EIC: The origin story
How I ditched contract work and my coaching business to pursue my first love
On December 7, 2023, I sent this message to my Mailchimp list, announcing the launch of EIC. If you missed it—and love a good origin story—please read on.
Hello fellowbeings,
It’s been months since I last wrote you. In that time, much has changed.
Last December twenty-seventh—my forty-sixty birthday—I had a long talk with myself. About deliciousness. And money. I uncovered the thought that I couldn’t create financial abundance—or even financial stability—while doing what’s delicious to me.
I decided that my project, in the coming year, would be to revise that belief. To prove to myself that doing what’s delicious could promote financial abundance. Or at least co-exist with it.
At that time, for money, I was partnering with my husband, Geranium, on our Airbnbusiness, and working as a contractor for his cyclemobility company, Revolution. I was also participating in a six-month mastermind, 10K in 10 Hours, which was supposed to help me build a six-figure coaching business that I could run in ten hours a week.
How do you build a six-figure coaching business that you can run in ten hours a week?
You niche all the way down, i.e., get very specific about your offer and target audience, and automate your marketing—via funnels fed by Facebook ads. I decided to help coaches write self-help books to build their coaching businesses.
I created Facebook ads. I crafted lead magnets. I offered webinars. I wrote email sequences. I made landing and thank you pages. I built a funnel. I tried to convince myself that I could help my clients get their desired result (a published book, working as a marketing tool) via an online course—which would allow me to generate cash without doing much actual coaching.
Needless to say, while I was building my funnel, designing my program, etc., I was not making money as a coach.
In late March—March twenty-seventh, to be exact—I joined the Boom Boom Room, Serena Hicks’s money coaching program. I already knew I was on my way out of Revolution—I did appreciate the company’s mission—and I do love my husband!—but working for the company was not delicious to me. It was also a source of strife between us. I can’t count the number of times I dissolved into tears in a Google meeting with Geranium. As client and contractor, Revolution and I did not match.
However: I didn’t want to quit. Why? Because, on January eleventh, after Revolution had suffered a disastrous battery fire, and I had told Geranium I was leaving a conversation with him because of what I perceived as rudeness, he had sneered that this would be a perfect time for me to “run away.” I feared that if I did step away from Revolution, he would interpret my move as betrayal. So I stayed.
Then—on April fifth, about a week after I’d joined the Boom Boom Room, and started to question my belief that working by the hour, for somebody else, was the most secure way to make money—I had a meeting with Geranium about Revolution’s finances. (Though I was playing a number of different roles at the time, my main task was stewarding the money.) In this meeting, he expressed displeasure with how I was doing my job. He intimated that I might not be cut out for it.
At first, I was miffed—how dare he criticize me! (Also, I disagreed with his take on my performance: I thought I had done my darnedest to take care of the company’s money, but been foiled by his foibles.) But then, I realized his criticism was a gift: I was not happy working for Revolution. And now I was hearing that the head of the company was not happy with my performance. We agreed!
But did I dare leave? Wasn’t that super risky? How could I be sure I’d be able to replace my Revolution income, in a timely fashion?
That evening, I was going to a literary event with friends. I planned to check the mailbox on my way over to their house. I decided that if the mailbox contained a royalty check from She Writes Press (publisher of Mating in Captivity), I would take that as a sign that I ought to step away from Revolution. (The latest round of royalty checks had been issued at the end of March; mine was due to arrive any day.)
Guess what I found in the mailbox?
Not one but two checks!
One was the regular check, relating to sales of Mating in Captivity.
The other one—about five times larger—was for the extension of a film option. I hadn’t even known the option holder had chosen to extend.
The next day—April sixth—I gave notice.
The day after that—certain that the date April sixth must mean something—I poked around in my email account for clues. Had I stepped away from my essay-editing gig on that date in 2021? No, I had not. I’d done that on April ninth.
And then it dawned on me: April sixth was Tartan Day (a U.S. holiday honoring people of Scottish descent), and the anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath (a precursor of the American Declaration of Independence, in which a band of Scots declared that as long as there were one hundred of them left alive they would not submit to English rule).
In other words, April sixth was the perfect day to have declared my independence from a gig that had ceased to be delicious.
After stepping away from Revolution, I doubled down on our Airbnb, and my coaching business. Even though, while marketing my coaching business, I felt like I was throwing my voice.
That’s the term I kept using—“throwing my voice.” Meaning, pretending. Saying shit I didn’t believe. I did all kinds of thought work—and got all kinds of coached—on how what I was offering was indeed useful, not just to my prospective clients but also to their clients, and the living web.
Then—in June—I read a book called Regenerative Business, by Sam Garcia. Sam lives on Maui with her husband, a regenerative designer and farmer. In this book, she shows how you can cultivate a business that mimics, feeds, and respects the cycle of life.
Part of that cycle is death; during her book launch, Sam hosted a webinar called “Regenerative Death.” On the call, she told us to open our journals and ask ourselves, “What’s out of alignment in my business right now?” I.e., what needs to die?
I transcribed the question.
I waited a beat.
I knew the answer.
I didn’t want to write it down.
I did anyway.
Here it is:
“I don’t give a fuck about helping coaches write self-help books.”
Boom!
My desire to build my coaching business dissolved. Alongside my fantasy of being a six-figure coach.
Maybe a week or a few days later—the day before the summer solstice—I raised my hand for coaching in the Boom Boom Room. When Serena called on me, I spilled out my story of not giving a fuck. I was crying. She had me pause, and get still. She asked me what I really wanted to do but thought I couldn’t get paid for. Eyes closed, I saw, on my mental screen, one word: “COMPOSTING.”
I didn’t mean processing food scraps (though I do love, and practice, the alchemy of turning all things organic, including human poop, into black gold). I meant etheric composting—turning the stinky guck of experience into fertile soul-soil. Mainly via writing.
We went on to explore the range of absurd things people get paid for, e.g., farting in jars. And I realized that, back in spring 2021, when I’d stepped away from editing college application essays for money, I’d wanted—as my first choice—to generate abundant cash through writing. Then I’d looked around for writers consistently making six figures, discerned they were mostly churning out multiple genre titles per year, and decided I couldn’t do that. So I’d chosen to take up coaching—something I thought people would pay me for—and continue writing as an avocation.
Well, the truth was that after more than a year of making offers as a coach, coaching people, etc., I’d generated a grand total of $1,150—far less than I’d made in my career as a writer. Was coaching actually an easier way to make money? No.
By this time, the Airbnb—though not necessarily generating enough to cover my monthly nut—was coming pretty close. And I had a few thousand dollars saved up. So I decided to drop coaching and focus, for the next few months, on revising my novel, which I’d started in 2019 and which, as far as I could tell, was what the web of life most wanted from me. (During those next few months, I generated additional cash by helping a student with her college application essays, for $200 an hour, and claiming a refund for 2K for 2K, a business coaching program I was no longer using.)
I finished my revision, and sent it to my editor, on Thursday, November second (All Souls’ Day, according to the Catholics, and the two-year anniversary of the day I’d started coach training). Then I got work on my next project: a paid newsletter, on Substack, called Everything Is Compostable.
In this newsletter, I'm saying shit that scares me. More regularly than I have in many, many years. I'm breaching—and dismantling—the etheric electric fence I’ve raised around all the things I think I’m not supposed to talk about. Should you subscribe, you might be offended, shocked, challenged, enraged, intrigued—but you will not be bored.
I’m going on an adventure, fellowbeings.
I invite you to join me.