When business slows, many owners instinctively blame their offer or marketing. But often, the real bottleneck is in fulfillment, delivery, or the systems supporting the work. In this episode of The Business You Really Want, Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo take you inside a behind-the-scenes review of Gwen’s own offers—a process that uncovered not a failing product, but one that had quietly become clunky, confusing, and harder to explain than it needed to be. Using their accountability and quarterly planning process, they reveal how to spot friction points, highlight what’s working, and restructure strategically—without scrapping what already succeeds. If you’ve ever felt the urge to tweak your offer, overhaul pricing, or rebuild your systems without really knowing what’s broken, this episode shows you how to slow down, ask smarter questions, and make changes that actually move your business forward.

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Your Offer Isn’t The Problem. Or Is It?

Common Misdiagnosis In Business Struggles

If you have been in business for a while, I imagine you have had at least one year where things did not quite go as you wanted, or at the very least, maybe you had a quarter here or there where things did not go as you wanted. Gwen and I both have had enough experience to know that a lot of times when that happens, business owners tend to want to tweak their offer, or they want to tweak their marketing.

It is like, “My offer is the problem. My marketing is the problem.” That is actually not usually the case. If you have had any measure of success, usually your issue lies somewhere in the fulfillment side of things. Either the delivery is clunky, there is some confusion, some friction, or maybe there are some problems with the structures that are in place to support that fulfillment. Gwen, because Gwen is Gwen, would say, “Maybe the goal that you are trying to achieve is not in alignment with your values or who you are.”

That does not mean that you should never consider changing your offer. In fact, we are both people who believe that it is always important to evaluate all aspects of your business. Maybe not all at the same time, but you should be going through a regular reflection of whether everything you are doing in business makes sense and aligns with all of your business. Does it align with you? Does this align with the market that you serve?

It’s essential to regularly evaluate your business. Reflect on whether everything you’re doing makes sense and aligns with your goals and the market you serve. Share on X

That is the topic of our conversation. Gwen, I want you to kick us off basically because you are the CEO of Everyday Effectiveness. In many cases, though I am your co-host, you are my boss in some regards, especially in these matters. Second, because we have been going through this interesting process of reflection and evaluation involving your business, your offers. Why do you not take it from here and let us see where the conversation goes?

Value Of Internal Process Utilization & External Facilitation

It is interesting because part of the work that we do with our clients that we have done for years and years and years is that we have an accountability process, which we use internally as well. We also have a quarterly planning process that we run our clients through. While we are recording this, we have finished that with our clients. When we have done our own quarterly planning, because it is typically you like you and me, that is our quarterly planning team, we do not necessarily use all of those pieces of the process.

We have used elements of it, but not necessarily the whole thing. As we were coming into doing our own quarterly planning, which happened a number of weeks ago before the holidays, we said, “What if we actually used our own process?” I said, “What I want you to do is I want you to be me,” because I am usually facilitating the quarterly planning. You are always there as my right hand and could not do it without you. I am the one leading the activity. You be me. You ask the questions. You make me do the work. You said, “Yeah, I could totally do that. Yes, very fun.”

I like to boss you around.

We sat down, and it did not take us nearly as long because we were, it was just the two of us. We actually went through that entire process. Several things happened that were enlightening. The first thing that happened, and our clients say this all the time. In fact, one of our clients said this yesterday as we wrapped up, which was, “I came into this with a pretty good idea of what I thought I needed to be focused on. This revealed some things that I had not considered and made me think about where I wanted to be spending my time, effort, and energy differently.” She said, “That happens almost every time. I do not know why I continue to be surprised because it happens almost every time.” She, like me, is also a planner. She is always thinking that way. That happened to me during our process. That was the first fascinating thing. The other was how effective it was. This is probably a bad thing to admit in public, but I was like, “Our tools are good.”

I have always thought that they were good. Being on the receiving end of it and being able to actually be on the receiving end because you are able to facilitate the session. I have not had that with other folks that I have worked with historically. It was like, “This is an excellent process that we have developed to uncover and reflect in a super useful way, not just in a check-the-box way. We uncovered things that I did not know were going to get uncovered.

I am going to have you share that, and then I will share from my perspective. I want to address the facilitation piece because I think one of the things that we do not do so well, or that we do too well, is we use a lot of the same terms that other people in business use. We use quarterly planning. A lot of people use quarterly planning, but quarterly planning in practice is vastly different across the marketplace.

Among coaches and consultants and even corporations, everybody does quarterly, though not everybody has a review aspect of their quarterly planning sessions. Some of them are only future-focused. Others spend, I would argue, way too much time in review and not nearly enough time looking at the present and then having that inform the future.

Our planning process, because I think an audience is going to go to whatever their planning process is, and think what makes theirs so special. Our planning process involves a lot of reflection, but the reflection is not siloed. It is not all internal reflection, it is not you journaling endlessly and letting your own thoughts spiral.

There is partner work where you get to express what you have experienced, and there is somebody else there to say, “Tell me more about that, given what I know about you, that does not quite align. Tell me what is behind this?” It is those deeper questions that end up uncovering interesting things. Sometimes you say things, and I think this happened to you, so I will give it to you after this, where you say things that you did not know you thought or believed until they came out of your mouth.

It’s those deeper questions that uncover the most interesting insights. Share on X

That happens to me a lot because that is the true extrovert in me. People think extroversion and introversion are certain things, but one of the things about extroversion that a lot of people do not talk about is that extroversion is that you do not actually have that many thoughts in your head. A lot of thoughts do not happen until they leave your mouth. Real introverts process and make sure they know exactly what they are going to say before those words come out. There have been more times than I would like to admit where I have said something like, “That was smart, and I had no idea I knew that.”

I think how you put it when we first started working together was that if my mouth is not moving, my brain is not working.

Hardly. It is truly idling at that point. That was part of it. Of course, we have always had the back and forth during our quarterly planning, but there was more intention about doing both the journaling, the writing down piece, and the reflection, all the things that we do with our clients. I do think that what makes our process unique is that it is not any one thing. There is some group work.

There is some personal, heads-down, do-it-yourself work. There is some reflection time. There is some group sharing, some small group sharing. There are different tools to think about things differently. All of that plays in. We actually leveraged all of that in our time together. That was helpful. Now, what was the question you wanted me to answer? I just blathered.

It is okay. It was all good stuff. The question is, what were the revelations?

Looking back, it is like, “This is a duh revelation,” because that is the thing about revelations, when you look back, they are like, “Of course.”

I want to say that during that conversation, I think there were five different times where I said, “I cannot believe it has taken me this long to connect these dots.”

Offer Confusion & The Decision To Streamline

It is one of those things because to me, that is a lot about revelations. How did we not see this before? The first piece is related to the new offer that we are in the process of developing, refining, and working on, which is the accountability training that we are calling the performance accelerator, where we train other people how to use the accountability tool that we have and customize it for themselves for their own environments.

That is open to everybody. I work with women entrepreneurs. This is open to anybody, male, female, big corporations, little tiny businesses, so long as you have a team, this is potentially valuable for you. That has added another element to our pot of things that we were doing. That helped me realize that our current set of offers was getting a little confusing. How do we start separating them so that it becomes easy to understand what they are?

Also, as part of that, what we were realizing is that one of our offers is probably not as robust as it needs to be. Another one of our offers has been, I’m going to say, too robust, which is probably not a great description, but that is what I am going to use because it is almost confusing for it. There is a little too much involved in it. The idea was, what if we smush those together and create a new offer that takes the best of both pieces and smushes them together?

That to me was like this huge piece because I have liked all of the offers and they have done well. The people who are participating in the two offers that are now going to get smushed, we have not had complaints. We have not had people like, “I hate this. It has totally worked.” What I realized is that it is not working for us in the way that we talk about it, the way that we market it. As we have evolved over the past couple of years, we realize our primary offer is accountability.

That is the primary thing that we are offering, which may not sound like much, but the real offer is that we guarantee we will show up every week and hold you accountable to your goals, not to what we think you should be doing. Although these other two offers did that, it was confusing and probably not as strong as it should be. It was like, “How do we make this better?” What I also like is that it becomes super easy to talk about what the three offers are. We do one-on-one coaching, we have a group offer, and we have a training offer. Most people can mentally get their head around that. They made it exactly what our offer is, but they can conceptually understand what that is.

The real offer is that we show up every week and hold you accountable to your goals—not to what we think you should be doing. Share on X

Customer Psychology & The Problem With Mixed Offers

Marketing 101 is that a confused mind does nothing, followed by humans do better when they have two choices. A lot of us think we need to give a third choice, but the third choice always exists. Choices A, B, and C are neither. Neither is always a choice. Giving people a choice between A and B is sufficient. In our case, there was no easy A or B decision for most people. It was like most people could fit into one, like two offers, and maybe the third. It was not easy for them to self-select where they should focus on in terms of learning. It was not always easy, even after we knew them, for us to necessarily suggest. We would have a good hunch.

One of the things that you brought up before, which had not occurred to me until we were talking about it, is that some people are one-on-one people, and some people are group people. This makes that distinction so much easier because our third offer was both.

Our third offer was a little bit of each, and very few people come to the table going, “Do you know what I need in life? I need something one-on-one and highly customized, and also in a group.” That’s not how our brains work.

That was the third offer that was probably extra confusing to most people. It made total sense how we got there when we got there, but it has also become very apparent to me that it does not make sense to maintain it over time. This was a big shift for us.

I think we both came into the session thinking that we were going to spend a lot of time on the new offer, the training piece. What that was going to be like, because that is such a departure in target markets, since that is a co-ed, gender-neutral, whatever term you want to use, but it is also corporation-friendly, where a lot of our other stuff does better for solopreneurs. Entrepreneurial, micro business, teams of twenty or fewer, that sort of thing.

It’s also unapologetically female-centric. We came in thinking that. At what point do you feel like your eyes opened and were like, “While that was important, that is actually not the most important conversation to be having?” This confusion of the offers is what we need to be addressing.

It was so organic, I cannot even tell you. We have to do that. Where I think the bigger picture was, until we get I’m going to call it our house in order, because this is the foundation of the business, and we have been doing it for a long time. If this does not feel easy, how can we put good energy into the new thing?

As we came to this, it was like, this made so much sense. I had already had a previous thought, the day before or two days before, around this. As I presented that, you also were like, “I have been thinking about this too. How do we do this?” Part of the new offer is that it is not all Gwen all the time. Which has been different because historically, it is basically all Gwen all the time.

It is a real, true collaboration with someone else who is sharing in making the offer, but also in delivering the offer at a peer level. I shared my first thought, and you were like, I have been trying to figure out how to do this with you too. That was the exciting thing, you immediately were like, “I totally get this because this is the answer to the problem that has been rolling around in my brain at the same time.”

Part of the new offer is that it’s not all Gwen all the time. Historically, it was, but now it’s a true collaboration with someone else who contributes both to creating and delivering the offer at a peer level. Share on X

To make this interesting and applicable to our audience, the summary here is we go into this planning session and we have a brand new offer that we want to think about which did force us because as we are thinking about how do we market this without confusing people in the rest of the business, without making people think, “We no longer do that. We are only doing this,” without creating any ambiguity around what your level of expertise is and where you excel, Gwen. In all of that, it was like, “We actually have to dissect each existing offer.” Again, to your earlier point, not because the offers are struggling and not doing well. It is quite the opposite because all of the offers are doing fine. Maybe not great, but definitely not poor.

They are all okay.

We have to dissect what is working, what could be better, and all of those things because we want to take the best and make sure we leverage that into the new offer. Somehow in there, this whole new, I am going to call it the baby bear offer, because it feels right, emerges. Here is a question that we have not discussed. Do you think you could have gotten there all by yourself?

Absolutely not.

Why? I happen to think I am not the smartest person on the planet. Why would you not have gotten there all by yourself?

Self-Reflection Vs. True Accountability

Part of me had already gotten there, but part of me had gotten there because I was going to have a conversation with somebody else. The reason I say absolutely not is because of how I feel about accountability. Real accountability is a problem-solving and reflection process. People talk about self-reflection. Self-reflection is not a real thing because that is our head, that is the same voice in our head telling us the same thing. It is the same tracks and the same things going around and around.

Real accountability is a problem-solving and reflection process. Share on X

Self-reflection is rare. Not that you should not do any of it, but it is rarely as useful as true reflection with someone else who is asking questions and making things happen. That, to me, is why I say no, I could not have gotten there by myself. Even though I had already started thinking about this process, part of you even saying, “I was thinking about the same thing,” totally shifted from a “I wonder if I should do this” to a “Holy moly, this is probably absolutely the right thing to do.”

Self-reflection. How I view self-reflection. Self-reflection is an exercise in me asking myself, “Why do I think the things I think? What do I think and why do I think them?” I think when you summarize it like that, you can see it is only so useful where the accountability process comes into play is because somebody else gets to say, “In my experience, when people say that, they often mean this.” You get to go, “Oh,” because if you had thought that, you would have said that already. You get to go, “Does that resonate? Does that not resonate?” You are actually moving that thought process forward.

It is also that piece where someone else sees the things in you that are so obvious to you, you cannot see them. You do that for me all the livelong time. I consider it one of the most valuable things that you bring to our relationship. I say something, and you say, “You know, not everybody sees that understands that, does that,” fill in whatever, “They do not?” You give me 2 or 3 examples, and it is like, “They do not.” In self-reflection, it is so obvious. I do not see it and pull it out as a separate item, which, back to accountability, allows someone else to pull that out and say, “You are lumping that in this big giant thing, and there are actually eighteen things here, and each one of those things is important.”

That is valuable. What I think is important here is that people do not necessarily know automatically how to evaluate their offers beyond what is selling and what is not selling. What offers are actually moving people forward, and which offers are not? Those are the two areas of evaluation. I would love to leave our audience with some things that they should be looking at. From there, I then want to get specific on comparing this new offer to the existing offers so that it is apparent how we move through it in answering those questions.

The first thing, as we have already said, is that it is not that these offers were not selling. One of the things that we realized is that they felt clunky. They found it difficult to explain. We would find ourselves talking about them, and you could tell that the person you are talking to, and I am not talking about a prospective client, I am talking about socially, or talking about them.

People don’t automatically know how to evaluate their offers beyond what’s selling and what’s not. Share on X

You could tell the other person was not quite getting it, but was wanting to be polite, because they are not asking questions, you do not necessarily know what they do not understand, but you know something is off. They were feeling difficult on that end. While people were moving forward, I do not know about you, but there is a little something in my gut that was like: I think they could be moving faster.

They are smart enough. They have everything they need to actually be progressing toward their goal faster. What could we be doing differently to speed up that in the guidance part? It did not feel like they were pumping the brakes. It felt like they were not moving as quickly as they could. Why do you not very quickly summarize where we landed in terms of this is the best way to serve the particular people we serve?

The one-on-one offer, we said, basically, we are leaving it. I have established some levels.

Not leaving it as abandoning it, but keeping it as it is.

We are not making many changes. We have added some levels so that people can understand what they are getting and what they are not. Otherwise, it is pretty much staying as it was. Our offer, which was our group offer, used to include both a group call that was much more of a mastermind call and a one-on-one call. Everybody gets our weekly course of action, an asynchronous accountability process. It does not matter who you are. That is the nature. If you come in and work with us, you are going to get that. That is the way it is.

It does not matter how much you pay. Everybody gets that high-touch accountability.

Everybody gets that. That is our base offer. It was that whole thing of they do not know quite how to behave in the group, but they also are not necessarily maximizing one-on-one. You will see that back-and-forth piece. Our other offer was just the asynchronous accountability offer, which, as we said, we have seen people make good progress, but we only talk with them in any live capacity once a quarter during our quarterly planning.

There is this piece of, but I bet if you had a little bit of possibility to ask some questions or to get pushed in a little bit different way in a live conversation, because there is only so much you can do in an asynchronous environment, you could probably get there faster. What we said is, “What if we combine the two?”

We said, “You still get the accountability program, because that is the thing.” Instead, we are going to do some Q&A calls a couple of times a month. You can come in, bring your question. If it does not work for you, you are not obligated to be there because, like the mastermind call, you are obligated to be there. Keeping it small enough that people can still feel like they are going to get their time.

One of the things I always talk about is small groups. As you have said, and I also agree, people define a small group differently. For me, a small group maxes out at 25. I usually think of a small group around 15 to 25, somewhere in that range or less, because anything beyond that, my whole thing is if it takes more than one Zoom screen, it is probably no longer a small group. We are starting to get out of a small group size.

Meanwhile, for a few years, I facilitated and coached a cohort offer, and every cohort was between 150 and 250 people. My cohorts were all 180 each. We had like 60 people per Zoom call. Easy. It was positioned as a small group.

I would be like, “You lied to me.” I doubt anyone would argue that a twenty-person group is a small group. There is probably someone who is like, “No, that is 5, 4.” A 20-person group is a group, for the most part. For me, it was a combination of both of those things so that we can keep the calls small enough so that people are getting some one-on-one time and having time to get their questions answered. It is not going and brief answers.

At the same point, having the flexibility to come and go and say, “I do not have any questions this week. I am okay.” To me, it pulled out the best of both worlds. As we said, it also makes a very clear line of delineation. If you want one-on-one support, because one of my clients who came back to me a while ago said, “I loved the people in the small group, but I am not a small group person. Tell me what my offer is as a one-on-one.”

What are my options for one-on-one?

It was like, “Great, here we go. This is what your options are.” That to me is also the value of it is to be able to say, “Do you like doing group work or do you like doing one-on-one work? If you like doing one-on-one work, here are your options. If you like doing group work, here is your option.”

Criteria For Offer Evaluation Beyond Sales 

When it comes to evaluating your offers, based on everything you are saying, I have taken some notes on the questions somebody could be asking. I am going to go through these, and I am going to use the examples that you have been using. Again, too often we end with an offer as we evaluate, “Is it selling?” That is our number one.

Is it selling? Is it selling what we want to sell? That is usually where we begin and end. As you said, the first thing is, “Is this offer smooth? Does it feel smooth? Does it feel easy to talk about? Does it feel easy to deliver? Is there friction involved in it either on your end as the provider or on the client’s end as the recipient?” I think that is the first question. Anything that does not feel smooth is worth exploring more.

You may not need to actually change your whole offer. You may need a tweak.

In our case, part of the evolution to this is that we used to “sell the quarterly planning retreat,” and say the weekly accountability was a bonus until we realized that the people who did not do the weekly accountability did not move forward. It was like, “The weekly accountability is actually what is giving them the promised transformation.

The quarterly planning is what is giving them the continuity of transformation month after month, week after week.” The second thing you have to ask, I stole my thunder here, is whether the offer is successful? When we talk about success, we cannot stop at whether it is selling. It is also whether our customers, our clients, are experiencing success through the offer.

 

 

Related to that also is, how easy is it for them to refer others?

That is a good one.

That is not on my list. I know it was on your list. It was why I am adding it. If they are having success, but they are not referring lots of others, it means they cannot talk about why they are getting success.

It is like they cannot put words around the value they are receiving. That is a good one. What I was saying before is, is it fulfilling the promised transformation? Your sales page says that if they give you money, they will get these things. Are they actually getting those things? How long is it taking them to get those things?

Is it getting them those things in a reasonable amount of time? If the answer is no to any of these things, then why is that? It is almost never because you, as the provider, are not doing your end of the bargain. It is usually because there is something that prevents them from holding up their end of the bargain, or there is something that prevents the work they are doing from being visible as holding up their end of the bargain. That is an area where, if it is not fulfilling the promised transformation, you need to dig deeper.

Next to that would be, is it customer-centric? We do not create offers that do not work for us. I know we all think we are super generous and we are selfless and we are all those things, but we would not be in business creating offers that did not work for us. I am never going to create an offer that requires me to show up in person once a month anywhere because I actually would pay you to let me stay home. That is who I am. You are a different person, Gwen.

I am a different person for sure.

Is it truly customer-centric? Is it centering the experience of the people you want to serve in a way that is in alignment with your business, your values of business, all of those things? Finally, I made this final because I knew you would have words to say about this, Gwen. Is it profitable? Sales are not the same as profitability.

Sales is not the same as profitability. Share on X

That is a huge piece. I love that you ended there, because yes, it is like you know me.

Importance Of Profitability & Cost Analysis In Pricing

Notice I did not say much else. I was like, “She is going to interrupt me anyway. I am going to stop talking.”

That is good. One of the first things I did after we did this was to say, “What does this mean to cost? What do we need to price it at so that it actually makes sense?” Part of this offer is that it is not Gwen all the time. I need to be paying other people on an ongoing basis. I want to make sure that they get commission on the people that they bring in, that they are getting paid for the time that they are investing, all of those things at what I hope to be a reasonable rate for what they are doing. The first thing I did was run the numbers to see where that was. It is still an estimate because we have not done it yet. I do not know, but we have a reasonable idea.

I need to pause you here because this is taking two existing offers and blending them. It is important to talk about the price points. One offer, our asynchronous accountability-only offer is, “I am going to round up. These are not exact numbers, but it is like $500 your first month because that covers a bunch of extra stuff you get that first month. It is like $300 every month after this other offer, this one-on-one plus group plus this plus that was $750 a month.”

A lot of people would merge the two and automatically default to an existing price point. They would say, “We are going to merge the two, but it is so awesome. We have got people paying $750 a month anyway. We are going to keep this one at $750 a month,” or “I do not think anybody is going to pay $750 a month if they do not get one-on-one attention, so we are going to charge $300 a month for it.”

It is important to do what you did, which is to go, “How much is this going to cost to deliver in this way and have it make nobody feel like they are a commodity?” That goes against your organizational values. You are very human-centric, human-first. You want people to feel like they are a top priority, even in a group experience.

We ran it. That was one of the things. Part of it is also that the other piece of it is this number that we think our target market will be willing to pay. That was also part of the conversation. We said, “We think they will pay between X and Y,” so I ran at several different price points, and we came up with where the new offer is going to land, which will be about $400. It is more than the low offer and less than the higher offer. The other piece that I think is important here is to say it is a different offer. We are going to treat it differently.

A lot of folks would say, “You are making more money on the other people.” No, we are actually letting all of our existing people at the low end say, “You can stay there. You can absolutely stay there.” We are giving them the option that if you can move up, you are going to get more service. For the higher offer, I cannot maintain it if I do not have enough people in it. We are not going to allow them to stay there. It is also going to go down in cost. Some people are like, “You are losing so much money.” “Yeah, but I am gaining other time.”

It’s because of the way that the offers are structured. If those people who will be going from paying $750 a month to paying $400 a month, I will eventually get all these numbers straight in my head. We told you it was new. We are still figuring this out. Those people could choose to buy one-off sessions with you if they wanted to. They could choose to buy one-off sessions with me or with whoever the co-facilitator is if they wanted to do that. That is an option they have. We are not saying, “You do not ever get to see Gwen one-on-one ever again.”

That has also always been available for my existing clients. That has always been out there, including the folks who have only been doing the asynchronous accountability process. They have always had that option. It is looking at the whole thing and saying, “Does this make sense?” Part of it, of course, is also saying, “How much time is this going to take for this as well?”

The ongoing time commitment for us is actually doing the accountability, and we are already doing that. That is an existing thing. It might have been something that you were adding in. You would need to make sure that you are accounting for that. Looking at that profitability piece, because a lot of times we get this great idea, “All it is going to take is blah.” When you start running the numbers, it is like, “I am not actually making any money on this.” It’s not something you want to be shifting to.

We started this off with the idea that while a lot of times your offer is not your problem, that does not mean that the offer should not be evaluated and considered regularly. In fact, I would say, and I think you would agree with this, you should not wait until your offers are a problem before you evaluate them.

I also encourage you to, at least once a year, evaluate your offers. Even if everything is going great, because sometimes the evaluation is not a big evaluation, it is just a tweak.

 

 

Also, what I would say is when you’re evaluating your offers, aside from this sort of thing, you should always be looking at your pricing in the context of the market. You should be looking at not just your pricing in the context of the market, but also what is included in that pricing. I come from the membership world. There was a time when memberships were about paying for curation and only being given stuff that exactly met my needs.

Somehow, they ended up paying very little money for this vacuous vault of stuff that’s like hours of content that you would never get through. Now they have swung back into the direction where people are paying premiums to have access to maybe twelve things over the course of a year, because time is a form of currency. The pendulum is always swinging. You should always be looking at where your offers fit with what is going on in the world at this time and in your industry. Gwen, anything you want to add before we close?

No, because this was an interesting experiment for us. I will say, and completely unrelated to what we’re talking about, but yet related, is if you are offering your clients tools, are you using your own tools? That can be insightful. That’s what it was for us.

I even think that to that point, because that is a good one, is that if your own tools are not working for you, that could be a sign that you need to alter your tools. It could also be a sign that your tools are best for businesses or customers at a certain stage, and you are no longer in that stage. That is important for you to know as well, because that helps you have less waste in your marketing and all of those things, lead generation, and all of that.

That is an excellent point. Thank you for bringing that up. Typically, at the end here, I would tell you something like, “If you want more help, give us a call.” Actually, what I want to know is, because this is fairly early in a new year, and I told somebody that I feel like when we were all annoyed with the unprecedented times during COVID, and we were like, “Can we stop talking about unprecedented times?”

The pendulum is always swinging. You should regularly assess how your offers fit with what’s happening in the world and in your industry. Share on X

I feel like unprecedented is now another word for Tuesday, because I feel like every day somebody is telling me something that I never thought I would ever need to deal with. I am curious, going into 2026, if you are tuning in to this episode, what are your thoughts on your own offer stack right now? What questions are you asking yourself? What questions are you looking to get answers to this year?

Are you asking yourself the same questions we have been asking ourselves, or do you have a whole different set of questions? I do believe part of why we do this podcast is that we wanted to take private conversations out in public because entrepreneurs do not do that enough, but particularly women in business do not do that enough.

We like to talk about money. We like to talk about profitability. A lot of women do not like to do that. We are interested in having that conversation. The best people to have that conversation with outside of your own circles are us, because we love to hear this stuff. We are total geeks for it. The best way to reach both Gwen and me is actually to email support at www.tonyakubo.com/.

That goes to Sophia. Sophia, make sure that everything gets in front of the two of us, whereas sometimes if you email me, it gets lost in my inbox. I will be honest. That is something I am working on this year. With that, I hope that you are having a great beginning to 2026, and we will see you on the next episode.

 

Important Links

• Gwen Bortner on LinkedIn
• Gwen Bortner on Facebook
• Everyday Effectiveness

 

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.