Katie worked 40 hours a week managing social media for her clients. Posting six days a week. Multiple times a day. At specific times based on each client’s audience.
Her best month ever was $10,000. And that month was rare.
Today she works about 15 hours a week running ads, has eight ad clients, and is on track for over $12,000 in September. Same brain. Same business. Same busy life with three boys, homeschooling, and travel baseball.
The difference was not working harder. The difference was making the pivot from social media manager to ads manager.
Katie’s story looks nothing like mine, and that is exactly why I want you to hear it. If you are buried in daily organic social media, or you started an ads business and keep putting it on the back burner, this one is for you.
The Social Media Management Trap: 40 Hours a Week for a $10K Ceiling
Katie started her social media management business about 10 years ago, right when she became a mom. She wanted to contribute to her family and still be home with her son.
So she managed Facebook and Instagram, and some Pinterest early on. She came up with the content, asked clients for creative, and showed up as them online. Every day. Several times a day. Six days a week. For eight years.
“I thought I was busy, and then the next year I just get busier and laugh at the old me thinking I was busy.”
I did the exact same thing when I started, so I am not guessing here. Organic social media management has a ceiling, and the ceiling is your calendar.
When “I’ve Never Had to Market” Becomes a Problem
For eight years, Katie never marketed. Word of mouth brought her everything.
Then about three years ago, her clients started having rough financial years, and one by one she got let go. “It’s nothing you did. We just have to cut costs.”
Y’all, if that sentence has ever landed in your inbox, you know how it feels. When your income depends on a service clients see as optional the second money gets tight, you do not have a stable business. You have a fragile one.
Katie gave it two years before she admitted she needed to pivot.
The Sign, and the Year She Lost to Consumption Mode
Here is my favorite detail. Katie was inside a client’s Instagram doing engagement, genuinely thought she was in her own account, and saw an ad for my boot camp about transitioning from social media management into ads.
She signed up. She did not even finish it, because one of the testimonials was Gretchen Wheeler, a woman Katie knew from the social media world. She took it as her sign and joined Conversions for Clients right then.
Great start. Then she stalled for a year.
The Consumption Mode Trap
Katie decided she had to learn everything about ads before looking for a single client.
“You tell everyone to start looking for clients right away. And I was like, yeah, no, I’m gonna learn how to do the ads first. That slowed me down.”
So she learned. For a year. And because she was not growing, she was still buried in daily social media, still burnt out, and now telling herself she did not have time to keep learning either.
Real talk: not one person in thousands of conversations has ever told me “Brandi, I landed a client too fast, I wish I had spent more time learning.” Not once. I hear the opposite constantly.
And when I asked Katie whether that year of studying actually prepared her for her first client, her answer was, “I definitely still had to go back to the training.”
Of course she did. Learning ads is like learning to ride a bike. We do not sit our kids in front of YouTube videos and expect them to hop on and ride. We hand them the bike.
It is a whole lot more fun to figure it out while you are getting paid than to spend a year figuring it out for free.
Ask yourself honestly: are you learning right now, or are you hiding inside the learning?
If that stung a little, DM me the word PIVOT on Instagram @brandimowles and tell me about it.
The Email, the Call, and the Investment That Felt Impossible
At the end of last year, Katie had all the knowledge and none of the application. Then she opened an email from me about doing five specific things every day to land dream clients. She opened it because she was thinking, “I just need someone to tell me what to do.”
That was the real problem. Not knowledge. Decision fatigue.
“I would get stuck on, should I do my marketing minutes, or make a flyer, or post a statistic? And then I did nothing. Which is crazy, because this is the exact thing I tell my clients not to do. But you are often your own worst client.”
Say that one again for the people in the back. You are often your own worst client.
She replied, we booked a business analysis call, and then she went quiet for a bit. My team followed up, I messaged her directly, life was crazy, and eventually we got on the call. I name that on purpose, because so many people assume a gap means it is a no. It usually just means someone is in the middle of their life.
What Actually Happens on a Business Analysis Call
Katie knew going in that it was also a sales call, and she was fine with that. “We have services that will literally change people’s lives. So it’s not sleazy when you’re in it for the betterment of people.”
Did she feel pressured at any point? Her word: never.
She was screenshotting the whole thing before Strategist Society was ever brought up. That is the point of the call. It finds the holes in your business, because if you do not know where the holes are, I cannot help you fix them.
Bonus most people miss: when you sit on a sales call that does not feel like a sales pitch, you are learning how to run your own. We close clients on sales calls. So why are we so afraid to get on one?
Her Only Hesitation Was the Price
Katie’s honest reaction when the investment came up: “Yeah, this is why I don’t open those emails.” She had decided she was not there financially yet. One day.
She kept putting off “one day.”
So she talked to her husband and prayed on it. “If I do what she says, I literally cannot fail. She has proof of all of her members who do what she says, and they are not failing. They’re making their investment back in the first three to four months. If they can do it, I can do it too.”
Then she asked for one thing. If this is meant to be, let me land a client quickly so it costs nothing extra.
That night, someone reached out to her to run their ads.
Three things on the money piece:
- Pricing is subjective. What we charge for Strategist Society is well below what we should charge and well below what other coaches charge for less. A lot of coaches price like course creators, and one-on-one service providers make money completely differently.
- It is always scary to invest. But when you make the right investment, it very rarely fails to pay itself back.
- We are not throwing up two shiny case studies. We track members’ activity every week. We have income growth stats and retention numbers to back it up.
From 1 Ad Client to 8 in Six Months: What She Actually Did
Katie has been in Strategist Society for six months. She started with one, maybe two ad clients and nothing proactive happening. She has eight now with more coming. Here is exactly what moved.
1. She Did the Touchpoints Every Single Day
She joined right as we launched a touchpoint challenge: reach out to at least five people a day and track it. Simple. Not easy.
Katie did not skip a single day for the entire challenge. She won it. “I needed to know what to do, and I needed the accountability for it.”
2. She Asked for Help Instead of Grinding in Silence
After weeks of touchpoints, Katie was not getting replies. She even upped her outreach to 20 a day trying to force it. So she Voxed me and said, I am doing everything you say and it is not working.
I asked to see her actual messages. And I told her, “I don’t like that at all. Trash it all. We’re starting over.”
She laughs about it now, because her first appearance in front of my audience was as the example of what not to do inside the Predictable Clients workshop, face blacked out, with her permission.
But I never stop at “this isn’t working.” I always follow it with, Here is how we make it better.
- Before: 1 in 30 messages turned into a conversation
- After the fix: 1 in 5 messages turns into a conversation
- She changed her messaging and got three replies that same day
Katie’s takeaway: “Some people might think, I don’t want to bother her. But you can go further and say, help me send the RIGHT message, because obviously something’s not working.”
So many of us, especially women, were raised not to ask for help. We are told it takes a village to raise children and then quietly taught not to use the village. It takes a village to build a business too.
And the data backs it up. Members who Voxed me at least once a week last year 2X to 10X’d their business. Not because I am magic. Because asking removes weeks of guessing.
3. She Ran the Standards of Excellence Daily
When I asked Katie what changed the most, she did not name a fancy strategy. She said doing the standards of excellence every single day, and she wholeheartedly believes that is what propelled the business forward.
She has not consumed even a quarter of the training. She found what she needed for her current roadblock and focused there.
Which is exactly right. Nothing is meant to be consumed A to Z. It is a library. You do not walk into a library and panic about reading every book. You take one book, get what you need, and go get another.
The Real Math: 15 Hours a Week vs 40
Before, as a social media manager:
- 40 hours a week
- Best month ever: $10,000, and it was not consistent
- Posting daily, six days a week, at specific times
- Clients cutting her for budget reasons
Now, as an ads manager, six months in:
- About 15 hours a week
- From a little over $2,000 a month to on track for over $12,000 in September
- Eight ad clients, with staggered onboarding and launches
- Work that fits into the pockets of her day
That is $10,000 in monthly growth in six months, and she was not building from scratch. These were pivots, not a rebuild.
If someone handed you the option to work 40 hours for $10,000 or 15 hours for more than $10,000, which are you picking?
That is the difference between organic and paid. You work way less and you can make double. Working more hours does not equal more money. When you have a very full life, you do not need more hours. You need a higher-paying skill.
Why Most People Quit 10 Feet From Gold
Here is the part of Katie’s story that will save you if you let it.
She did touchpoints for about 90 days before she got a discovery call. She stayed consistent anyway, and then everything snowballed. Her entire income jump has happened in the last three months, even though the work started six months ago.
That timeline is not random. It takes 45 to 60 days of consistent marketing before discovery calls start coming in. Katie did 45 days, asked for help, we fixed the messaging, she marketed the better way for another 30, and the calls started rolling in.
I always picture the miner digging toward gold who quits when he is a few feet away. All he had to do was keep digging.
Most people are not inconsistent because they are lazy. They are inconsistent because nobody told them results were 45, 60, 90 days out. So they stop right before it works.
Are you actually failing, or are you just early?
The Pivot Is Available to You Too
The biggest things I want you to take from Katie:
- You can be a fully present mom and still build a five-figure-a-month business. Katie’s life did not get smaller. Her business got smarter.
- If you are burnt out on organic, there is another way, and it means fewer hours and more money. You already know how to run a business and how to run organic. Transfer those skills into a higher-paying, more in-demand one.
- Timing is never going to be perfect. Katie sat in Conversions for Clients for a year and a half before she went for it. That is exactly why it is lifetime access. We do not kick you to the curb because your life got loud.
Making the pivot from organic to paid was one of the best decisions of my life, and I would not change it for anything.
So if you have been thinking about it, make the pivot.
If you are saying “but Brandi, I need to know how to actually run ads,” head to conversionsforclients.com and sign up for our free boot camp. It shows you how to find clients and what an ad management business really looks like. At the end, we open the doors to Conversions for Clients.
If you already have a successful business and what you need is accountability and a room of people scaling to $10,000 months, head to thestrategistsociety.com and fill out an application.
You do not need more time. You do not need a less busy life. You need a skill that pays you what your hours are actually worth, and you need to stop digging a new hole every 30 days.
Go do the dang thing.
Katie’s full story is on this week’s episode of the Serve Scale Soar podcast, where we help one-on-one service providers build profitable, scalable businesses without the hustle. Go out, serve your clients, scale your business, and soar into the success you deserve.
** This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you if you use one of the links to purchase. This helps keep the podcast going and I only share products I have used, tested, and love.”
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Meet Brandi
Brandi Mowles is the host of the Serve Scale Soar® podcast which is a podcast dedicated to helping service-based entrepreneurs scale their online business to five-figure months so they can soar into six-figure years. Brandi is a wife, mom and in less than one year, created a six-figure business. Now she is spilling all her secrets so you can too.
