Here’s a question worth sitting with for a moment. If you disappeared from your coaching business for the next fortnight, what would still be working when you came back?

Not “what would you have to catch up on”. What would actually still be bringing people in.

For a lot of the coaches I work with, the honest answer is nothing. And that’s not a personal failing, it’s a design problem. If your entire marketing plan depends on you showing up every day, then the moment you can’t show up, everything stops. You come back from your holiday, or your child’s sick week, or the fortnight where your energy just went, and it feels like starting from zero all over again.

If you’re highly sensitive, heart-led or neurodivergent, this is going to happen to you.
Regularly. Not because you’re doing it wrong, but because that’s how your capacity works.

So let’s stop trying to fix the person and start fixing the plan.

Listen to this episode on The Wholehearted Business Show Podcast: Listen on Apple Podcasts / Listen on Spotify

Why “just be more consistent” isn’t the answer

In this blog post we talked about why consistency is such a difficult ask for sensitive coaches, and why steadiness is a much better goal. If you haven’t listened to that one yet, go back and grab it first, because this blog is the practical follow-on.

The short version is this. Consistency asks you to perform at the same level every week regardless of what’s happening in your life or your body. Steadiness asks something different. It asks you to build something that keeps working at your lowest level, so the ebbs and flows stop taking your business down with them.

There are so many reasons your capacity might drop. Health stuff. Caring responsibilities. Kids, and the way the last two weeks of term eat your entire brain (can confirm, that one’s very recent for me). Another job you’re still working while you build the coaching business. Or simply not wanting to work at full pelt every single week of your life, which is a completely legitimate reason on its own.

Let me be clear though, this isn’t the “work two hours a week from a beach in Bali” fantasy. You still have to put work in. What we’re doing is making sure the work you put in keeps paying you back when you’re not there.

Building a business that functions at your lowest weeks

Most coaches build their marketing around strategies that require them to be present. Posting on social media, DMs, networking, reaching out. And there’s nothing wrong with any of those things, but they all have one thing in common. They only produce results while you’re actively doing them.

Stop doing them and the results stop with them. Immediately.

So if that’s your whole plan, you’ve built a business that can only function in your good weeks. And your good weeks are not every week. They were never going to be.

What we want instead is a business that still functions at your minimum. Because if you can build for your minimum, everything above that is a bonus rather than a requirement.

Mapping your capacity

The way I teach this is through three capacity tiers. There’s a free workbook that goes with this episode which walks you through mapping yours properly, but here’s the structure.

Tier one is your lowest capacity. This is holiday, illness, your kids being ill, the end of the school term, the summer holidays, or something wonderfully fun that you’ve chosen to go and do. Very little, if anything, is going into the business.

Tier two is a regular, normal week. Not amazing, not terrible. Just your standard.
Tier three is when you’ve got extra. More time, more energy, more availability. Maybe it’s ovulation week and your energy is through the roof. Whatever a high capacity week looks like for you, that’s tier three.

Now here’s the bit that changes everything.

You cannot do marketing that grows your business in tier one. That’s the whole point of tier one. So the work that makes tier one keep working has to be done in tiers two and three.

Making your marketing work for your off weeks

This is where most coaches have it backwards, and it’s worth being honest about it because it’s an easy mistake to make.

Most people put their social media, their DMs and their networking into tier two, their normal weeks. Which means their normal weeks are full of activities that produce nothing the moment they stop. Then tier one arrives and there’s nothing running.

Flip it.

Tier two is for building the things that keep working without you. That means long-form, searchable, discoverable content. Blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, Substack or Medium articles, Pinterest. Content that goes out and exists on the internet (not the technical term, but you know what I mean) and gets found by the right person at the right moment, months after you published it.

Unlike a reel, which gets a spike of views and then quietly dies, searchable content compounds. New people find it every single month without you touching it again. This is exactly what I teach in The Searchable Show Method, which lives inside Wholehearted Business®.

Tier two is also where you check in on your ads and email your list. And if you can see a tier one week coming, tier two is where you write and schedule those emails in advance.

Tier three is for the extra stuff. Social media, networking events, DMs, conversations. All brilliant, all worth doing, but do them when you’ve got the surplus rather than making them your foundation.

Tier one is where you find out whether it worked. By the time you get there, you want searchable content out in the world bringing people in, a small amount of paid ads running on a low daily budget, and an email funnel nurturing new subscribers automatically. None of which needs you.

On the ads point, I’d love to tell you organic content alone is enough. It isn’t, not if you want to grow with any real pace. You don’t need to start there, build your organic foundation first, but it’s worth knowing that’s where this goes.

Next steps

Yes, building a system like this takes time. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But it’s the difference between a business that collapses every time your life happens and one that quietly keeps going.

Start by mapping your own three tiers. Download the free workbook here and actually fill it in, because seeing it written down tends to make the gap obvious very quickly.

Wholehearted Business® opens in September and this is a big part of what we build together inside it. If you’d like first access, pop yourself on the waitlist. I’ve also got a free training coming up very soon where we go further into the other parts of your business that need to run this way too.

And if you’d rather just have a conversation about your own situation, a Clarity Call is always there.

Laura 💖

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