What's your bread and butter? | GB74

In this episode of the Good Business Podcast, host Illana Burk delves into the concept of 'bread and butter' offers—the reliable and consistent products or services that sustain your business. She shares her personal journey from web design to partnership coaching, highlighting the importance of these core offerings and their role in creating a stable and meaningful business foundation. Illana also reflects on the significance of simplicity and sustainability over scalability, and how evolving your main offerings can lead to continued growth and success.

For more details, visit illanaburk.com.

Good Business is hosted by Illana Burk, CEO of Illana Burk Consulting llc and strategic coach and advisor to entrepreneurs, creative leaders, and industry disruptors the world over.

For more of illana around the web:
Web: illanaburk.com
On TikTok: @illanaburk
On Insta: @illanaburk

Transcript

0:41

Welcome back to the Good Business Podcast, everyone. I am your host, Illana Burk, and today we are talking about the most central parts of your work. The things that always feel true and reliable. The things that consistently make you money. The things that people always seem to respond to. The things that pay the bills while you're trying to create the bigger, riskier, more experimental offers. Today we are talking about your bread and butter. Bread and butter offers are like the unsung heroes of small business. They are the things that we almost forget to appreciate that just keep chugging away and making us money or just being the things that we can rely on, right? For some, it's the service offers that keep you going while you're trying to build a bigger vision of courses or more asynchronous income. For others, it's a simple offer that carries your whole business. And for me, my bread and butter has of late been one on one coaching. Like that's the thing that, you know, when people talk about it, that's all, that's always my answer, right? Coaching is my bread and butter. I have all kinds of other things that I'm always working on, but coaching is my bread and butter. And over the last 15 plus years, it's changed shape like more than a few times. But the actual delivery of it has pretty much stayed the same. Clients show up, usually in some level of disarray or crisis or stuckness, and together we work it out. And over time, that early triage gives way to strategy, and strategy becomes support. There are tears, there's trust building, there's resistance and breakthroughs and progress. And some clients work with me for like six months and some a year. Some stay for years on end and I become less of a coach and more of like their thought partner. This is why I call it partnership coaching because I am like a temporary business partner with my clients and I've always called it that for as long as I've done it. And honestly, the name is like the only constant in the entire life cycle of my business. When I was first starting out, I remember I was absolutely fretting like mad over what to call my new coaching service. I did what most new entrepreneurs do, and I burned a stupid amount of time brainstorming all the floofy, imaginative names to try to differentiate my coaching package. And nothing really felt right. So I finally landed on partnership coaching as like a stop gap while I figured out something better. And that was in like 2009. So I guess it's safe to say that nothing better ever really emerged and partnership coaching has been my bread and butter ever since. So that's how it often is with bread and butter offers. They tend to just keep on thanklessly grinding for you while you create big dreams and experiments and find magical new ways to leap tall buildings in a single bound. And ironically, Partner coaching, partnership coaching, while it's been part of my business since the beginning, wasn't always my bread and butter. When I started, web design was the thing that got me by. It was the easiest money when I was just getting things off the ground and trying to pay my rent. You know, everyone who started a business back then, you know, 15 years ago, They knew they needed one thing and one thing only. They knew they needed a website. And back then, pre Squarespace, it was something that you had to hire for. DIYing it was such a mountain of work and it was hundreds of hours and, you know, a steep learning curve. So most people felt pretty ready to put money into that much more than they do now, because there's much easier solutions and you can DIY it now. But back then that was like something that you could reliably, like, if I wanted to work with small business owners, that was something I could reliably count on them understanding a financial need. It was a problem they wanted to solve that they knew they needed to pay to solve. And I just kind of happened to be good at it. It wasn't like I set out to do that. It was just like the work just organically kept coming. And while coaching and consulting was what I was really aiming at, web design was my way in, you know, clients would come to me for a website. And the first thing I would ask them was like, well, what do you want it to be like? What do you want your brand to be like? And they would go like, uh, I don't know. So usually they didn't really know what they wanted their business to look like. And that's what got me to my thing, because I would build in coaching sessions into my web design packages. And once their websites were done, many, many, many of them stayed with me for more coaching because I had really become a partner in their business growth. I understood them. They understood me, they understood what I could do. And so that sort of parlayed into a bit of a coaching practice, but it took me a really long time to move away from web design entirely. Mostly because, as it turns out, I was pretty solid at both web design and running an agency and coaching. So I built, a really thriving design agency that supported a whole bunch of designers and writers and VAs. And design was my bread and butter while I built my coaching practice. It was the thing that consistently paid the bills. Then about seven years ago, I started to actually wind down my design agency to make way for coaching being my whole offer. And it was really exciting. Clients were happy, my time was my own, my business felt simple and nourishing and lovely. And it still does. But over time, my attitude towards it Shifted, right? Coaching became my bread and butter while I contemplated how to take all that I've learned and all the experience I've gained to a broader audience. And you guys have heard me talk about that many times. It's why I do the podcast because I want what I know to not be limited to the people who can afford to work with me one on one. So that's why I do this, you know? So that's what you're supposed to do, right? You create something sustainable, then you grow it, then you scale up, then you expand, then you find more ways to offer it. And then you sell it 19 different ways and courses and da da da da da, right? And you shoot for six figures, and then you shoot for seven, and on and on and on. Where, like, where does it stop? I mean, I never thought that I would see people go, like, Solopreneur should make seven figures. Back when I started, it was like, shooting for six was enough. You know, like, yes, let's do that. And it kind of, it probably should still be, but that's a conversation for another day. But what if that like, wasn't how it had to be. What if you didn't have to chase that scalability in order to have a successful business in order to have a sustainable business? What if simple and sustainable is actually the right goal? And that's where bread and butter offers really shine is in the simple and sustainable category. They're the things that tend to be easier for you. They're the things that tend to just keep rolling along and keep making money without a ton of extra energy inputs from you all the time. Right? So what if we recalibrated our ideas around success and expansion to honor our bread and butter offers as not just the thing that keeps us going, but what actually gives our work a sense of stability and meaning. Now, I want to just throw out a quote. Like Jacques Pepin, who arguably is, you know, a world renowned chef and one of the godfathers of like, really complicated gourmet cooking, once said, if you have extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter, it's hard to beat bread and butter. And he's not wrong. As a fan of actual bread and butter, it's, um, it's really hard to beat when it's really good, right? And I think bread and butter offers are much the same way to pull the metaphor forward, because what I have learned so far is that the things that are truly central to what you do tend to evolve really, really slowly. Those changes happen maybe a couple of times over the course of your career or the life cycle of your business. For me, those moments of evolution were like it was from design to coaching and now my business is actually at another crux point where it's sort of ready to evolve into something new. And I'm working on what that might look like. But each time those things, those central bread and butter things in the, that are like the core offers each time, those things expand and push up against the constraints of past decisions and patterns and, and strategies that you may have completely fulfilled and kind of not noticed that like you did the whole thing and you're still just kind of cruising along. Whatever comes next tends to be stronger and more well formed and easier to unfold because it's something that feels like a natural evolution of the thing that comes next. Kind of like how making better and better bread over time out of the same humble ingredients can take a lifetime. Okay, that's it for me today. Thank you for honoring me with your time and attention. Now go find your very best bread and put it together with some very good butter and enjoy every single bite. Thanks, everybody. Have a wonderful day.