Building a Business That Supports Your Life: Community, Cash Flow & Knowing Your Numbers with Daria Astanaeva | Ep 195

What made you realize you needed to pivot? Because I know like a lot of us, for example, for myself, like I started my business in tax, but I knew that wasn't what I wanted to do.

But it took me so long to like pivot and like let go because of the fear.

So was it easy for you to like pivot and like let go of that version of you?

I would say one thing that I do really appreciate about myself is that I am very quick executor and I can very quickly identify when the path I'm on is no longer one that works for me.

However, so my agency existed before March, but it was a content creation agency where we were just focusing on creating content.

My thought process came around December, January, where when I was reflecting on all of the data and how much money we made over 2025, what did it look like? What was our cost breakdown? It took me a minute to realize that for me to make, let's say, $50,000 a month, $100,000 a month, I would need to have a lot of fucking clients.

And it's not really something that I can manage because our content packages, they were pretty small.

Our content packages, they were ranging somewhere between like $1,000 to $3,000, which is a lot of work to get $100,000 a month.

And then I calculated how many team members I would actually need to have full-time, some of them part-time.

in order for me to make that hundred thousand dollars and then I ended up with like margins so slim it made zero sense for me to do it this way because With me building a business with this agency, I don't want to just for it to sound good.

I need it to actually look good on paper because it's one thing for me to say, oh my God, I need like $35,000 in months.

But what is the actual money that I'm walking away with? And I've had full transparency been in situations before with my previous business model where On paper, I made $15,000, but like when the actual money you're looking at, you're like, oh shit, I made 1500 bucks.

Like I'm sure they're like easy.

Yeah, exactly.

They were easier ways for me to make 1500 bucks and just like slaving away for an entire month, you know? So that's when I realized that the content creation business model doesn't really work for me.

And then when I also reflected on my own zone of genius and what I actually like to do, I'm not actually that good at content.

I'm really good at sales because I feel like content is truly an incredible skill, but I also feel like anybody can get pretty good at content if they just continue to show up for the next six months, one year, but it's like the sales component that feels sticky to a lot of people where we have beliefs that we suck at sales that nobody will buy but then it's just a process of pulling in the leads and you know asking the right questions and framing the launch in a way that's actually going to be exciting so it was like well this is actually something that i want to do so um from january to march it took i took some time away So I went home, spent some time with the family.

And then when I came back, I was just like brewing away this offer and like what it's going to look like, what this like pivot is going to look like.

And then I feel like within like two weeks, this clarity.

just came to me in the middle while I was showering, you know,

because that's where all the best ideas come from.

Truly.

And I was like, oh shit, no, I like, I want to go all in on the sales part.

And so we switched all of our offers.

We now actually only have one service.