What used to grow my business isn't working the same way anymore, and chances are you're feeling something similar. Things have shifted dramatically for small business owners, especially over the last year or two, and it feels like the market is just constantly shifting under my feet.

Tried and true tactics that I used to be able to depend on regularly, consistently, are no longer generating the results that they used to. And that leads to traffic slowing down. Referrals are a little slower. Sales are taking longer.

And when we start to see things slow down, it's really easy to hit the panic button and feel like the answer is to pivot, to blow everything up in your business and start over. Well, before you hit the blow-it-up button, I want you to hang in there with me today, because I actually wanna walk you through some of my own decisions as I am navigating this right alongside you.

I am seeing the same shifts that you are seeing, but because of the 90 Day CEO Operating System framework that I run my business by, I don't have to completely pivot. I just need to adapt and adjust to what's real, to what's actually happening in the market and how it is impacting my business.

So over the next few episodes, I want to share behind the scenes a real adjustment I'm making in my own business here at The CEO Collective right now, run through the same exact planning framework that I teach.

This series is This Is Not a Pivot. You don't need to jump ship. You just need to learn how to turn it and course correct.

Why Lagging Metrics Push Us Into Panic Mode

Hey there, CEO. Racheal Cook here, founder of The CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast. I've been wanting to have this conversation and take you behind the scenes in my own business, because I know that I am not alone in this. What used to grow my business just isn't working the same way anymore.

I recently surveyed all of my clients to see what are the big concerns that they are currently having for their small businesses, and hands down, some of the biggest concerns people are having is the fact that it seems like sales are slowing down. Revenue is not what they had projected. Conversion rates are not as good as they used to be.

They're getting fewer people to say yes. People are taking longer to make a buying decision, and overall, inquiries seem to be down. And those things are happening despite the tried and true tactics that are still in play.

This happens sometimes, right? The market shifts. The way everything works gets shaken up a little bit. And unfortunately, if all we're paying attention to is the moment that it hits revenue, if all we're paying attention to is the sales coming in this month, the clients saying yes this month, the inquiries coming in this month, then we are just looking at the lagging metric.

We are looking at the result of something happening further upstream in our client growth engine. And I wanted to dig into this, because I think when all we see is the moment that it either does or doesn't become revenue, it does or doesn't become a new client, then when things slow down or when things stop working as well, we hit the panic button. Especially if you need that revenue, right?

If you really needed those clients to come in, you really needed that money to hit your bank account, that is when it is so easy to start going into panic mode and feeling like, "I have got to pivot. I've got to drop my prices. I've gotta come up with a new offer. I've gotta throw everything out and start all over again."

If you're feeling that way, I want you to breathe and know that there's something else happening upstream that we need to hone in on here and pay attention to. Because when the market shifts like this, if all we're doing is going back to throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks, we are going to waste a lot of time and energy just guessing, instead of being able to very strategically look at our business and tweak one or two things to make an adjustment and to make an improvement.

So we aren't going to panic pivot, okay? We are going to press pause, and we are going to get curious. Because if the only data we are collecting right now is the lagging data (sales, new clients acquired, revenue), then we are missing the bigger picture. We can't tell what has shifted or changed and what we need to do to adapt and adjust yet.

Start With How Your Last 10 Clients Found You

We have to get curious first. So the first thing I recommend everyone do is look at your last 10 clients. How did they discover you? This is a data point that every single small business owner needs to be tracking.

I track this in multiple places. I track this when people book a call to learn more about working with us at The CEO Collective. They can select how they discovered us. This is part of their intake questionnaire.

I'm asking people all the time. I don't want to just assume that my marketing is working. I wanna know how they first discovered me.

And this is going to be helpful not only to let you know what is actually working, but over time, this data point will let you know if something is shifting. And that is also incredibly important, because like I said at the top of this, what used to work in my business isn't working the same way, and this was the data point that I was seeing shift.

When AI Search Started Showing Up on My Intake Form

I was seeing that more and more people were starting to come to me from AI search. If you have ever listened to me describe my client growth engine in the past, then you know for a very long time, for over a decade, my biggest attract strategy was getting in front of other people's audiences and doing podcast interviews.

I had a team pitching me so that I could have two to three interviews a month, and that was on top of producing this weekly show for everyone. And that was one of the best ways that I was generating interest and helping people discover me and move into my ecosystem, right? Continue to learn about me, continue to learn about working together in The CEO Collective or any of the other offers that I have.

And when I had to really put a lot of stuff on the back burner so I could take care of my mom the other year, I had to put that on the back burner too. So I shifted my core attract strategy, because it took so much time and energy on my part, and I redeployed those dollars.

Instead of hiring an agency to pitch me, I hired someone to run my ads and to help me with a way to get in front of folks that didn't require a ton of my time, energy, and attention. They were gonna run the advertising.

And that was working. We were seeing people coming in through ads. I could tell it was working because we tracked that data point.

But over the last, really, four-ish months, I saw an uptick in inquiries. And what was interesting is, as that uptick in inquiries was coming in, it was coming in from people who were selecting that they had discovered me on AI search.

They were sharing how long they had followed me: just learned about you. And about half of them went on to say yes to working with me inside of The CEO Collective within just a couple weeks of having that conversation. So that totally blew up any assumptions I might have had about how long it takes somebody to make a buying decision.

It turns out the people who were discovering me because of AI search were very high-intent buyers. And I went back and asked several of them, "Okay, tell me more about what was actually happening when you learned my name." And they were telling me the conversation they were having inside of ChatGPT or Claude that helped them to find me and then to reach out to have a conversation with me.

It was so interesting and so eye-opening, but it also started to alert me that I needed to get curious about this, that I needed to figure out where I might need to make some changes.

Surveying Our Clients to See the Bigger Picture

So knowing that we were seeing this shift was a really important data point, but we wanted to dig in a little bit deeper and understand the bigger picture for what is happening for my community and for my clients. So we decided to put together a survey for our paid clients. This was going to go out to my current and past clients who were a part of The CEO Collective and the CEO Retreat.

There were a few different questions we asked in this. We were looking to get 100 responses, and we did offer an incentive. We offered that if you completed the survey, we'd send you a copy of our 90 Day CEO Planner.

So yes, I did spend money on making sure that we were gonna get enough results from this survey, because if you've ever done any sort of survey type of research before, you know you need a certain volume in order to get useful data. And so we wanted to get at least 100 results here so that we could see what the patterns were and what was changing for my community.

So that survey was really interesting, because once we pulled that together, we started to see some really strong patterns emerge. And those patterns helped us to see what needed to be addressed in my marketing, both to help improve conversion rates, so what would help people say yes to joining us, but also what I needed to tweak in each part of my client growth engine.

So now I was no longer guessing. Now, because I had this data in front of me, I could more clearly see what the changes needed to be in the business.

Adjusting for Leads Who Find Me Through AI Search

The first adjustment I started to make was around the fact that my lead source had changed. People were discovering me more and more through AI search.

Now, I'll be the first to say I am not an expert on AI search. I don't really understand 100% how it works, but apparently it is working. My hypothesis is that the reason I am showing up on AI search has a lot to do with my body of work.

I mean, I've got over a decade of having a podcast. I've been creating content for that long, all of the interviews I've done, like hundreds and hundreds of interviews. So there is plenty of information about me out there on these internets, and AI has scraped it all up and created a profile on me.

So now when people are going in and talking to their chat or to their Claude, it is sharing The CEO Collective, the CEO Retreat, Racheal Cook as, "Here's who you should go work with." But what I'm starting to see is that also means these folks are not as familiar with me as people who are coming from a different attract source.

So remember I shared that in the past, what was working for me really well was doing podcast interviews, other people's audiences. And the difference here was somebody was listening to me for a half hour to an hour, and then going to get content from me and listening to my podcast for several more hours.

So by the time they were learning about The CEO Collective or maybe jumping on a call with me, they already had a pretty good understanding of who I am, how I work, if this was for them or not, because they had really been warmed up by a lot of content. Well, what I was seeing with AI search was that timeline was collapsing.

People were coming in a little colder, so they weren't as familiar with my work, and I needed to make sure that everything from the moment they landed on my site was what they needed next.

I discovered really quickly that some of the people who were finding me because of AI search were finding a workshop that was listed on my website that was outdated. That was a big, like, "Oops. Okay, you actually heard about a version of The CEO Collective from several years ago, and we've changed it since then." So I had to take that down and make sure that that was no longer gonna be shared via search.

Better Intake Questions and Pre-Consult Education

And then I needed to make sure I was making any tweaks in the sales process. So if they were landing on theceocollective.com, I wanted to make sure the sales page was absolutely up to date, the FAQs were up to date.

If they were booking a call, I wanted to make sure I had enough intake questions so that I knew before the call that they were coming from AI search. This was also another big shift.

In the past, I wouldn't have asked so many questions in the book-a-call-with-me form. But I needed to have more context. I need a little bit more data. And the biggest reason for that is because I know there's a difference between somebody who's listened to me for forever and someone who's just finding me.

The people who are just finding me, if they're selecting that they've discovered me through AI search, now I know to send them what I call pre-consult education. This is something we teach inside of The CEO Collective, but basically it is content that I'm gonna send to them prior to our call that gives them a bit more context, helps them understand who I am, what we do, get some case studies, answer some of the big questions.

Is some of this information available on the website? Yes. But we never assume that people have read the website head to toe, and I wanna make sure that if they did find me in this way, before we have a conversation, they've gotten a little bit more context before making a buying decision.

So that helped me really clearly see that AI search is a very viable option here. It's a very viable source of leads. Seeing that people who are finding me this way are booking a call and making a buying decision within just a couple of weeks is opposite what I'm seeing from a lot of other sources, which was really fascinating. It just meant that I needed to make sure that everything was tightened up so that experience would be as seamless as it possibly could be.

Now, is there an opportunity here for me? Yes. I need to figure out how the hell AI search actually works and how they're showing me. That is something I have on my list to figure out, but I was able to go ahead and optimize for the part of the process I knew they were already engaging in.

Why More Content Is Not the Answer to AI Slop

Now, another thing that we started to see as we were getting this data, as we were doing our survey, is additional changes that are happening in the market that are impacting my business, just like they're impacting yours.

One thing that we are also seeing is the impact of AI slop, and I'm sure you are seeing this and probably getting just as tired of it as I am. It is really interesting, because some people have really highly attuned AI radar. It's so funny.

We were just in New York City, and we were at dinner with my kids, and my daughter just kind of went, "Ugh, this music is AI." And I said, "What?" And she said, "No, Mom, it totally is."

And so there's a feature on your iPhone where you can ask Siri, "What is this song?" and it will listen to it and then tell you what the song is. And sure enough, it was an AI musician. I had no idea how she figured that out.

But the AI slop is out there in so many ways. Definitely some is super obvious, some is not so much. But what's happening right now is we are just watching things get flooded with garbage, and that means that, unfortunately, more content is not necessarily the answer.

And I think this was the play for a really long time, was to simply pump out more content. That was the answer that a lot of us were given. Just share more content.

The challenge is, when there's AI slop, when there's so much content out there, when people are just wading through it, it means a lot of people are just going for more, hoping that they're going to be able to put out more content faster than AI can. And you just can't.

So if you can't do the volume play, if you can't go on quantity, especially quantity of AI-generated content, what's on the other side of that? What is the shift? I think it is really leaning into more quality, and quality is all about being incredibly relevant, about talking directly to your ideal client, and leaning on the things that make you different.

Voice of Customer Research and Differentiation

One of the things that we have been doing behind the scenes is, in addition to our survey, we do a lot of voice of customer research. And we have a huge document that breaks down our ideal customer, that breaks down the voice of customer, the language that they're using, the pain points that they're sharing with us, that informs a lot of the marketing that we do here at The CEO Collective.

And in fact, it's so powerful, this is something I'm building for each and every one of my members inside of The CEO Collective. We're doing some of this voice of customer research.

Because AI has made everything so generic and made everything sound the same, if you are not speaking the actual language of the people you want to buy your stuff, then they are not gonna understand, right? There's gonna be a huge disconnect.

So we need to make sure we're really clear on what our ideal clients are actually saying, what they're actually wanting, where they're actually stuck, what their specific pain points are, what is getting them to take action, because we wanna make sure everything we are creating is as relevant as possible.

And so that voice of customer research really needs to be constantly updated as things evolve, and I think this is another really important thing. A lot of times people think ideal client research is something you do once and you never think about. Great marketers know that you need to be constantly refining this, because the clients you had a couple years ago might have changed.

Your client base might have made some changes over time, and if you're not aware of it, you might find yourself wondering why people aren't responding to your messaging, or maybe you're just not getting clients who are the best fit.

We cross-referenced our survey results with years of intake forms and a lot of other data we have about our clients, and that helped us really see that our client has changed. It has evolved. She has gotten more sophisticated, and that now informs the type of content that we are going to be creating. I'm able to create more relevant content because I've done this in-depth customer research.

We've also done a lot of research in differentiation for The CEO Collective, and how does it stand out, how is it different from other programs that people might have taken? This is also something that I'm doing with a lot of my clients.

I want them to make sure that when a potential client is looking at your business, they understand what makes you unique, what makes you stand out, what you are doing that no one else does. And I think this is another step that can be really hard sometimes to see, but once you're clear about what helps you stand out, then you no longer blend into that kind of sea of sameness that a lot of AI-generated content is going to create.

Point of View, Stories, and Being More You

Remember, AI is all about finding what is the average of everything. So if you're focused on AI-generated content, it is going to sound like everything else.

If you're wanting to stand out, you wanna be really clear about what makes you stand out. And what's honestly gonna make you stand out more than anything is gonna be, one, having a point of view. It's gonna be having real opinions and being willing to plant a flag somewhere. You have to take a stand somewhere.

You need to have your stories and be ready to incorporate storytelling into your business, because stories are how humans engage and connect, and AI can't create my stories, right? Only I can share my stories. Only I can share my experiences.

We also are seeing that you're just gonna have to lean into being more you, more authentic. I think the pendulum has swung the other way a little bit, because for a long time there was this push for everything to be so polished and so beautiful and so professional and so aesthetic. And now, I think because that went too far, and then AI had filters and everything else has just... People wanna know what's real again.

So being more you, being more authentic, bringing you back into your business is only gonna serve you, and we are seeing that already.

Bringing Short-Form Video Back

I'm also seeing in my business, in addition to focusing on the quality, right, focusing on what the things are that only I can say and do to stand out, is we're also leaning into some of the shifts and trends that we are seeing.

So years ago, I had gone all in on TikTok and short-form video. I had to put it on the back burner when I was taking care of Mom. But I found that that was a great platform for me, right? TikTok was a great platform for me. I had people who were discovering me and signing up to work with me in a couple of weeks.

It built that know, like, and trust really, really quickly for me. So that discovery engine was a huge win. I just didn't have capacity for it for a while.

Well, now we're seeing the discovery engine is pretty much standard on other platforms. It's not just TikTok that is creating discoverable content. Now Reels and trial Reels are creating more discoverable content. So I'm gonna be doing some experiments over there as well.

You've probably seen that I've started to publish a little bit more on my Instagram and my Facebook, and I'm still testing out a lot of things. That is still an experiment right now, but I'm betting that what is going to work is going to be things that are more off the cuff, a little bit more in the moment.

In the past, I actually did full-on video shoots where I would hire a videographer, and I'd have a whole production around it. I think what we're gonna see now is a little bit more in the moment is gonna work really well, and I'm experimenting with that.

Am I saying everyone needs to experiment with that? Nope. There are plenty of clients that I have who I would never recommend focus on short-form video.

For my business, I know it is a format that works really well. I know that I need to tweak and change how I'm doing it a little bit, and I have to do it within the constraints that I have so that it's actually sustainable long term. But that is a change that I am making in my marketing, is leaning more into short-form video and doing some experimentation around that.

Running Ads to a Paid Offer Instead of a Free One

The other thing that has shifted behind the scenes in my business as the market has shifted is around ads. Now, I shared with you that I switched from doing a ton of interviews to ads mainly because it was a capacity issue, right? I didn't have the time or energy, or even a consistent schedule, to show up for two or three interviews a month.

I needed something that didn't require my time and energy. So I redeployed those dollars to hiring Gabi Day and having her at Hype MA'AM run our ads. So for the last 18 or 20-ish months, this has been the longest stretch I've consistently run ads on Facebook and Instagram.

I have run ads ever since Facebook made ads an opportunity, and in the early days, I can tell you, it literally did feel like printing money because it was so cheap. Before people all got into Facebook ads, it was so inexpensive to get traffic and send it to your free resource, your free training, your free webinar, your free workshop, your free challenge. And I did that for years and years and years. It was a great way to build my audience.

But at some point, that shifted, right? As ads got more expensive, suddenly I wasn't just paying 10 cents or 50 cents for somebody to sign up for a free thing. Now I could be paying $10 for somebody to sign up for that free thing. So the economics of it no longer made sense.

So we started running some different experiments here. And one of the experiments we ran this year was around offering a paid offer upfront to ads instead of just a free offer.

So we created the Get Paid Calculator, a tool that I have available where you can figure out what you want your actual CEO salary to be, and then it helps you reverse engineer the revenue goal to support that CEO salary, the sales goals in order to support that revenue goal, mapping out what your launch plans need to be, every single step of that, so you have a full projection of what your revenue should be looking like in order to pay you what you want to be paid.

And that experiment worked really well. It was the first time I'd ever had ads that paid for themselves right away. And that became really helpful for me to see, because if sales cycles are slowing down, I can't afford to run ads to something for free that doesn't pay off for months and months and months, right?

I have to figure out, either is there a way to shorten my sales cycle, or is there a way to just get people who are more likely to buy into my ecosystem? And that's where having more of these smaller paid offers comes in. So those are still things that we are experimenting with when it comes to ads in the business.

How to Diagnose What Needs to Change in Your Business

Okay, we just did a big deep dive under the hood of my business. I shared a lot of my thought process and how I am making those tweaks and adjustments. But I wanna make sure that, one, you know and keep in mind that this is for my business. This is not gonna be the same for your business. You have to go through this process yourself, and that's really what I want you to take away.

I want you to use this thought process I just shared with you to identify and diagnose where in your own business things need to be adjusted. So if what used to work isn't working, if the market has shifted somehow, and it's showing up in your lagging metrics, it's showing up because inquiries are down, conversion rates are down, people are taking longer to make decisions, people are having a lot more questions, then we need to look upstream, okay?

We need to get curious, we need to press pause, and we need to look at who's in front of us. Look at your last 10 clients. Where did they come from?

If you're not tracking this information, start tracking it. Put a question on your intake form when they sign on to work with you: "How did you hear about us?" If you're doing consult calls, make sure there's a question there: "How did you hear about us?"

You need to collect this information. It is the most important information any small business owner can collect, because it truly will tell you whether or not your marketing is working.

Now, if your last 10 clients are still coming from the same source, but it's a volume issue, then how proactive are you being to get those people in the door? For example, if it's referrals, if you primarily live on referrals, referrals are the lifeblood of your business, have you been proactively asking for referrals? Have you been proactively creating referral opportunities?

If the volume is still there, and you're not seeing the results, then maybe something else needs to change further in the system, right? If you have just as many referrals coming in, but not as many of them are saying yes, where do you need to answer your questions better? Where do you need to put in place a pre-consult education? What else needs to happen in order to make that work?

And if your source has changed, though, like mine did when I shared with you that now AI search is increasing in the number of people finding me, what needs to change in order to make sure that is going to work for your business?

I shared with you that in my business, people were discovering me via AI search. High intent, a good number of them did convert, but some of them were finding an old webinar with outdated information, so I needed to take that down. I needed to make sure that what they were finding was up to date and accurate, and I needed to update my sales page with all the questions they could possibly have.

I needed to make sure that the request for a call with me had better questions on it, so that I could figure out if they needed more context and information before a call and send out that pre-consult information. All of that was hugely helpful, right? Just by understanding that, of my last 10 clients, more of them are coming from this source, I wanna optimize for that.

I'm also going to get curious around what else is happening for my clients. I'm sending out that survey. I am asking, what is the biggest challenge you're having right now? What is the biggest frustration you're having right now? What is not working in your business right now? What is working in your business right now?

Talking to your people is the only way to truly have your finger on the pulse of what they care about. And if you don't know what they care about right now, you're not gonna be able to stay relevant. And if you can't stay relevant, and you can't speak directly to your ideal client, then people aren't gonna convert, right?

So talk to your clients. That is going to always, always, always pay off.

Making Adjustments From Facts, Not Feelings

Okay, CEO, I hope this episode was helpful for you. I know it was a big one, deep diving into the very scary, dark corners of how my brain works. But I have to tell you that learning how to diagnose problems in your business and learning how to make adjustments from facts, not just feelings, is one of the biggest CEO skill sets we all need to be honing.

It is not always easy, because when we see sales slow down and we still have to pay the bills next month, I completely understand how easy it is to feel like you need to panic, you need to pivot, you need to slash prices, you need to have a big flash sale or something. You don't need to do that. We just need to make sure that we have line of sight into what's actually happening in our business.

That's exactly what the 90 Day CEO Operating System truly is. It's helping you understand how your business operates, so that when you start seeing a change in one area, you can quickly reverse engineer and diagnose what's actually happening. And that is such an empowered place to be, when you're able to see those changes before they become massive issues.

So if you enjoyed this, if you got something out of this, come talk with me on Instagram @racheal.cook. Let me know if you did your last 10 clients exercise, if you're sending a survey, what tweaks and adjustments you are making. I'm gonna be sharing a lot more about how I am thinking and making plans for my own business going into 2027.

There's a lot on my mind right now. There's a lot that's gonna stay the same. We're still gonna have The CEO Collective. We're still gonna run the CEO Retreat. These are the foundational building blocks of my business. We're still gonna have this podcast. But I'm always having to adapt and adjust as the world evolves, right? As things are changing.

And I want to take you along with me on this journey so that you can see that just because something changes doesn't mean you have to burn down the whole business. You absolutely don't. Hang in there. We can figure it out. The first step, though, is getting that data and starting to become more comfortable with understanding how your business actually works.

All right. I'll see you in the next episode.