Happy Monday!

Though, it wasn’t a happy Saturday for my friend Alex. Well, it was a mixed bag I suppose.

He ran his first marathon, ever. Major props. The first half went well. He was making a good pace and his numbers were right where they needed to be.

But the second half… not so much.

The way he describes it:

Whoooo it was crazy!! First 16 miles I killed it with my target 8:45/min pace. Then at mile 16 body ran out of entry (sic), brain told my legs to go to sleep, and they shut down. So last ten miles was excruciating. Shuffling my feet then stopping to rest over and over. Still managed to finish though averaging 10 minute mile despite this and finished first marathon!

Then came the picture forever etched in my mind. A black toe. Yuck. Looks like it hurts.

And I got to thinking… ya know, there are “marathon clients” who sometimes give you a black toe.

At first, things go well.

You like them. They like you.

All of the numbers seem to line up, you’re hitting a stride, and you think “man, if all my clients were like Sally Sue!”

And then — BOOM.

It’s like a switch flips.

Sometimes you don’t even know why. It’s like they just woke up one day and decided they have “ran out of energy for being easy to work with.”

Suddenly, you find the project dragging on.

Make the logo bigger. Make that text smaller. Make that RIDICULOUSLY slim border a little less opaque.

Can you relate at all?

So, how do you find that balance of working with your client, being accommodating, helping them make good decisions, etc… but not allowing them to give you a black toe?

One of the ways you can do this is with a repeatable process that you obey like it’s the gosh darn 10 Commandments.

You need to have a process.

Or else the scope creeps and creeps until it turns into a monster. The goalposts keep moving. Clients become unsatisfied. You start getting upset.

Real bad news; the good news is, this is totally avoidable.

If you want to learn how to create this process, I teach exactly how to do that as part of the subscription web design Success Path.

And since I’ve made it so flexible, you can skip right ahead to that section if you want.

Here’s where you can get it today:

https://subscriptionwebdesign.com/get-swd

Ok — for real, yesterday’s episode of the Subscription Web Design Podcast with Adam McLaughlin was on fire! 🔥

Go grab a coffee, pull out your notepad, and really watch this one. It will change your life if you do what Adam says.

After watching it, I’m SUPER excited about trying his model out sometime in the future.

Here’s just some of what we covered in detail:

• Why niching down isn’t “all or nothing” and doesn’t have to be stressful
• The EXACT blueprint (it’s not clickbait) you can use to take your business to 40K per MONTH in recurring revenue 🤯
• A “hardcore” strategy (which most people simply WILL NOT do) to find their perfect target client… but those who do will be able to capitalize BIG TIME
• The nitty gritty details on how to structure your business model
• How to build a website that pays you for AT LEAST 24 months but only spend 4 hours building it…
• …and way more!

And, bonus—Adam was extremely kind and generous to give my audience a 25% discount on signing up for his course, which you can find at https://www.buildthatagency.com/. Just use code STEVE to get your hands on that discount.

If you’re wondering, yes, technically Adam is my “competition.” So why allow him to promote his course?

Simple—it might be the best thing for you, and that’s what I want! Adam essentially “laser-focuses” in on just one of the recurring revenue models I teach, and goes super in depth.

So if you find that model to be intriguing, I WANT you to take his course and learn from him! There’s plenty of room for all of us, and as long as YOU—our students—win, everybody wins.

Ok, enough blabbin’.

Go check out the interview right now.

Hey friends!

I hope this week has been awesome for you so far and you’re getting stuff done. It’s the home stretch. You got this! Let’s go!

Now, let me start off by saying this is not “Yet Another Guru Demonization” email. If I didn’t believe in learning from people—call em gurus, if’n you must—on the internet, I wouldn’t be in the education business nor would I be primarily in the business of learning management/membership sites (my agency’s main gig).

The problem is that learning alone does not go far enough.

There are a lot of things I know to do. There are a few things I even know how to do.

But guess what, if I don’t do them… they don’t get done 😛

So I’d rather you think of me as your guide than your guru.

Here’s why.

You don’t have to listen to a guru.

If you don’t do what a guru says, you might miss out on some “enlightened” path you were supposed to take in life, but in all likelihood, things will work out just fine.

But a guide:

• Has walked the trail many times
• Has successfully led others down the trail
• Knows where the exact dangers are
• Can guide you even when the path ahead is foggy, dark, or unclear
• Is usually revered among fellow travelers

You can ignore a guru, but you can’t ignore a guide.

If you ignore the guide, you risk falling off the side of the mountain. And that’s no fun.

In a perfect world, you’d read every email, watch or listen to every podcast, take my courses, join my coaching calls, and radically implement based on what you hear. Like, you’d block off time on your calendar to DO the thing. Or at least think about it.

Guides > Gurus. My commitment to you is to do my very best to be a lot more guide than guru, because I don’t want to fail you.

Blatantly cheesy segue into a sales pitch incoming:

Let me “guide” you into a more stable, secure future with Subscription Web Design. Our next member call is next week, 11/7—my birthday!

You don’t deserve to ride the feast or famine rollercoaster.

Your business, your family, and YOU, my friend, deserve more. It’s possible to build a recurring revenue web design business, and here’s a secret, there’s more than one way to do it. Lot’s more.

In fact, we talk about five entirely different approaches inside the Success Path which you have access to immediately upon signup.

Here’s the link to join up:

subscriptionwebdesign.com/get-swd

Your mind is the ultimate battlefield.

More victories are won or lost in the mind than will ever be won or lost while you’re actually “playing” the game.

When you start something new, are you expecting it to work? Or are you expecting it to fail?

In order for something to work, it needs a few things:

1. Commitment to the process
2. Quality execution
3. Consistent execution
4. Undying belief of success

That last one is important.

I make it a point to never start a new initiative with the expectation that it isn’t going to work. Put another way, there ain’t nobody who believes in what I do more than me.

“Steve,” you say, “that’s the height of pride and arrogance.”

No.

I never said it would only happen because I make it happen, I don’t believe I’m God’s gift to the world, and I certainly don’t think I can pull things off by myself.

Think about it this way, though:

If I don’t believe in it, how will anyone else?

Here’s another thing: People can “just feel it” when you don’t believe in it. This is why I say that honesty and confidence are two of the most important attitudes in sales.

Nothing makes a client’s BS radar beep faster than someone who doesn’t even believe in their own product or service.

So, brass tacks.

What are you working on this week? Do you believe in it? Do you believe it’s going to work? Are you expecting it to work?

More:

I’m also not demonizing failure nor am I suggesting “wishful thinking.”

Please, if you don’t believe in it, don’t do it! Like I said—people can tell. You’ll give off a vibe then can just sense. Trust me.

And failure is not all bad. We can learn from failure. It’s hard to get to a yes before first hearing a no—perhaps many no’s.

But you shouldn’t expect it in my opinion. You expect success. A win. A gold medal.

I’m a huge MMA/UFC fan. A lot of the fights are milquetoast. Most of them are good. Some of them are incredible and dominating.

And in their rare moments when someone is just dominating their opponent, there’s something distinct about their attitude. They literally don’t think they can lose. It’s not determination to win. It’s not even that failure isn’t an option. It’s more than that.

It’s that there is no possible world in which they are going to lose.

That’s the kind of determination and expectation you need.

We’re headed straight into the holiday season. This is a slower time for web designers, but this is when you need to be thinking about new initiatives and putting things in motion.

This is when you need to have the mindset of winning. This is when you either fall behind or pull ahead.

Let me help you:

subscriptionwebdesign.com/get-swd

There be pirates.

For real, though: Take this lesson to heart.

In the Bible, the wise man builds his house upon the rock, and the foolish man builds his house upon the sand.

If such a parable were given today, it might be said that the wise man builds his house upon land he owns while the foolish man builds his house upon land he merely rents.

I started a new YouTube channel the other day, just for fun, and for an experiment. I didn’t really even tell anybody about it.

Pretty quickly that bad boy reached 25 subscribers! I thought that was pretty cool for a new channel nobody hardly even knew about it.

…until Google SNATCHED it out of my grubby paws.

Yep, the random “Dear John” email from Google…

“We’re sorry to inform you, blah blah blah… I’m sure this is disappointing, blah blah blah… but we deleted your channel, not telling you why, and you can’t have it back.”

Horror of horrors! Can you imagine this happening to a channel with hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of subscribers, watch time hour, etc?!

Madness.

(I appealed the decision and DID get my channel back. But I truly wasn’t expecting to, and many others haven’t been so lucky.)

There’s a lesson in this for you, of course, that should be obvious. But really this is a lesson in sales, too.

Many of you are using platforms like WordPress, and today (maybe more than ever), there’s a great case to be made for self-hosted platforms like it.

Make sure your clients know, if you find them asking why a Facebook page isn’t good enough or why they can’t just go build a Wix website themselves, the dangers of such folly.

That’s all I’ve got to say about that.

Now let me ask you a question: Want to spread a little cheer as we move into the holiday season? (I’m so ready for Halloween to be over with, lol.)

My pal (and basically, neighbor) Stephanie Hudson, whom some of you pay know from the Divi Chat podcast, among other things, is very sick right now. She is on the mend, but there were apparently three separate times in the past month or so that we almost lost her due to a terrible health condition.

And as you can see from the link below, her medical bills have been significant.

A GoFundMe has been set up for her.

I donated, and if you have been blessed financially and are able to give anything at all, it would mean so much to me.

Here’s the link where you can make that happen:

Donate to Stephanie’s Medical Fund

Let’s show her our support 🙂 And if you can’t give, of course, prayers, good vibes, or whatever it is you do would no doubt be appreciated.