EP27: Why Business Growth Can Weaken Your Market Position with Ally Machate

🎙️ Inside the Conversation.
Growth is supposed to strengthen your market position but for many businesses, growth creates pressure that quietly dilutes what made them successful in the first place.

In this episode, Cerila sits down with publishing strategist Ally Machate to explore why leaders often broaden their messaging as they scale, how positioning begins to drift, and why trying to appeal to everyone often weakens connection with the people they serve best.

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 ✨ Dig Deeper with These Resources.
→ Don't Write the Wrong Book! an on-demand free training. 

→ Author Advantage Mastermind - Learn how to leverage the book you already have to support your business, visibility, and long-term goals with our six-month, small-group program for authors.

→ Resource Library - We have a ton of free resources available to help authors with everything from analyzing their book concept to refining their draft to marketing their book.

 ✨ Guest Resources.
🌐 Website → The Writer's Ally
✉️ Email → ally@thewritersally.com
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 👤 Guest. Ally Machate
Ally Machate is a publishing expert and the Founder & CEO of The Writer’s Ally, where she and her team have helped hundreds of authors write, publish, and sell high-quality books. With 25+ years in the publishing industry—including her work as a Big Five editor—Ally understands what actually makes books succeed. Follow Ally on social media → LinkedIn  

🎧 Host. Cerila Gailliard, PMP, CSM
Founder, Orchestrating Your Success | Host, Manage Your Projects with Confidence | International Bestselling Author 

Helping CEOs eliminate execution gaps, protect profits, and scale with clarity, structure and confidence. Follow Cerila on social media → LinkedIn
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🎙️ Scaling isn’t accidental. It’s intentional.
You don’t scale chaos. You scale
You scale what’s clear, structured, and repeatable. 

https://manageyourprojectswithconfidence.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Manage Your Projects with Confidence, a podcast that examines the patterns and disciplines of execution behind business growth. Hosted by Cerelia Gaylord, this show helps women business owners understand what's actually holding their growth back and what must change for scale to become clear, structured, and repeatable. Because you don't scale chaos, you scale what's clear, structured, and repeatable.

SPEAKER_02 0:35

Growth is supposed to strengthen your market position, but as visibility increases, so does pressure. And under that pressure, leaders often stretch their positioning to chase opportunities. That is how dilution happens. Today, we are unpacking how growth pressure causes leaders to dilute their positioning and how to protect it as you scale. Welcome, Allie, to the Manage Your Project with Confidence podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Well, I'm excited for you to be here. And we're going to be talking about a topic that we usually don't usually talk about. We talk a lot a bit about marketing, but we don't really talk about this word called positioning. And we're going to talk about that and define it and all that good stuff so our listeners can really understand why positioning is so important and how we sometimes lose it. And then Allie's going to tell us how we get it back again. So before we get started, I always like to understand how our guests got into the business. So you're in the business of helping business owners develop their books and they're in their expertise, but you also align businesses with their message and their positioning. So tell us a little bit about that. How'd you get started? How'd you get into the industry?

SPEAKER_01 1:59

Yeah, well, um, for me, it's all really about the books. You know, I've I've been a big fan of books and writing my entire life. It's been a through through line uh ever since I was a real little kid. I loved to read. Uh my mother loves to tell the family legend is that they couldn't read to me enough. I was always begging my parents to read more books to me. And they had things to do, they had jobs to get to and houses to clean, you know. And uh so I started trying to teach myself. And I started reading. Uh, my mother, who was a school teacher at the time, saw that I was so eager to read, and so she started trying to teach me. And I started reading at the age of three. And I would make books out of construction paper and crayons, and I would go around to people and give them books, and I would tell them that I was a book publisher. So it really is something I've always been passionate about. It continued all the way through grade school and element and uh high school. I did like editor of the school paper and yearbook and all that kind of stuff. When I got to college to uh not to date myself too much, but the internet was really just becoming a thing back then. And uh, so I started freelance writing. I got my first uh my first job's freelance writing for websites. And I was very fortunate to get uh an internship with a regional book publisher while I was still in school, which was an amazing experience. It was a very small publisher, but because it was so small, I got to do a lot of different things. I was basically the publisher's right hand person. Um so I got a little bit of a taste of all the different departments and all the different things it takes to make books. And then the real big turning point was that when I graduated, I got a job at Simon and Schuster, which of course is one of the big five publishers, one of the biggest in the world. And that's where I really got my education. I got a real snoot full of what it takes to get a publishing deal, what books go through before they hit the marketplace, how marketing plans are structured, what you know, kind of branding conversations happen, all of that stuff. Eventually, a whole bunch of different things happened. Time conspired. There was 9-11, there was the dot-com bust, and I decided to leave and finish up a master's degree and do a little freelancing on the side. And what I found was that I loved working with the authors directly so much more. And even though I had loved my job, I was working with great people, being able to work very directly with the authors and help them to understand in at the time what was becoming a whole new world of independent publishing. Print on demand technology was emerging. Some years later, we had ebooks coming out, right? It was a very exciting time. And we had a lot of people who were suddenly finding themselves in a position to be able to realistically produce their own books and distribute their own books and market their own books without a lot of good education on how to do so properly. And of course, lots of scammers, lots of people out there trying to take advantage of people because that's pretty much how it works. Anytime there's a new industry, we got folks coming in to take advantage of it. That's just that's just capitalism. So I started my company to help authors to really have have their best chance of success, help them to edit their books, design their books, publish their books, market their books. Fast forward many years later, here we are. I'm head of the Writer's Ally. We're a team that helps authors to do exactly that. And what I found is that along the way, one of the biggest, let's say one of the biggest challenges I've had and where the business stuff comes in is that when you are an expert, when you're a coach, a consultant, a speaker, when you're publishing a book that is specifically designed to be a part of your business journey, a tool to grow your business, it takes a lot more than just being a good book. A book can objectively be well written, it can be interesting, it can be well designed, it can have a nice cover, and it can still fail to get you the results that you want on your business if the book is not clearly positioned and if it's not clearly and strategically tied into what you do for your business and what you're planning to do with your business moving forward, how you intend to grow. So, all of that, we really focus on the books. That's our main thing. But to do that well, it necessarily brings in all these elements around people's target audience and who they serve and what exactly they offer in the marketplace. Oh wow.

SPEAKER_02 6:22

That is amazing, Allie. I and I think we're probably the same age because I remember the dot-coms and I remember all that. Yep, yep, yep, yep. I'll say check, check, check. Are we the? I think we uh generation X is probably the forgotten generation. Is that what we are? I can't remember. Something like that.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

I heard that said many times. I I fall into that uh that fun little pocket they call sometimes the Oregon Trail generation. Right, right, right. Like in between Gen X and millennials, we're just kind of didn't grow up with the internet, but had it early enough to figure it out.

SPEAKER_02 6:56

Right, right, right. So thank you for that. And we're gonna get into a little bit more about her expertise and other things that she's doing later on in the podcast. But let's get back to the word positioning and that piece of it that you talked about, how you were helping businesses when they write books to make sure that their business message, positioning, and what they write about it, and it could just be a book, it could be anything, right? Or is it aligned? So let's start with a definition. Define positioning as it relates to business. I should have looked this up for a more formal definition before we came in here.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

So I I would explain positioning as actually, I'll I'll explain it in book terms, right? So imagine you are in an old-fashioned bookstore and you're looking at a shelf, and let's say that shelf full of business books. We have this category of business books. Now, any number of books could be considered a business book, right? But where the book is physically and it metaphorically on the shelf, where it fits into the category of business books, that's what positioning is about, right? So is your business book about marketing or is it about building a team? Right? Those are both business books, but they're in different niches, different subcategories. Let's say we're heading in the direction of, okay, you're somebody who talks to people about building a team. That's where you are in the category. Great. Well, then you want to further position yourself among all the people who are helping other people to build a team. What is it that makes you different? Do you serve women entrepreneurs specifically? Do you serve first-time business owners or people who are seasoned entrepreneurs? Do you serve people who have a business that is SaaS, a software as a solution business versus a service-based business or a brick and mortar, right? A building somewhere where you have a retail shop. So making all of those decisions ultimately leads you to your position, your specific little GPS point in the broader category of what it is that you do. And the clearer you can be about your positioning and learning how to communicate that to others is really the core of any truly effective marketing approach.

SPEAKER_02 9:20

So what I hear is when I summarize summarize what you said, who you serve, why are you different, and what you're known for, basically. Positioning. Pretty much. Okay. Okay. All right. We got we got that. So I love freedom life. I always like to define words because not everybody has the same definition. So once we get into our questions, that way we can start on the even kill here. So let me ask you this question. A business is growing, right? So let's just say they went from $100,000 to a million dollars and their visibility is increasing by, you know, a hundredfolds. What pattern do you typically see in how they begin to stretch or adjust that positioning that could actually dilute their messaging, right? Because their messaging was good to get them enough to get a million dollars. Now they're like, ooh, I'm saying this, I'm saying that. What typically happens between those two phases of revenue?

SPEAKER_01 10:31

I think what tends to happen is, you know, I'm sure there's a psychological term for it, but I think it's a very common thing that we do as humans. And that is we're thinking about how to grow. We're thinking about how to reach more people with our service or our tool. We want to scale, right? That's the word. You're scaling up. So it's natural for a person to start thinking, okay, well, I need to reach more people. So I need to start getting out there to more places. I need to be all the places. I need to attract as many people as possible. And what ends up happening is that people start to be less specific. So we stop thinking about the details that we started with, those questions of who exactly do we serve? What exactly do we solve for them? What makes us different? It starts to get watered down in our attempt to reach more people and get bigger and bigger. And when you get more general with your marketing, you get more generic with your marketing. So I like to say that if you're trying to talk to everybody, you're going to connect with nobody. And again, it's a very natural impulse. You're thinking big numbers. Well, how do I get more and more people? I need to reach more and more people. But marketing is really a little counterintuitive in this way. When you get general, when you get generic, when you're trying to reach a little bit of everybody from everywhere, you end up watering those that messaging down, watering that position down, trying to be everything to everybody. And again, you end up connecting with almost nobody because your message becomes less powerful. Nobody can see themselves in your messaging when you do that. It's not clear anymore if you are the person for me that solves the problem that I have. So the reverse is actually true. When you want to grow and you want to scale, you get bigger by getting narrower. The more specific you are, the more clear you are about who you serve and what exactly you offer to help solve that problem, what makes you different from your competitors. It's the difference between trying to speak to, say, 100,000 people and attracting maybe 1% of them versus speaking to 10,000 people and attracting 50 to 70% of them, right? The narrower you get, the more you're going to have those connections and counterintuitively, the more people and more customers and clients you're going to have.

SPEAKER_02 12:49

Give me an example of something small in a company when they start to just move their positioning. Can you give me something relatable in a company that give an example of how that works, right? You have an example?

SPEAKER_01 13:06

Yeah. So I can tell you a little about it. I'll use an example of a client that we had. She was an executive coach, worked with a lot of really smart people, worked with people on leadership, building their leadership skills and being better leaders. And then she wanted to write a book. And the original idea for the book was very much about leadership in general, just being a good leader. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But if you look at Amazon, if you look at a bookstore, anywhere you go, right, there are thousands of books on leadership. I mean, literally thousands. So why is somebody going to buy your book on leadership? Why would they hire you to work with them compared to somebody else? So she thought, just as we're talking about, well, I have this small list and this small group of people, and I want to be better known and I want to have more visibility. So I'm going to write this book on leadership and it's going to be good for anybody, anybody who runs anything. Right. She pitched it to us as like, oh, well, if you're a church volunteer, if you run a business, if you run a household, anybody who's any kind of leadership position can benefit from these tools. And so in that way, she took that first step to what we were talking about earlier, becoming more general and more generic instead of focusing on the kind of people she actually worked with, which was executives in a very specific type of situation in very specific type of company. So, you know, we had to have those conversations to help lead her back to those things that make up her positioning that made her unique, that made her connect with her best clients in the first place and remind her those are the people you're writing the book for. We're going to help you reach more of those people, not more of just anybody, random people. And we don't want to reach anybody. They're not going to hire you. You want to reach more of the people you actually can help.

SPEAKER_02 14:54

What's the cost of drifting bigger instead of understanding who you serve, how you different, and what you're known for? What's the impact to a business if they go wide instead of going narrow? Well, it's very costly.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

Certainly it costs you in time and energy, right? Many people, most people were starting a business not with uh a million-dollar budget and a built-in team, right? Many of us are building it from something small and trying to grow it. You have a limited amount of time and energy as an entrepreneur and as a business leader, right? So where are you putting that time and energy? If you are frittering it away on what is essentially a waste of time, being broader and more watered down and more generic, that's time and energy you're not putting into the right things in your business. So you're going to lose that momentum. It costs money sometimes. Like again, talking about a book. You can publish that book. You can put that time and energy and money into writing and publishing and marketing that book. And maybe you spent anywhere between 10,000, 15, $20,000 to make that book, plus whatever else you're going to spend on trying to market it, right? And you're not going to get the results that you really wanted because you've lost sight of your positioning, because you've been trying to go too broad and too general. So it can be a financial cost as well. And I think worst of all is that when you confuse the market about who you are and what you do and who you serve, it's very hard to undo that. That gets out there into if you are successful about marketing yourself in the wrong way, you could conceivably have a situation where you've got dozens of podcast recordings and social posts and interviews and all this stuff that's out there, that's just confusing people. So even when you start to get it right, now you kind of have to fight upstream against your own, your own wave of kind of misinformation to get the right message out. So it can be very costly.

SPEAKER_02 17:00

Let me ask you this question. When we grow, right? And in we grow with the tight message, we understand who we serve, we understand what's how we are different. What is it because we're too busy to make sure that everything is the messaging that we're we're aligned? Is it because we get too busy and we're trying to do like 50 million things that we lose sight of what the company is doing? Or is it because oh, I'm growing, I'm a million dollars now, so I'm just gonna take it and just go and do this and try this, right? It it which one is it, or is it just a little bit of both?

SPEAKER_01 17:47

I do think it's a little bit of both. I think that uh I think that the the challenge of staying focused as a business is growing is real. We we've all been exposed to countless stories from very successful entrepreneurs. I think they all kind of tell this story. There's always some kind of inflection point where things start getting crazy and they got to bring in a fractional COO or full-time COO, depending on your business model, they got to bring in help. People start expanding their team to cope with it. So yeah, I do think that some of it is just a pure busyness problem and a difficulty in staying focused. But I do think that instinct, like I said, it's it's a very normal reaction because marketing is counterintuitive. But I think that that initial impulse, if nobody corrects it, you can just go too far down that rabbit hole, that initial impulse of I gotta grow, I gotta get bigger, I gotta start attracting tens of thousands of people instead of just a couple thousands of people that keep making my nut every month, right? And you just naturally start to think bigger means broader, but it it just doesn't, right? It's it's a it's a it's just a little misconception, a way that our brains trick us. We think it means broader, but we actually are more successful in marketing when we stay narrow and clear.

SPEAKER_02 19:10

And I always say this, you know, Apple, you think Apple advertises to everybody, but they actually don't. That's right. If you if you look at some of the bigger companies, yes, they have this big marketing and they get commercials and all that other stuff, but they're trying to reach a segment of the market that whatever segment that they want to reach, but we just as consumers don't realize that because everybody got an apple, right? Everybody got an apple. But they are positioning themselves, what whatever commercial that comes out, whatever video they turn out, they are positioning for a specific segment of that particular population. So let me ask you this question: what needs to change in how leaders think or decide during growth so they can protect their positioning and not dilute it? How do they do that at the start before they actually take off in scale?

SPEAKER_01 20:05

I think a lot of it comes down to having systems. What exactly those systems look like can vary a little bit. Uh, I am obviously very uh written word focused. So for me, it's a lot of documentation. Me too. Right? This is like actual print documents. Um, a lot of things where not just creating the document itself, but the investment of time you put into the research and the thinking and just putting all of that together creatively into ultimately what just looks like a clean statement, but being able to have something that serves as a touchstone, being able to build into your marketing systems, your outreach systems, your sales, your website, all of the things that you do, some central way to make sure everything is coming back to the same source material. So that could be a collection of documents that just describes who are our target clients are, what problem we solve for them, how are we different? I worked with a branding and marketing company recently for the first time, uh, hired some real professionals, which was very exciting for me. I think it's a real milestone moment uh in any business. And I now have a literal collection of documents that states, you know, what are the three to five things that make us different? Who exactly do we serve? What does an ideal client look like? What are they struggling with? What are they trying to do? How does what we offer solve those things? Like we're really laying it all out. And now my job and my team's job is to remember now that that exists, to come back to it. When I'm, I certainly rely on it when I'm writing content, blog posts, emails to clients, when I'm having conversations, when I'm doing these podcasts, right? Anything that I'm doing now, I'm reviewing those documents to refresh my own mind and making sure that I don't just come out here and talk about random general stuff. And I'm like, we're being really specific about the things that that we To communicate. And honestly, this is one of the reasons why I really love books. I think a book can be an incredible solution for people struggling with this problem. When you get to that place where you know you have a successful business, you've been around a while, you've been selling what you're selling, you've refined your offers, you've gotten clear about who you're working with, all that stuff is working good. If you've done well enough that you're at the point now to start thinking about growing and scaling, that is a time to think about whether or not a book would help you to do that. And it's not always the right answer. There are lots of different reasons why a book may or may not be the right tool for you in that moment or ever. But if it is, having that book is that literal touchstone. It becomes a physical artifact that you have in your business that you can hand to another person that encapsulates all the things we're talking about. This book is my flag in the sand about who I am and who I serve and what my company does and why we're different. And what are the unique things about our systems or our programs or our services, right? You put all of that into a book and then you have that thing now that you can refer back to. So the book itself becomes, I think, a really key tool in helping you to drift from your messaging. But also the journey to writing that book, I think, can help a lot of people get there. If you have not done the work to get clear about all those things in your business, when you sit down to write a book, you're gonna realize that very quickly and you're gonna have to correct that to write that good book. So sometimes that transformative process of writing the book is the thing that gives you the clarity to better position yourself.

SPEAKER_02 23:52

Exactly. And then also it's you might find gaps in your business. We're like, oh, wait a minute, we'd we'd haven't addressed this, or oh, yeah, we need to stop doing this. Yeah. Right? Yeah. If you're gonna sit down and write a book and like you say, give that book to your clients or even potential clients and say, Well, this is what we do. So I love that. And it keeps you honest. And also it helps you create content easily. You don't have to say, Oh, okay, so what are we gonna write about today? Right? Because you already know when you get clear on your positioning, I don't know about you, but ideas just start coming and you can and you can point out if you read a post on LinkedIn and be like, no, this is how this is what it is. You can you can see it clearly. So thank you for that, Allie. Let me ask you this question. If someone is struggling with this positioning, they may be seeing a little bit of growth, or they're listening to this podcast and they say, Let me put this in place before things get crazy. How would they do that? Would you suggest the first thing they should do, besides call you and be like, hey, Allie, I need you out?

SPEAKER_01 25:09

Yeah, I mean, certainly working with a consultant or a coach, you know, that can be a really great way. Sometimes you need someone who's outside, right? You know, you've heard that saying, like you can't read the label from inside the jar. Sometimes it is very helpful to have an outside person come and reflect things back to you. I've actually seen some really interesting AI tools that people are using that help, you know, they're pre-designed to walk you through questions that help you to get clear about. But however you do it, I think the first thing is a thought exercise. It's really sitting down and thinking about, okay, who have I been working with? Who are the clients that I've worked with that have gotten the best results? Who have been my favorite clients, right? Who have been the people that that really just got what we were doing, got dug in there, did the work, saw the results, like we're on board, we're here for the whole thing. Who are those people? What do those people have in common? Being really, really clear about the characteristics or the perspectives or the life scenarios, whatever's you know, relevant, everyone's business is different, but being able to be really, really clear about who those people are, that's really where it starts.

SPEAKER_02 26:16

Let me ask you this final question. And I forgot to ask it to you before. What about the employees in the company? How important is it to have one message coming from the top to the bottom so that everyone is aligned about, you know, what we're known for, who we serve, and why is it different?

SPEAKER_01 26:37

I think it's critical. I think it's critical for a number of different reasons. I mean, again, every business is a little bit different, like somebody who maybe has no actual client interaction, like maybe there's somebody in the back end somewhere working on something. Is it going to affect their day-to-day life as much as it affects the person who's writing the social content? No, probably not. But you still want to make sure everybody is clear about these things. I think in in the in the olden days, we used to call this a mission statement, right? People would always have a mission statement, and everybody in the company needed to be clear and know what that mission statement was. This is a a little bit more of a little more sophisticated version of that mission statement. And it matters because it informs everything that the company does, ways visible and invisible. The visible ways are the marketing, the copy, the website, where you choose to show up as a speaker, what kind of podcast you get on, all that type of stuff. That's the visible stuff. But even the invisible stuff, the company culture gets influenced by those answers. Who are we? Who do we serve? How are we different? And if everybody in the company doesn't understand those, then it may be that they're making decisions that are running contrary to some of that stuff. And again, you end up with people, clients who don't have a great experience. They come in with one set of expectations based on the marketing, then they're getting an experience that seems kind of different or out of alignment or less interesting. So I do think it's really essential that everybody be clear about what those things are, which just makes it even more important for the leader to be clear about what those things are. Because if you can't communicate it clearly to your team, you certainly can't blame them for not being able to do the same to your clients.

SPEAKER_02 28:24

Well, that should tell you right then and there, if you're not clear that, like, hey, wait a minute, I gotta let me slow down just a little bit so I can get clear on what we're doing here. Because, like you said, the cost could be enormous. Lost of clients and or just pretty much outside, you get out of the market. You're no longer uh relevant to the to the market itself.

SPEAKER_01 28:48

So I mean, think about advertising. Like we have so many different kinds of social platforms now and so many different kinds of places where you could be running ads. If you're not clear on who you're trying to reach, how do you decide where to put your ad money? You're gonna spend a lot of money really fast if you're trying to run ads on every platform, right? Just trying to attract people, right? Right. It's much better if you can pick, say, one or two platforms where you know my people are here and double down and invest your money there, you're gonna get better results than trying to sprinkle a little bit all over the place. Right.

SPEAKER_02 29:22

Especially when you're, you know, when you're starting up and you got limited funds, it's like, where do they go? So absolutely. So thank you for that, Ali. So let's talk a little bit more about your business and what you offer. Let's talk about don't write the wrong book. Tell, tell us a little bit about this online, free, on demand, free training.

SPEAKER_01 29:43

Yeah, don't write the wrong book. That is a speaking of positioning, a big piece of my positioning is, you know, I'm out here trying to make people understand that first of all, a book is absolutely an incredibly powerful tool for your business. It can be really powerful for you as the author, right? And we're talking about going through the journey of writing the book, but also having that book can be something you can really leverage to grow your business in a very tangible way. But first of all, a book is not the right tool for everybody. I don't believe that every business should have a book. Sometimes it's not the right tool for the job. Sometimes it's just not the right time in your business. Lots of reasons. But if a book is right for you, it still matters what the book is. So we talked earlier, you know, I mentioned you can have a book that is objectively a good book. It's well, right? Like the leadership books. We'll go back to that leadership book example. It's well written, good ideas, nice professional cover, everything done well. You put that book out there, it's one book in a sea of millions of leadership books. There's no way to distinguish it. It's going to be really hard to market it, it's going to be really hard to leverage it. It's not really going to attract the kind of opportunities and leads you wanted it to. Compare that to, say, uh a client of ours from a couple of years ago who's had enormous success. She wrote a leadership book for scientists and engineers, specifically. She's a scientist. She identified that in her world there are highly skilled technical people that get involved in these companies and eventually get promoted to being in leadership positions. Except no one's ever trained them on leadership because they're technically skilled people. They're software engineers, they're coders and they're builders and they're all these kinds of people. So that was her positioning. She wrote a book on leadership for scientists and engineers. That book was the right book for her and her business. And she's had incredible success from it, right? The generic leadership book that could have been written by anybody, good book, wrong book. So I say don't write the wrong book, meaning don't invest your time and energy in writing a book just because it's a good book. It has to be the right one, the one that's strategically designed and dialed in to not only who you are and what you offer and why you're different, all the things we're talking about, positioning, but also where you want to go with your business. What do you actually want to do with that book? The book has to be designed to get you those results. Because the way you write a book for, say, getting more speaking gigs versus trying to attract people to a workshop, it's going to be a little bit different.

SPEAKER_02 32:12

How important is it to have, because those questions you just asked, they're very good questions. How important is to understand, like, okay, I'm gonna write this book and I'm positioning it this in this way, and then how do I market it? Because don't you need to understand that before you actually write the book?

SPEAKER_01 32:31

Absolutely. That's why it's so important to write the right book and not the wrong one. And that's exactly what that training is all about. It walks people, it helps people understand what that really means so they can really internalize the idea. And then I walk them through a simple five-step process for how to analyze their current ideas to make sure that what they think is the right book is actually going to be the one that gets them the results they want.

SPEAKER_02 32:52

Well, I love this. Don't be the leadership book on the shelf with the sea of everything else. You should put something like that together. I don't know. Tell us about the author advantage mastermind that you have as well.

SPEAKER_01 33:05

Yeah. So the author advantage mastermind is something new that I'm working on. I'm so excited about it. It builds on these same ideas. So we have lots of folks out there. I've met so many people over the years that come to me having already written and published a book because everyone told them they needed one. They saw it everywhere. Oh, you should have a book, you should write a book, you need one, you need one. So they wrote the book, they published the book, and now it's just sitting there. It's just, it's in their email signature, it's in their Zoom background, gathering virtual dust. They're not doing anything with it. And so they're frustrated because they're not seeing all those magical opportunities and that return that everyone told them they were gonna get. So the mastermind is a small group program, four to six people. We meet uh twice a month for six months. And the idea is that I'm gonna help you identify one to two key strategies and opportunities for you to leverage your book, to grow your business in specific ways. And over the course of those six months, we're gonna support you while you take action and in uh enacting that strategic plan. So it's all about how to suck every last drop of juice out of that book that you work so hard and put so much time and money into publishing.

SPEAKER_02 34:14

Absolutely. And I love that. And thank you for offering that because you just know, like you said, there's people written books and they just kind of go by the wayside. So I'm glad that you're helping authors get back up and say, well, you know what, you wrote the book, let's let's leverage it, right? And go forward because you just need you need to focus and you just need a help like from Allie to say, hey, let's do this. Sometimes we need a little push to get us up and get us back on track. Talk about your library, because you have a library full of things, resources for people who's writing a book. So tell us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_01 34:53

Yeah, absolutely. Uh so part of this branding and marketing effort we went through a few months ago uh was to relaunch a brand new website. And on the website, we now have a resources library. We're very excited about, very proud of. It is chock full of free resources. So it contains our blog, of course, which has years of really great content in it. It also contains a whole bunch of videos. I've been on almost a hundred podcasts at this point. Uh they're not all on there, but some of the some of the top hits uh can be found there for easy access. We've got downloads available, we've got worksheets available, whole bunch of stuff all put together in one place for people who are trying to write the right book and find success with it.

SPEAKER_02 35:35

Well, thank you, Allie, for being on our show. And we will have this all listed on the show notes. Thank you because I think what you talked about is positioning. It's so important. These last couple of months, I've been talking about structure, putting structure in your business, make sure you have the right systems, who's doing what, what decision approvals and all that system stuff. But this is important too as well. Because if you don't have positioning, you don't have clients, what you need systems for? If you got nobody coming in. This is what the system supports. Right. Oh, I love that. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So thank you, Allie, for coming on our show and just letting us know you how to do this and how to do it properly. And also what you couldn't do, you don't necessarily always have to be on social media. You can write a book. So there's other options out there besides social media and and all the marketing and stuff on that. So, one last question. How can our listeners get in contact with you?

SPEAKER_01 36:38

Well, of course, they can go to our website at thewritersally.com and we're gonna include all those links in the show notes. Um, but we're gonna have a special URL for your listeners. It's offers the writersally.com backslash project confidence, uh, which will take you to that webinar, don't write the wrong book.

SPEAKER_02 36:55

Well, thank you, Allie. Again, we will have your information out there if you are struggling with this issue or positioning. And even if you just want to talk to Allie about gaps or things that she can help you with in this, because this is critical. I I can even tell you, I just kind of revamp my stuff too, a little bit, right? So it's it's extremely important. Please get in contact with her. And um thank you, Allie, for being on the Manage Your Project with Confidence podcast. Thank you so much for having me. This was fun. Before we end, take a moment to reflect on this. Why might the market be confused about what I offer or how my business operates?

SPEAKER_00 37:40

If this episode helped you see something more clearly about how your business is running, that's the work. Growth doesn't stall because you're not capable, it stalls when execution isn't clear or repeatable enough to support the next level. If you want more conversations like this, subscribe to Manage Your Projects with Confidence and share this episode with another woman business owner who's ready to stop guessing and start understanding what needs to change. And remember, scaling isn't accidental, it's intentional. You don't scale chaos, you scale what's clear, structured, and repeatable.