By Becky Hancock
When the Job Search Ran Out
The idea didn’t arrive like a lightning bolt. It arrived like an ultimatum. I was deep in a job search that wasn’t going anywhere, watching the math on my bank account get less forgiving every week, and I had to face a fact I wasn’t thrilled about: if I wanted income again, I was probably headed back into entrepreneurship. I had already done this once before, and it hadn’t gone the way I wanted. So this time, before I let myself get excited about a niche or an offer or any of it, I made myself a promise. I was going to do this my way. On my terms. Industry standards be damned.
That promise mattered more than I realized at the time, because the very next thing I did was hire someone to tell me what to do.
Finding a Framework
I found a business coach who specialized in helping women launch new businesses, and I joined her group program for six months. That decision was the actual starting gun. Before that, I had an idea and a bad feeling in my stomach. After that, I had a sequence. She broke it down into steps that sound almost deceptively simple written out: decide on a niche you want to help. Do market research on that niche. Decide how you can best help them. Develop an offer that solves a real problem they have. Build that into a high ticket offer. Bring it to market using DMs on social media to build visibility. Sell the offer.
Reading that list is nothing. Living it is a year of your life.
The Power Tasks
I want to be honest about what “doing the work” actually looked like, because I think people hear “I built a business” and picture something more dramatic than the truth. The truth was repetition. I had what I started calling my power tasks, and I did them every single day whether I felt like it or not. Twice a week I posted something of real value on LinkedIn, not a status update, something that actually helped the person reading it. Every day I sent twenty-five connection requests. Every time someone accepted, I sent a welcome message, and if I didn’t hear back, I followed up again five days later. Then again. That was the job. Not glamorous, not exciting, just the same handful of actions performed on a loop for twelve months.
The Turning Point
For most of that year, nothing about the results matched the effort. I kept going anyway, because I had been told this is what works, and because quitting felt worse than showing up one more day. Somewhere around the one year mark, the compounding finally became visible. Sales started landing consistently, between eight and twelve thousand dollars a month, month over month. It didn’t happen in a single breakthrough moment. It happened because I had shown up enough times that the pipeline I’d been quietly filling for a year finally had enough people in it to convert on a regular basis.
Rejecting the Playbook
The harder part of this whole process, though, wasn’t the volume. It was the sales conversations themselves, and specifically, learning to reject the version of selling I was being coached to do.
The training I received was the standard high pressure playbook: solve every objection before it’s raised, stack bonuses so heavy the person can’t rationally say no, and never, ever accept a no as final. I understood why it works. I also hated doing it. It felt like I was performing a version of persuasion on someone instead of actually talking to them, and it didn’t sit right with who I wanted to be in my own business.
So I built my own version instead. When I got on a call with someone, I listened. I reflected back what they were actually feeling, the real hesitation underneath the polite hesitation. And instead of stacking bonuses or pushing for a yes on the spot, I’d say something like, “I don’t want you to make a decision right now. Please think about it overnight, and email me in the morning with your thoughts.” That was it. No countdown, no urgency manufactured out of nothing.
What Actually Built the Trust
What I found is that trust doesn’t come from cornering someone into a yes. It comes from being willing to let them say no and still respecting them. Giving people room to think overnight told them I actually believed in what I was offering enough to survive a night of their honest reflection. That trust is what turned into sales, again and again, in a way that felt sustainable instead of extractive.
The Road I Found
Looking back, the framework I was given got me from idea to launch. The niche, the research, the offer, the DMs, the daily discipline of the power tasks, all of that was necessary and I don’t think I would have gotten anywhere without it. But the part of the business that actually feels like mine, the part I’m proud of, is the piece I built by refusing to do it exactly the way I was told. I followed the map until I hit the one turn that didn’t feel like me, and then I found my own road from there.
I didn’t have a dramatic origin story. I had a year of showing up, a coach who gave me structure, and a decision to sell the way I wanted to be sold to. That was enough.
Have a similar idea you’re sitting on? Follow along for more of the process, or reach out and tell me where you’re stuck.