.” That’s worth all of the effort.
However, if you just relish, and the courses and the thought of working one-on-one make your skin crawl, there’s probably no advantage to chasing that trend. You probably already know what’s going on. When it typically pays off is early on in your entrepreneurial career, where you may not have tried all of the things, and trying some of the new things may be like, “Who knew? This is cool. I love this.”
If you’ve been doing this for a while and/or you are comfortable knowing what your definition of success is for yourself, not in the typical ways we talk about it, but in the things that I love to do, my unique zone of genius, and all of those things. You are losing a whole lot of energy. We’ve been talking about it more on quite a few of the last calls. Energy is our most precious resource because it’s hard to measure.
Energy is actually our most precious resource because it's really hard to measure Share on XWe can measure time. We can say that it took a day. That’s a day I am not ever going to get back, but it took a day. Was it worth that investment? Money is super easy to measure. You took $1,000; it produced ROI, it didn’t produce ROI, whatever. It’s easy to measure. Energy is hard to measure, and because of that, it’s easy for it to leak away in little tiny amounts that add up to giant oceans of energy over time.
I think we’re chasing things without a clear motivation for them. I’ve struggled with that word. I think motivation is the right word. It’s not that I’m doing it because I want the money, or not because it’s the current trend, but because I’m motivated by it, so it’s easy to leak a tremendous amount of energy into it. Spinning, trying to make decisions, or spinning around a particular decision can be a big waste of energy. Trying a whole lot of variations of the same thing that are close, but none of them feel right, is another potentially big waste of energy.
You can probably come up with 2 or 3 others, but I think that’s where the real risk is. Of course, the other piece is the part that we can measure, because usually there is time and money associated with those things. It’s like, “What if we had invested the time, the money, and the energy into the thing that we already know works? It just may not be as easy to sell right now.”
What may not be as easy to sell right now may potentially need to be packaged differently. There are so many things. A lot of times, when people come out and they say it’s not selling anymore, that’s not true. That’s not even what they mean. Although I think they think it’s what they mean. What they’re saying when they say it’s not selling anymore is “What I have historically said and done to sell this thing is no longer working.”
Rather than focus on, “What’s my appropriate positioning? What’s my appropriate pricing? Do I need to rewrite a sales page, rewrite a bunch of sales emails?” It’s so much easier to be like, “No, this is all broken. I’ll burn it all down, and I’ll go over here to this new thing.” When you were talking about the time, the money, and the energy that you spend, there’s a whole lot of time that gets invested in learning how to do the other thing.
You’ve got routines built around however you deliver your core offer, however you sell the product that you have. If you’re going to completely shift your model, then you’ve got to develop new routines. When I started seeing this trend start to emerge, I saw people who had, let’s say, five years ago, talked about how they weren’t doing one-on-one anymore.
If you're going to completely shift your model, then you've got to develop new routines. Share on XThey were doing these large to mid-size programs because it gave them freedom, allowed them to take their kids to the park, and do whatever they wanted to do. When they shifted to the one-on-one work, because their large and mid-size groups weren’t selling anymore, they had to deprogram their audience. Now they have to develop a whole new batch of messaging that’s like, “I know I said that, but right now I want to get to know you. Right now, I’m invested in you.”
They don’t want to sound like they’re lying, and they weren’t lying. Things just change for them. However, they have to develop this whole new reputation and positioning in the market to then make people trust them enough to go into the high touch. That’s a lot of boomeranging. Back to what you said, it’s not that you can never change. It’s not that the decision you make now is the decision forever, but if you’re boomeranging for the sake of chasing a trend, you’re putting yourself through a lot of emotional work and hardship for something that you most likely aren’t that invested in or getting much enjoyment from.
Is Your Offer Not Selling, Or Just Packaged Differently?
I loved what you said about chasing it. Maybe it’s not just selling. You’re not selling it. You can’t sell it the same way, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t sell it. The thing that popped into my head when you were saying that was, and I don’t pay that close attention, you probably will tell me, we had the whole avian flu egg crisis thing. What were we paying, $10, $12, $15?
Between $11 and $13 for a dozen eggs.
If two years ago, someone had said, “In two years, you’re going to be paying $1 an egg.”
For conventional eggs, by the way.
The regular, old, not organic grass-fed, raised on the moon eggs. Everyone would’ve said, “There’s no way that would ever happen. There’s no way you could sell that.” Apparently, you can.
Apparently, people like eggs way more than anybody thought they did.
Eggs are used in a lot of things, but they’re not water. It’s not critical. It’s not the only way we can get a protein. There are a lot of options out there. There are undoubtedly some people who are not buying eggs at $1 an egg. I have zero doubt about that as well. This is the whole thing. Could you sell that? Back then, we would have said, “There is no way that you could sell that?” The answer is yes, “There is a way that you could sell it.”
Part of that is supply and demand, which I think is also related to these market shifts. You mentioned it in the intro, people can create courses faster because they’ve got AI and all of the other things. Maybe you can’t sell this course for $997 anymore because it’s not 1 of 10 or 20 variants out there. It’s now 1 of 200 variants out there. You know that yours is a way better variant, but how do you differentiate that to the average audience? That’s probably different messaging than when there were only 20 variants out there.
Now that there are 200, you’re going to have to have different messaging because most of those 200 are not selling for $997. They’re selling for $97. They are probably only a tenth of the value. They may only be a twentieth of the value, or they may only be 100th of the value. Different buying process, different thought process. Often, I think we try to do the big shift because it feels easier than the small shift, but I don’t think it’s ever easier.
It’s not. I think we do the big shift because we look at somebody else and go, “They are where I want to be, and all they had to do is…” We’re not taking into consideration that maybe that’s in perfect alignment with their personality and what they enjoy doing. It’s not in perfect alignment with me and what I enjoy and what I’m doing.
We have no idea all of the backstory. We’ll link to The Comparison Trap episode because it is. It’s the comparison trap.
We’re spending so much time looking at what everybody else is doing and going, “I could do that and I could do that, and why am I not doing that?” I feel like this is a systemic issue. For some reason, we assume that everything we see is 100% of what’s there and what it takes to make it happen.
Has it ever been true about anything since the beginning of time?
It’s as if the entire outside world knows the inner workings of our business and our offers. The world sees 10%. I don’t quite understand why we look at somebody else and go, “I can do that,” and behave as if everything we see is all that they had to do.
You’re right. It’s never that way. When you said that, I was thinking back to caveman times. The first one who was showing how to flint and how to start a fire, it was like, “I should have been able to figure that out.” Undoubtedly, there were all sorts of other accidents and things at the beginning of time. We’re like, “I should be able to do that.”
The Comparison Trap: What You See Isn’t Always True
I was thinking about this whole chasing trends. This takes me back to my days as a social media manager for a university. That was pre-TikTok. TikTok did not exist back then, thankfully. I did not have to become an expert in TikTok. We would always be on some path, following some type of strategy, usually to drive enrollment. You would go and you would talk about the campaign, and this administrator would come in and they would be like, “What about…” and they would tell you about some trend that had their kids scrolling on their phone for an hour. “That’s what we need to be doing. Why aren’t we doing that?”
I always had to be the unpopular person in the room to say, “First things first. Social media moves so quickly that if that is a trend right now, by the time I get a concept created and vetted through the 22,000 layers of bureaucracy and approval required in higher education, they will be on the 100th iteration of this trend. We will look like the old fuddy duddies that we all are.”
That would be the first thing I would have to bring up. The second thing I would have to bring up is I would have to break down the trend and be like, “This is why that trend is working, and this is why the structure of higher ed makes that not applicable.” Gwen, I need you to educate me on this because you’ve been at this for 40 years more than me. We’re so blinded by the idea that somebody else out there is working as hard as us or potentially not as hard as us, and they’re making more money that we feel like it’s a better investment of time and energy to chase what we think they have than it is to look at what we’re doing, and figure out how do we make the most of this with the people we serve and what we like to do.
It’s the comparison trap because, of course, all we ever see is the 10%. We look at “Insert big popular internet name here as a speaker, as a consultant, as a course provider. I don’t care what thing we add. Put a big popular name here.” We see mostly what they want us to see.
What? We only see what they want us to see, Gwen? Say more.
Even if it’s not that they just want us to see things, why would I tell you about all of this other stuff? It’s irrelevant to my messaging, to my conversation, to what I’m posting. There’s an example of someone very popular a while back, and super internet famous in the business marketing world. What no one knew was that all of the people who worked for her hated her. Every once in a while, you would interview someone and you’d find out that they worked for person X. You would ask a little bit about it and they would be very quiet because they usually had NDAs and they can’t say anything until you’ve worked with them for 2 or 3 years and it’s like, “They’re amazing.”
What you start hearing from it, you get these little bits, and it was like, “That was when you were working for so-and-so.” They aren’t telling stories out. We’re smart. We can figure things out. It was like everyone thought that working on her team would be the best dream ever. Part of the reason that she’s able to do what she’s doing is that she is working these people to the bone. If that’s not your personality, then you’re not going to get the same results. There’s so much behind the scenes. Once again, context matters. This is another thing. There’s so much context that we can’t possibly know.
Sometimes, it has to do with timing. There are some things that you happen to be the right person at the right place, at the right time, with the right offer, with the right knowledge, with the right fill in all of the blanks. It’s like, “I want to be like them.” It’s not going to happen because that time could have been a moment in time, and that moment is gone. Even if it’s only been a month, that moment is gone. You can’t do it. It’s about playing your own game and saying, “What is the game I am good at?” Look at the trends and say, “How do I leverage that trend where I still can be maximizing my game?” I think there’s almost always a way to do that, but we have to get creative instead of copying.
Understanding Buying Behavior: Is The Sales Cycle Longer?
What you made me think about is that there are trends in offers. There are trends in what the market wants to buy, what problems the market is looking to solve, and is willing to pay certain amounts of money for. There are also trends in buying behavior. I think sometimes we mistake a trend in buying behavior for a trend in what the market wants, like the problems the market is seeking to solve.
One thing that is still holding true, it was true when we recorded episode 46, and it is true now, is that people are taking longer to make their buying decisions. The sales cycle has gotten longer. Mainly because I think everybody has finally recovered from COVID’s stimulus money, where it felt like they were spending Monopoly money. Now they realize it’s their hard-earned money, and they need to think about what to do with that.
Also, back to there are a lot of competing offers on the market. There used to be a time when if you wanted to be part of a group program, those programs were sold in May and September. That was launch season. The rest of the year, maybe you had 1 or 2 options for offers if you didn’t take those. Now, there are at least half a dozen things you can buy at any given time. It’s thinking of what your data is. Are your sales down, or is it that you’re not selling as much in a seven-day period or a one-month period as you used to sell? Taking that information and then going, “How does that apply to what I love doing and what I don’t love doing?” I can imagine that if you don’t love the sales process, it may feel grueling to have people take more time to make their buying decisions.
That’s back to where I think we have to get creative to say what the thing is. For instance, if the sales cycle is longer, then ask yourself, “What could we do to make the sales cycle shorter?” Using my prior example, that’s a random example, the sales cycle is going to be shorter for a $97 offer than it is for a $997 offer, generally, because people don’t think as hard about that.
One of the things might be like, “Could I make it shorter? Could I make it shorter by reducing the cost? Could I make it shorter by giving them free access to part of it?” There are so many things, but it is understanding what has shifted versus what we are perceiving or what we think might have shifted. We had an earlier conversation with folks where we were talking about how things feel very uncertain. My comment to the whole group was, “Yes, except they’ve always been uncertain. We are just seeing the veil lifted.”
To me, that’s the same thing. It may feel like the sales cycle was always easy. It was probably always easy for this in this situation and this set of variables, but this set of variables has changed. Let’s look at it differently and decide what that means, and make a different choice without necessarily chasing the whole new thing. I think it’s a way better use of the energy, back to the energy piece, to get creative on the thing that you already love, rather than to get creative on creating something new.
It's a way better use of energy to get creative on the thing that you already love than to get creative on creating something new. Share on XThe Business You Want: Asking The Right Questions
I love that on this anniversary of our first year in podcasting, we’re getting back to what’s the business you really want? I’m curious, as we’re following this trend, because so much of it is about what business you want to build. What’s the business you want to be running? What’s the job you want to perform today? What are some questions do you think that readers could ask themselves to get clear on what it is they want?
I think the first question is the question we’ve talked about many times on many episodes. It’s a simple question that is hard to answer. That is, what does success look like for me? When that filter becomes very clear, then you can run everything through that filter and say, “Does that get me closer to that definition of success? Is doing X going to get me closer to that definition of success? Is it taking a roundabout path to that definition of success,” which is not the best way to go.
There are way too many things that can go astray on the big roundabout option. I think that’s the first thing that you have to be able to do, to be asking yourself. One of the other questions, once you’ve got that, is what is the biggest challenge? What’s the biggest constraint? What’s the biggest block? You can use the word that makes sense for you and your situation, but what is preventing me from achieving that success?
Ask yourself, “What’s the first thing I can do to get me past that block?” These are the questions that I’m helping my clients think through about what those things are. One of the other things that people don’t necessarily think about doing is thinking through what questions I should be asking myself. It’s a question about questions.
What are the questions I should be asking myself? It goes back to your observation before this. We may think it’s X, but it’s Y. That’s about taking time to say, “What are the questions I should be asking myself? What if it wasn’t what I’m assuming it is? What if it was something else? What else could it be?” Back to getting creative about thinking about the problem
What do you think inhibits that creativity? Is that the topic for another episode?
It’s probably the topic for the next episode, looking at how much time we put in. That one, we could go on for hours. I think we get caught in what I’m going to call the easy answer. The easy answer is usually what someone else is telling us. “So and so says it’s this, so it must be that.” Maybe, and maybe it is for them, but is that true for you? Maybe not.
I think that is an excellent place to leave us for this episode. As always, I’d love to turn it around to our readers and say, How does this particular topic sit with you? Drop me an email. I’m at Tonya@EverydayEffectiveness.com. I would love to hear what your greatest challenge is when it comes to figuring out what it is that you want, and how what you want aligns with whatever you see everyone else doing, and those trends in the market.
Gwen, it’s hard to believe, but this wraps up our anniversary countdown of our top four episodes. I want to say to our audience, thank you for making the show part of your journey for the past year. Your tuning in to the episodes tells us exactly what conversations matter most to you. It helps us better craft the business we want around here. Doesn’t it, Gwen?
Absolutely.
Until next time, keep thinking hard about what it is that you really want.
Mentioned in This Episode
Podcast Anniversary Series
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.
