There is something about writing these Sunday updates that makes me a little unhinged.
I spend the rest of the week being Professional Kate. Writing sensible things about high performance. Drawing on twenty years in elite sport. Occasionally citing research. Using words like ‘execution’.
Then Sunday comes around and apparently all bets are off.
Which explains both the slightly deranged AI generated image accompanying this post and some of the language I’m about to use.
More on the chocolate Labrador later.
Anyway.
Last Sunday I told you the score was still 3/20.
A week later, I can exclusively reveal:
It’s still 3/20.
At this point, the dramatic weekly score reveal may be losing some of its jeopardy.
I did say I’d tell you exactly what happened, even if it wasn’t going particularly well.
And this week, quite a lot happened.
Just not, irritatingly, the bit where people bought The Performance System.
I may have given myself a slightly ridiculous job.
This week, I sat down and got everything that is currently occupying space in my head out of it.
The Performance System. Lessons from the Touchline. The free masterclasses I want to create. Another business I’m building. Angela Reed, the furniture and interiors business my husband and I own, which is 145 years old and going through a period of significant change. A property project. Financial decisions. Children. School. Content. Exercise. The normal administrative nonsense of being a functioning adult!!!
I also did a big interview with The Times.
Sadly, nobody wanted my thoughts on high performance.
They wanted to talk about my childhood.
Cue the entirely unscheduled surge of pent up emotion afterwards. Excellent use of a working day.
Then on Thursday I did my first ever Substack Live!! Eek! Did you come and watch?
And somewhere amongst all of this, I’ve been trying to work out why The Performance System isn’t selling more quickly.
Which has resulted in me doing what I suspect quite a lot of us do when something isn’t working as quickly as we’d like.
Adding things.
Post on LinkedIn every day.
Create masterclasses.
Do more video.
Write more.
Try different platforms.
Change the messaging.
Look at the offer again.
Do more marketing.
Do more, basically.
Surely the answer to something not working quickly enough is to work harder at it?
And then Instagram decided to get involved.
Instagram, which has spent quite a lot of the past year behaving as though I no longer exist, suddenly sent a surge of people to my website.
Aha!
Traffic.
People clicking.
People actually making it to The Performance System.
Surely this was the moment.
Reader, it was not.
Nobody bought it.
Which brings me to this week’s considered, evidence based analysis:
WTF?
Annoyingly, it’s also useful information.
If nobody was clicking through, I could reasonably conclude that I’m not getting The Performance System in front of enough people, or that what I’m saying isn’t making them curious enough to find out more.
People did click, though.
They got there.
They looked.
And then they left.
So now I have a different question.
Why?
And, actually, I genuinely want your help with this.
I’ve spent two years building The Performance System. I know it inside out. I know what I mean when I describe it. I know what happens inside it. I know what people who’ve completed it have told me.
Which possibly makes me the least qualified person on earth to tell whether the sales page makes sense to somebody encountering it for the first time.
So I’m recruiting you (please and thank you).
Go and have a look at The Performance System.
Pretend you’ve never heard me explain it. Forget that you like me, if indeed you do.
Then come back here and tell me why you wouldn’t buy it.
Seriously.
Don’t be nice. Be useful.
I’ve even created the sort of rigorous customer research methodology you’d expect from someone who spent twenty years in high performance environments.
This is either an admirably transparent piece of customer research or a small business owner having a public breakdown.
We’ll see.
I realised something else this week, too.
I’ve been behaving as though I’ve spent an entire month trying to sell twenty places.
I haven’t.
I announced this challenge on 8 September on Linkedin!
And if I’m being completely honest, I didn’t really start pushing The Performance System until around the middle of the month on Substack.
So I’ve essentially given myself about two weeks to launch something, work out the messaging, create the content, learn what people respond to, send traffic to the page and sell twenty places.
Very reasonable. No notes.
This doesn’t mean I’m moving the goalposts.
I said twenty by the end of September.
The score is 3/20.
Unless something fairly spectacular happens over the next few days, I’m not going to hit it.
What I do need to be careful about is the story I tell myself about that number.
There’s a considerable difference between:
“This isn’t working.”
and
“I haven’t given this very long to work.”
And I suspect I’ve occasionally been treating the first as fact when the second is much closer to the truth.
Which brings me back to all those things I’ve been adding.
I know where that leads.
I’ve watched versions of it happen in professional sport.
A team isn’t performing, so everybody wants to fix it.
More meetings. More analysis. More training. More information. New ideas. Different tactics.
Some of those things might be exactly what’s needed.
The problem comes when you change so many things at once that you have absolutely no idea what made the difference.
Or when all the extra activity starts taking capacity away from the things that were working perfectly well in the first place.
Activity can feel remarkably similar to progress when you’re in the middle of it.
They’re not the same thing.
So I’ve stopped posting on LinkedIn every day. I tried it. My reach got worse rather than better. I’m going to post less and make the things I do publish worth reading.
I’m still creating the masterclasses, but I’m not going to rush them out simply because I publicly announced a target and September is disappearing.
I’m going to keep talking about The Performance System, keep showing people what the work actually looks like, and keep learning from what happens.
And rather than invent another seventeen things I could do to make people buy it, I’m going to ask the people who aren’t buying it why.
Which sounds painfully obvious when I write it down.
Most useful things do.
So.
3/20.
I’m still going for twenty because I said I would.
At the beginning of this experiment, though, I was looking at that number and asking:
What else can I do?
Now I’m asking two rather better questions:
What is the evidence actually telling me?
And:
Have I given this enough time to know?
Somewhat irritatingly, those are exactly the sort of questions I’d ask somebody going through The Performance System.
Turns out I might need to take my own programme.
PS. I don’t have a chocolate Labrador.
I asked AI to create an image that captured my week and it apparently decided the situation required one.
This is, frankly, the most intelligent thing AI has suggested to me all week.
I now want the dog more than I want the other seventeen sales.
Kate
Here’s one more try…Join The Performance System
I’ll be back next Sunday if I haven’t gone totally loopy to tell you whether I managed to scrape anyone in before the actual end of September.
