The Recipe That Got You Here Won't Get You There
Before I left my corporate career at Boeing, I went through a serious cupcake phase. What began as a fun hobby eventually became a real business called When Cookie Met Cupcake.
If you know anything about cupcakes, you know the cake matters, but for me, the icing is everything. In the beginning, I was working entirely from other people's recipes. The one I was handed in my decorating classes or the ones I found published in books and online.
They were fine. They got the job done initially, but I kept feeling like I could make them more my own. After all, the recipes I was working with were everyone else's, not mine.
So, I started experimenting. I ran taste tests with trusted people to see what landed and what didn't, and I married their honest feedback with my own growing expertise. I knew I wanted an icing that was easily pipeable and spreadable. It also needed to be creamy, delicious, and not too sweet. It took countless batches, but eventually I developed my own classic vanilla bean buttercream. That icing became my signature. People still ask me for the recipe to this day, and no, I still don't share it, because it became truly, distinctly mine. I eventually ran that same process for my vanilla cake and my signature sugar cookie. The borrowed recipes got me started, but it was my own recipes that built the business and helped it grow.
Most of us build our businesses on borrowed recipes
Almost all of us build our businesses the same way I started baking. We borrow. We follow someone else’s proven framework, adopt their offer structure, or model our growth on what worked for somebody we admire.
Many of us took the courses and programs from celebrity entrepreneurs like Amy Porterfield, Marie Forleo, Jenna Kutcher, and those courses gave us structure and language and a path to follow when we needed one. There is nothing wrong with that. After all, you don't need to experiment with a bunch of ingredients when you’re first learning to bake.
But almost every single founder I work with has been at this for a while, and I’m guessing you’re the same.
You’re no longer a beginner. You have decades of experience, hard-won expertise, and a point of view that has been shaped by everything you've built and navigated and learned over the years. As your business grows, and as the environment around you changes, the methods and approaches that once served you have to evolve, too. We've seen that in spades over the last year or two, and at some point, the borrowed framework that worked so well in the beginning starts to feel wrong.
The grindy feeling that tells you something is off
I think of it like the cupcakes that don't quite rise, or the ones that start to sink the moment you pull them out of the oven. They still technically work. You can still frost them and serve them, but they're not the exact, beautifully domed cupcakes you were actually going for. Something underneath isn't quite right, and no amount of frosting fixes what's happening when the cake is too claggy (as they say on Great British Baking Show) or too dense.
That grindy, something's-off sensation in your business is often the exact same thing. It's the feeling of operating inside a framework you have outgrown, and over the last two decades of doing this work, I've learned that you usually feel that pressure and the pull long before it ever shows up in your revenue or your operations. It starts as a subtle sense that something needs to change, and that feeling isn’t something you need to suppress or ignore. It's an invitation to break out and do the work of figuring out your own way.
What it cost me to evolve
I know this firsthand. I shared this recently, but for a long time, a significant part of my business was built around helping people get onto the TEDx stage. It was a borrowed framework and a proven model that helped me grow, and bonus! I was good at it. But it was never fully my own, and over time I could see it was actually limiting me and what I knew I was capable of. I wrote about that decision and what it taught me here, and it remains one of the most honest things I've shared in a while.
What I want to add to that conversation is that it wasn't just that I struggled to see how to evolve past it on my own. I knew, deep down, that it was going to potentially cost me financially to make the change. Trust me when I say, walking away from a revenue stream that worked, in order to build toward something more aligned, is not a small thing. That's exactly why I'm such a massive advocate of doing this work strategically rather than haphazardly. Evolving your business without a plan is like trying to write with a giant piping tip when the moment calls for the tiny, delicate, precise one. You can technically do it, but you'll make a mess of the very thing you're trying to create… and in my case, probably end up chucking the whole thing in the garbage. 10/10 do not recommend.
What it costs to stay
This looks a little different for each of us, but more often than not, the cost looks like:
Continuing to execute a strategy that was never designed for where you're trying to go, which means you work harder and harder for results that plateau.
Attracting clients who fit the old version of your business rather than the one you're growing into. For me, this was continuing to get people who were only focused on giving viral TEDx talks or doing it solely for notoriety. Those were not my people.
Staying busy, even successful, while the thing that could actually become your signature, your distinct point of view based on your real expertise, stays buried under a process you copied from someone else.
Feeling more and more disconnected and disgruntled about your business, even though it’s technically doing what it’s supposed to do.
Knowing you’re not quite fulfilling your deepest calling… while simultaneously feeling guilty that you’re not happy with the success you already have.
Every quarter you stay in this place, the gap between the business you have and the business you truly want (and that’s actually yours) gets a little wider, and a little harder to close.
I know how hard it can feel to make a move when the current version is still technically working. As I mentioned when the revenue is still coming in and clients are still there… walking away from what's familiar, even when you can feel it limiting you, takes real courage.
But the cost of not moving often compounds without you even noticing it, until one day you look up and barely recognize the business you're running and who you are in it.
Questions worth sitting with
Where in your business are you still using someone else's recipe? Perhaps it’s your offer, the model, the messaging, or even the process you adopted years ago and never questioned again.
What's the thing you know how to do, see, or say that nobody else in your space does quite the way you do? How much of your current business is actually built around it?
If you started from your own conviction and expertise rather than the framework you inherited, what would you build differently?
The answers are usually where your signature is hiding, and it's almost always been there the whole time, waiting for you to stop following someone else’s recipe and start writing your own.
If you can feel it's time to evolve but you can't quite see the path from where you're standing, that's exactly the work I do. I’d love to talk through it with you. A free discovery call is a good place to start, and you can book one here.
I’d love to hear what you’re cooking up!
