Define your style of consistency
Conventional advice in business is to be consistent, which means these "best practices":
One “signature” offer
Repeat your same launches over and over (and reuse your marketing assets)
A weekly email or podcast that goes out at the same time every day/week
Even having the same schedule every day
Now, I’m all about having deadlines that help you ship creative content and get out of the way of over-engineering.
I love routines that remove decision fatigue (”On Wednesdays, we wear pink”).
I love getting more efficient and leveraging assets you’ve built and systems you run.
And predictability in what you offer and how you communicate your message means that you become sticky in the minds of your fans and followers.
But, consistency can be sometimes… shall we say… boring? Or at least not achievable for your situation.
Maybe you get bored to tears with the same offer or same launches/challenges and you crave novelty.
Maybe you work within a cycle or a rhythm that changes over the week/month.
Maybe you run a seasonal business, or have a seasonal change to your schedule, like kids out of school for the summer.
It’s not about relentless, monotonous, and rigid consistency.
It’s about understanding the rhythms in your business - and what needs consistency at all.
What’s your business ecosystem?
Monica Leonelle and Russell Nohelty have developed a set of Author Ecosystems, outlining the different types of authors for fiction writing.
Their Deserts are all about market triage - seeing an opportunity and writing as many books as possible as quickly as possible to capitalize on an opportunity, without necessarily staying in the same genre or world at all.
Because Deserts are good at riding trends, they need to have a few different skill sets, including strong research skills, ability to produce quickly, and willingness to detach—both to double down on what’s working well, and to cut activity on anything that’s not working.
The Grasslands take an area and dive deeply, obsessively, and single-mindedly.
Because Grasslands are intense and obsessive about their chosen topic, they must stay focused to see the fruits of it. It does not serve them well to have multiple projects going at once because they don’t have the energy to devote to each one.”
The Tundras? They pop up intensely with a new, high-energy launch every so often, but usually within their genre.
Healthy Tundras have a firm understanding of their seasons and build safeguards to make sure there’s never a point of starvation. They also learn to connect their body of work—usually somewhat disparate projects—under one banner so that every launch offers a bigger feast on their backlist. Unhealthy Tundras struggle to create enough feast to get through the famine periods, leaving them burnt out and under-resourced before the next launch.
And the Forests and Aquatics are prolific world-builders, creating an immersive experience for their fans with product lines and merch that go far beyond books.
Healthy Aquatics survive by creating cool new things that both service their current audience and help them grow a larger audience. Unhealthy Aquatics create too many things with disparate audiences, spreading themselves too thin and losing momentum across everything.
All of these personality types are somewhat different - yet they all have their unique ways to be consistent.
The different requirements of "consistency"
But every one of these ecosystems requires consistency in some shape or form that is dependent on their ecosystem.
This can be varying consistency in what you offer AND then accordingly, how you market.
If you’re a Desert, staying highly aware of the market and on top of trends for triage is a requirement. And you must consistently ship these new projects and courses. Finding the shiny object and inconsistency is in fact the business model, and you’ve got to be committed to build quickly and monetize while the market is hot. Because if there’s no back end, recurring revenue, it’s important to drive this one-time revenue infusion (also, with a larger audience, because there’s no recurring sale).
There's an entrepreneur I follow who's always doing something new, and often first to market: from systems to teaching about VIP days to collabs last year and then micro-tools in 2024… you never know what she’ll be launching, but she’s always launching something new and quickly transitioning once the time has passed.
For the Tundras? You might have a new front-end offer or entry point to your work every season for novelty.. but the consistency is in having the discipline to plan out those seasonal pushes for when it makes sense for your schedule, and make sure they happen with real quality. You might not show up as regularly between launches (because launches take hella work), but when it’s time, you pour yourself into it.
Cohort-based courses are a clear example of this… tons of energy securing affiliates and planning for the launch with list-building, for an injection of revenue. And there’s often a front-end challenge that changes and meets the market where it is now. But skipping a launch or under-preparing? Will directly impact your revenue.
Or there's podcasts that are SO GOOD.... but come out on the schedule they come out on. What's consistent is the quality.
Forests and Aquatics get to play with what they offer and how! But the magic is in being consistent and focused in the world they are building. And they will want to launch new extensions to keep the energy high between projects without losing momentum by being disparate.
Forests might do lots of project work with the same clients or in a similar industry across clients, weaving in deep knowledge over a long period of time yet not having to be working on retainer and adapting to the seasons.
Friend of the newsletter Amelia Hruby's Off the Grid project is a great example of the Aquatic model. Off the Grid has a podcast, a learning platform (the Interweb), the Clubhouse on Substack, and stickers and a new Zine! And I don’t think there’s something they could launch in this vein that I wouldn’t buy, and the people I've met are amazing.
And Grasslands? Hi, it’s me. Showing up like clockwork every week and month in your inbox diving deeper on these business topics. I’m teaching something from a different angle each month with my free Deeper Business Dialogues and love the depth and evolution I get to see with my clients over the long term. You might love the consistency of doing similar client work each month, like podcast production or social media marketing.
Healthy Grasslands find fertile soil to take root in and grow the tallest, most epic tree in the garden. They also dedicate so much of their energy to one area that they become above reproach. Unhealthy Grasslands plant a lot of seeds but never gain momentum in any one area, and struggle to deliver on deadlines they’ve set for themselves.
What’s most important is knowing how you like to operate.
Understanding the balance between consistency and novelty, and clarifying the role the business plays in your life across money, time freedom, creative freedom, and responsibility to others.
Designing your business to meet that balance: your business model, financial model, product suite, and marketing approach.
And running your business accordingly.