THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

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My 2025 - Business Development

2025 was a transformational year for me for a few key reasons:

1. I had my fifth (and final) kid - Scarlett - In January 2025. Any year a new child comes into the world turns your life upside down in the best ways, and knowing this is actually my final child makes me feel like my family is complete.

2. My EOS business completed it’s second year, and it and I grew from the initial growth phase where things were going well but I still wasn’t quite sure it was going to work, into the next phase - I’ll call it consolidation, where I’m relatively close to having a mature practice and know for sure it’s going to work and I’m doing the work I’m meant to do.

3. My relationship with my partner, Erin, developed in many ways that have made me feel truly settled for the first time since I divorced in 2020.

4. My professional identity has shifted after a 6 year transition period. It’s been a long road but the past year I’ve felt things settle into who I’m meant to be professionally for the next decade.

While some of the year has passed with ease, I can’t imagine anyone would say a truly transformational year was “easy”. Mine certainly wasn’t. More on that in a minute.

I have an article on each of the above topics, but today I’m focusing on one part of how I grew my coaching business.

My coaching business can be broken down into three major categories:

-Sales/Business development

-Delivery of services - which we call “Mastery” in my community

-Practice management or administrative support

Today I’m going to highlight some wins and challenges of my business development side of business.

First here’s my numbers:

2024 Revenue - $167k

2025 Revenue - $275k

Growth rate - 65%

2024 was my first year as an EOS implementer, and 2025 was my second. A minor nuance of reporting is that my community measures their year from Feb 1 - Jan 31 for a few reasons - if I used that calculation the numbers would be about 90-100% growth.

But the above is on the calendar year.

Am I happy with those numbers? Absolutely.

Did I hit my 2025 plan? No, I missed it and will explain a few reasons I came up short.

A LOT of work went into those numbers. This is my full-time work, I don’t do anything else. Here are the numbers behind my growth:

Every week in 2025 I completed a series of business development activities. And over the course of the past year I refined which activities give me the results I wanted. Here’s a brief explanation of my major activities:

1. LinkedIn - I’ve consistently created content on LinkedIn for over 2 years now. I’ve built up 14,000 connections and figured out a relatively easy and repeatable process that my practice manager, Cami, and I execute every week:

   1. Write content and post 4x a week (I write everything, Cami creates graphics and schedules)

   2. Engage with people in my network through commenting, and respond to all comments on my posts

   3. Send 100-200 connection requests to people in my local market

   4. Send a series of DMs to my network with value added articles to help first

2. Connector meetings - I meet regularly with people in my network to catch up and stay connected with people I enjoy spending time with. I follow a relatively simple process of evaluating who I want to build relationships with over repeated meetings. Since I’ve been consistent about building my network for the past 5 years, I don’t actively pursue new general connections, they sort of just come to me through my network.

   My connector networking approach is simple:

   -Do things I like doing with people I like spending time with (lunch, sauna, walks, anything the other person loves doing)

   -Make sure these people are in the same universe as me - involved in running, serving, or advising small growth businesses

   -Be proactive about staying in touch with people

   As my business had matured, my list of people has narrowed to who I really like spending time with. I also offer events so I can meet with more people I like more regularly.

3. Events - Still in the consolidation phase where I’m figuring out which events are best for me. In 2025 I mostly did wellness focused events like rucks and sauna events. In the fall I hosted a dinner that was very successful.

   Events are great for me because I’m able to attract cool guest lists and if I do things I love it’s a win-win for me and my guests.

4. Proactive calls - This is what it sounds like, calling (or texting) people in my network to say hi and ask how I can help them. It’s a simple concept that works in a multitude of ways.

   In 2024 I struggled with this concept, in 2025 I made it part of my weekly work that I looked forward to. In 2026 I’m going to become an expert at it.

5. Sale presentations - My version of this is called “The 90 Minute Meeting”. It’s technically a sales presentation, but it’s actually the first session in the EOS journey. As I get more refined in my approach it becomes more of a way to qualify whether my prospects are good candidates to work with, as it is for them to evaluate whether I’m a fit for their organization.

6. New clients are leadership teams who start the EOS journey with me.

Those numbers equate to a large amount of weekly activity:

Part of getting great at this kind of business - which involves selling myself as the service - requires falling in love with sales and the sales process.

It also involves getting comfortable with NO.

If you do some math you’ll see that for every YES - a new client, I had to get through at least 3 NO’s from qualified prospects who I had a conversation with.

In addition to that is probably 15 no responses, ghosts, etc, for every new client that I had to get comfortable with.

In 2025 I got comfortable with all of it.

I also struggle greatly at times. Here’s a few big ways I struggled:

1. Blocking time for the boring stuff - Calling people proactively is hard for most people. It’s the reason most people fail at sales. I got really comfortable with it through repetition over the past year, but I still found myself procrastinating and moving it to later in the week often.

   It wasn’t until I got consistent with blocking time early in the week to make these calls, that I started having consistent success.

2. Content creation - I struggled greatly with content creation last year. I’ve been very consistent on LinkedIn for a few years now, and want to expand the quality of my content, along with the quantity onto additional platforms.

   If I’m being honest with myself, I failed here in 2025. I brought on Cami in July, and we ramped up my content creation to where I was at the end of 2024, but we’ve had trouble expanding beyond that with video and additional platforms.

   Content is tricky - I don’t need it to build a full EOS coaching practice. But it makes it easier to run a full practice, and also builds my authority in the long-term for additional areas I want to explore.

   This is why very few people in my field are heavily involved in content creation - there’s little short-term benefit, and it’s not necessary to have a highly profitable coaching business in the long-term.

3. Confidence - This gets into the mastery side of things a bit, but confidence is one of the most important traits in determining success or failure in a coaching business. While I present as highly confident and generally am, I realized through coaching I received along with reflection after losing some clients, that I can struggle with confidence issues - especially during the sales process.

   This is still a work in progress - and always will be. But I made some massive strides in confidence in 2025. I’ll write a post about this later.

4. Lastly - and I hate using this as an excuse but it’s a reality - having a toddler and newborn at home last year rocked my world. I’m about as experienced a dad as there is I know, but that combination really sucked away most of my excess energy to create, and I struggled greatly with it in 2025.

   A great example? This is the first weekly newsletter I’ve written in over 6 months. I wrote weekly for over a year, and at some point just stopped because I couldn’t figure out how to fit it into my week.

   And as you can tell by reading this, I’m hopefully coming out of the deepest part of the baby cave.

I’m going to devote the next few newsletters to where I grew and faced challenges last year, but the main takeaway I want to stress from a sales and business development standpoint, is that ALL of my success came from doing the boring weekly activities that are so easy to push off until “later”.

I’m very proud of those numbers that, to be honest, I often woke up on Mondays not wanting to do that.

Well I did, and despite not hitting the exact numbers I projected, I finish 2025 extremely strong with 5 of my 10 new clients being booked in the last quarter of the year!

So I’m actually setup to double my revenue numbers in 2026.

All I have to do is the basic boring stuff.

Every. Single. Week.

Talk to you next week,

Mike