By: Andrea Mac | November 15, 2023

If you can only handle me in small doses:

I am obsessed with holiday gift guides. I could browse 1,000 of them for 1,000 hours. It feels like curated shopping. This one by Claire Perkins is a top contender so far this year.

I got a new planner today. Have you heard of the Full Focus Planner? Dude, they have a podcast with over 230+ episodes on planning, goal setting, productivity and focus. Basically, it’s early Christmas over here.

I tried to do a fun unboxing video for content’s sake and it was trash – I will not quit my day job.

Building Prequal #17: Building ALTAR: A Client Story

Last week, I held a revenue workshop with my team for a women’s co-working space that is way much more than a “co-working space.” It’s more of a one-of-a-kind of experience for those that want to live and work consciously.  You can read more about what that means here.

ALTAR is led by two inspiring and dedicated women named Kathy and Tia. They engaged Prequal to help them clarify their offers and design a path to greater profitability. Our primary objective with this engagement was to help the team explore all possible revenue options and determine which revenue streams to prioritize/launch.

Our engagement began as it typically does, with a deep dive into the business and its operations and by interviewing ALTAR's key stakeholders. This part of the process is necessary for peeking under the hood of a company and figuring out what’s working, what’s not, and what possibilities exist. It’s an honest, thorough analysis.

Kathy and Tia were committed to this process from Day One and have not been shy about expressing their excitement and gratitude for and about our work. Since Prequal's mission is to help women make more money, this engagement could not have aligned more with what we're focused on. Excitement all around is a goo starting point.

But to say it’s all sunshine and rainbows would be a little misleading.

Any conversations having to do with money can be challenging. As a growth strategist, sometimes I must deliver hard truths. In most client engagements, I ask during onboarding how comfortable my clients are with direct communication and feedback. I can be blunt.

Occasionally, during a revenue workshop, I will need to deliver a truth about a revenue stream that a client may be emotionally tied to. These conversations can sometimes serve as a reality check. A business can make money in many ways, so the revenue workshop is designed to bring clarity and find the most effective and sustainable path to profitability.

I ask anyone attending a revenue workshop to suspend preconceived notions before we begin the work. I’ve often seen something unexpected come out of this workshop – a revenue stream a team hadn’t considered, an acknowledgment that something a person has worked hard to cultivate just isn’t working. It’s a permission slip of sorts.

If generating money is the objective of this workshop (and it is), we let go of emotions tied to a particular offer. Instead, we take a mathematical approach and focus on the revenue streams (1) our clients are excited about, (2) are most feasible, and (3) are scalable. Surefire revenue paths can suddenly disappear when you put an idea through these criteria. The math usually doesn't mislead.

That’s what happened during ALTAR’s revenue workshop.

Kathy and Tia have created a space for women that their members describe as "magical" and "inspiring" and somewhere members can bring their whole selves to work. They have cultivated a fantastic group of women committed to seeing one another and ALTAR succeed. It’s inspiring, and that’s only a part of what’s needed to increase profitability.

As we worked through the workshop exercises, membership as a priority category slipped lower.  Despite being an obvious path to revenue before the workshop, it didn't emerge as a top contender. And when Kathy and Tia questioned the absence of membership, we considered,

“If membership was going to generate large sums of sustainable revenue, why hasn’t it already?”

As a warm-blooded-sometimes-occasional-capitalist and growth strategist, it's that realization that I typically point to help clients prepare for a change. To Kathy and Tia’s immense credit, they got it. We moved on to discuss the ideas that did rise to the top.

And to be clear, I didn’t suggest they scrap their membership program entirely. My recommendation wasn’t to abandon the community they built for the almighty dollar’s sake. But if the larger objective of our work together is revenue, we must be realistic and ruthless in pursuing profit. That doesn't mean altogether casting away ideas that haven’t worked well in the past. It means going forward, they will put more time and resources toward the money-making activities we identified.

Our next step for ALTAR is creating an implementation plan for the ideas that rose to the top. We’ll deliver Kathy and Tia plans, deadlines, metrics, and targets aligned with their revenue goals. The workshop allowed them to see a new path toward revenue and how that path, in the end, will better serve the community they’ve already built and are looking to grow. It’s a win-win for all involved.

Kathy and Tia, I am so grateful that Prequal has played a small part in this chapter of ALTAR. Thank you for letting us tell a bit of your story.

Rooting you on, always,

A.

PS - We’re in the process of creating a Prequal offering for this type of revenue workshop. If you’re interested, let me know. We’re considering all possibilities and would love to know if this type of work would help you or your company thrive. Notice, that I wasn’t overly direct and omitted the “Duh.”