Lyndon's List (coming soon)

We’re now over halfway through January:

• Can we still say Happy New Year to people?

• Is it time to seriously consider which resolutions are worth sticking with?

• Have you defined your goals for the year yet? - If not we have a couple of strategy calls left where we can chat about your plans for the year (oh and it’s free)

Mythological ships 🚢 & AI?

This week I put up this post on LinkedIn (come hang out on Linkedin, we’re trying new things):

I haven’t been able to get the idea of Theseus’s Ship out of my head. Specifically, what else does this apply to?

The one that I’ve given the most thought to is how this applies to the offers that we, as business owners, have. Let’s take a look at our phased-out photography business.

Over the years, we changed

• the equipment we used (Canon 5DmIV → EOS R → EOS R6)

• the type of photography (Weddings → Boudoir → Branding)

• the people (College Sweethearts → Late 20s YUPpies → Business Coaches → Newer Business Owners)

• the city (Michigan City → Bloomington → Chicago → Indianapolis)

• the price 📈

• the team (Joelle → Jo & Lyndon)

• and more

But somehow through all of that, we were still “photographers”…

The things that we never replaced were our skills & our network.

Everything else can come and go, but the things that make our offers truly valuable are what make us unique as service providers - our personality, our skills, and our perspectives.

Why does this matter?

This week, DJI announced the DJI Flip, their second camera drone that sells without a controller that uses “AI” to fly itself and take photos and videos for you. If you look at DJI’s pace of improvement from the DJI Neo that they announced less than 6 months ago, in a few years (or less), AI will be able to replace all but the best photographers in many applications (frame the photos, edit the photo, record video) - but it won’t replace your personal relationship with people or your skill telling people how to pose, yet.

This has really challenged me to think about the value we bring to our coaching offers because just knowing case studies & frameworks is not enough to separate us from someone going to chatGPT and asking it to pretend to be their coach. I can’t compete with something trained on the entire corpus of knowledge on the internet.

But I can 100% use more empathy, connect more relevant dots, understand the motivation behind what someone says, and actually help them implement the solution (to mention a few).

As you’re going into the weekend I’d challenge you to take some time to think about what the irreplaceable parts of your offers are.

• How can you lean further into those things?

• Do you need to be educating your audience of that value?

A peak behind the curtain: Lyndon’s List (coming soon)

My word of 2025 is “Connector” and being in a time of change in our business (rebranding), this presents opportunities. I’ve been ‘cooking’ on the idea of - what would it look like to have a literal open and active Rolodex?

Over the holidays on a 10+ hour road trip Jo and I started brainstorming, here’s a super high-level summary of our resulting notes:

• What is it: a database on our website

• Who would it be for: small business owners

• Who would be included: service providers (eg: photographers, designers, bookkeepers, coaches, social media managers, VAs, etc)

• How would it work:

  • application based for inclusion to then be vetted by us to maintain a level of quality

  • a public board that isn’t pay-walled, or behind a login making it difficult to drive referrals

I proceeded to sit at my in-law’s kitchen table the next day mocking up what I was envisioning in Figma. If I was going to work with a web designer to make this a reality, I had to figure out what I wanted it to look like/include before trying to explain my vision. This is what my first draft rough mock-ups looked like: