Once Upon a Time
About a year ago, I had an idea. Now I have a lot of ideas, and that comes with the territory of being a creative and a serial entrepreneur. Hard to say sometimes if the lot of us is simply unemployable because we will not allow anyone to tell us what to do, or if we are a genius, or simply full of ourselves. But one thing is certain. Every invention started with an idea, so it is a good thing to have them.
It is one of those things I teach my granddaughter. We practice storytelling, and everything starts with opening the book and saying once upon a time. Then the next question is, who is in the story? XO, the stuffed animal, and Paw Patrol’s Liberty. What is going on? XO is hurt, and Liberty is going to save him. How is Liberty going to do that? With bandaids. Excellent. And how is the story going to end? XO is feeling good.
This is the same concept I take my clients through when we flesh out an idea. What are we doing? Who is doing it? What problem are we solving, and why are we solving it? Why are you the person to solve the problem? This simple concept, the storyline, teaches consequential thinking, logic, and understanding what we are doing and why we are doing it. Every idea needs to go through this cycle before it goes anywhere.
In The Growth Architect®, we promote podcast guesting as a simple and effective way to build your authority platform. Once you are clear on what problem you are solving and why you are the person to do it, you need to get your message out, and you need to get it to the right audience. Daniel Priestley said in his 2015 book Oversubscribed that there is a 7-11-4 rule: seven hours, eleven touches, four platforms. Dreamdata ran a benchmark in 2026 for B2B that puts the journey at 272 days, across 88 touchpoints, four channels, and ten stakeholders. That does not even include how Google’s search AI, Chat, or Claude are changing what a touchpoint even is. But one thing is clear. If you think you can run an email campaign and sign up ten thousand leads, it is not going to happen. The market has been destroyed by internet marketers, and it is heavily saturated. That means to stay competitive, you must adjust your strategy.
If It Was Mine to Keep, It Wouldn’t Have Burned to the Ground
At the risk of sounding repetitive, after the Palisades Fire, faced with a catastrophic loss, I had to rethink what I was rebuilding and how. My basic philosophy is that if it was mine to keep, it wouldn’t have burned to the ground. If it is gone, maybe there is a reason. The second question I ask myself is: what is it forcing me to do? And it is not high-ticket sales, as tempting as that sounds. It is starting from the ground up.
Think about XO and Liberty. What is the real story here? The story is that I am an operations person. I do not mind sales or marketing, but at the end of the day I love tinkering and reverse engineering outcomes. Then I realized I get a lot of questions from podcast guests who ask me about my automation. How do you do it? Your reminders are spot on; your communication is consistent, clear, and excellent. What do you do? And finally, I realized that perhaps what I am being asked is to give what I built to other coaches, consultants, and service providers who need the workflows I have built. It is so easy for me that I often cannot understand why others are struggling with it. I mean, it is not hard. And then the self-check: we are talking about my super skill. This is what I am good at. Taking seemingly complicated things and putting them in order. So easy that I can teach a three-year-old these very concepts.
Do Not Lie to Your Audience
What I see working right now is the opposite of what AI makes possible. AI is telling us we can hyper-personalize by simply taking my thing and your thing and having AI make it work. Oh boy. Please refrain from jumping into that abyss. There is nothing AI does worse. It will find the most common, mediocre formula, Beate is a well-respected and highly sought-after podcast guest and host, and match it to the most mediocre description of where I am pitching to. And she is the perfect guest for your show on making business owners successful through specific strategies, like in your last podcast with XO, where Liberty healed him by simply applying a band-aid. You will not get booked.
I get hundreds of these. Josh Elledge gets hundreds of these. We all do, and one is worse than the other. I run a spiritual transformation show that showcases that every successful person has gone through a spiritual transformation that becomes the strategy. Please tell me you think AI can do that? It cannot. It is not possible. AI can outline the format, the structure of your pitch, but the key points, the match points- those you have to do yourself, personally and painstakingly. With AI, sure. But do not rely on a matchmaking AI podcast pitching service to do the thinking for you.
This is something I discussed with Josh Elledge on the last episode of The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future. If you want to use authority platform building as a strategy, listen to this one. He has done 3,000 media appearances, recorded 2,500 podcasts, and launched 300. He can tell you what lands and what does not. Episode Link
Less Is More
In addition to getting your message out, there has to be a foundational aspect of how you do things. Is what you offer relevant now? Does it land? Who wants it? Do you need to start from scratch and ask, what does my audience want from me? And then lean into that.
If you read my newsletter updates, you have been on this journey with me. As I gain more ground under my feet, I am learning to drop more and more. I cannot be on X, formerly Twitter. The hostility of the message and the owner are not aligned with my belief system. Facebook. After they deleted my account with zero explanation, two weeks after the fire, when I was hacked, I never went back to rebuild it. I am not on it anymore, and I am certainly not clicking ads. So why try to keep it up? It has run its course. Google is gaining steam again, but what is up with YouTube? I like Substack, Threads, and LinkedIn. Less is more; targeted is better. And with that, I am focusing on one client at a time.
I am building out the backend, focusing more and more on my CRM, adding all of our workflows and materials to it, so you can use what I have built, and then use AI, and I will show you how, to take that and yours and start building your own follow-up. If you want to check out what I am building, or you need a CRM that is preloaded, check this out: Creator Forge.
Closing Reflection
But amongst all of it, what resonates now is what Josh Elledge said on the podcast: the lesson he learned from his mentor. Do not lie to your audience. So here is my honest question for you. If it burned down tomorrow, how would you rebuild it?
Let’s grow,
Beate