Business Foundations vs. Strategies: What You Really Need to Create Long-Lasting Sustainable Success

When something feels off in your business—whether it’s stagnant sales, low engagement, inconsistent growth, or something else—it’s tempting to assume you must need a new, different, or (seemingly) better strategy to “fill the gap.”

• “My sales aren’t growing. Maybe I need to create a scalable offer like a course or template.”
• “I’m not getting enough engagement. Maybe I need a new social media strategy.”
• “I keep getting caught in a feast and famine cycle with clients and revenue. Maybe I need to create an evergreen webinar funnel instead of launching.”

While this is a natural response in our strategy-obsessed online business culture, it’s not the most effective. By flitting from one strategy to the next, the most you’re doing is putting a bandaid on a wound that, if left unaddressed, will fester and become a bigger problem than the one you started with.

What do you need to do instead? 

You need to build your business foundations.

What are business foundations? And how do they differ from strategies in business?

Business foundations are the universal, core components or building blocks which must be in place for success in any given area. If you’re a student of philosophy or science, you might have heard of these referred to as “first principles.” 

Strategies, on the other hand, are specific methods of bringing the foundations to life. Of applying the foundations in a way that’s tailored to a goal, situation, or preference. While foundations are consistent, unchanging, and applicable across any (relevant) scenario and within any (relevant) context, strategies must evolve as market conditions, resources, and audience trends shift. 

In essence, foundations are the what, the necessary elements that create a solid base for your success. Strategies are the how, or the creative ways those elements are combined, styled, and executed.

Why Online Service Providers, Coaches, and Practitioners Need Business Foundations

You’ve probably already seen for yourself just how much trends in strategies shift and change in online business. One year, launching is all the rage, the next, everyone’s going evergreen. One year everyone’s preaching that you “need” an ultra high-ticket coaching package, the next, it’s memberships. 

Without having your foundations solid, it’s easy to be swayed by the of-the-moment rhetoric that says that this or that strategy is the key to success. Whereas when you deeply understand and have mastered your foundations, you know that the “key” to success isn’t in following the hot new trend, but rather in how effectively you’ve applied your foundations. 

Foundations are what make any strategy you wish to use in your business work. Because of that, they are what set your business up for long-lasting success, rather than fleeting wins that must be followed by implementing yet another new strategy in order to produce even somewhat similar results. As a plus, foundations-focused business-building has the side effect that you don’t have to follow trends in strategies, shifting your approach with each new “must do.” Instead, you’re able to continue using your chosen strategies—perhaps with some minor updates—becoming even more masterful at implementing them the longer you stick with them.

Foundations are critical to Sustainable Success in business. Without them, you’re left constantly seeking some new strategy-level solution to solve repetitive problems in your business. 

In this blog, we’ll explore what business foundations you need as well as how to implement them. But first…

“Don’t only inexperienced business owners need to focus on their foundations?”

Thankfully in the last 6+ years of running WholeCo, I’ve only received this question a few times. Yet I think it’s really important to acknowledge here, because the word “foundations” has a bit of a “newbie” connotation to it, leaving a lot of more experienced business owners thinking that they need something more advanced than stronger foundations. 

Yes, there are business owners who’ve strategized their way to big-time success without consciously differentiating between foundations and strategies or intentionally focusing on their foundations. However, if you examine these businesses closely, you’ll often find that their success isn’t because they skipped this foundational work. It’s because, whether consciously or not, they built their foundations along the way. They might not call it that; nonetheless, they’ve established the universal principles that make their chosen strategies effective.

However, these businesses who have become ultra-successful without conscious foundation implementation are the exception, not the rule. They represent a minority of entrepreneurs who either intuitively figured out what they needed or were in the right place at the right time with the right resources. For the majority of business owners, mastering their foundations and intentionally building them as the base of their chosen strategies is absolutely necessary to create any “flavor” of transformational success, and especially Sustainable Success. In fact, I’ve heard from many clients over the years that the foundations-focused approach finally makes everything they’ve been trying to do in business finally make sense. The truth is: they’re the “missing piece” in most businesses, especially businesses which have stagnated (or never really grew to begin with).

As just one example of where foundations make all the difference—

If you’ve ever wondered why implementing a strategy exactly as taught by someone else isn’t yielding the results you expected—or in alignment with the results they marketed to you—it’s often because of one crucial difference: the business owner teaching the strategy has solid foundations in place, while you might not. Their foundations are what allow their strategies to work seamlessly and produce the kind of results they showcase. And fortunately or unfortunately, you’ll never be able to replicate those results until you have your relevant foundations in place. (At which point you might even realize that you don’t want to implement this particular strategy anyway, and that you were only doing it because you bought into the marketing hype which said you “needed” that strategy to achieve your desired outcomes.)

All that to say: no, focusing on foundations isn’t just for inexperienced business owners. It’s for anyone who wants to create a business that grows sustainably, produces consistent results, and which doesn’t require you to constantly seek out a new, different, or “better” strategy to see compounding success. Building foundations in your business isn’t beginner-level work—though yes, beginners need them too, and they’re just as beginner-friendly to implement as they are for the ultra-experienced! Foundations are the backbone of every successful business that lasts.

How to Build Your Business Foundations

We’ve already established that, in order for your chosen strategy/ies to be effective, you have to first have your business foundations. But in actuality, your foundations and strategies are only two parts of a four step process.

Meet WholeCo’s Hierarchy of Steps™.

In everything that you build in your business, you need to first know your context, or any relevant information that might inform your next steps. Then you need your foundations, followed by your strategy/ies, followed by your tactic/s.

We know what context we need by looking at the Sustainable Success System™.

The Sustainable Success System starts with Audience, then moves clockwise through Offers, Messaging, Marketing, Lead Generation, and Sales.

The context you’re working with in your first time building out the elements of your Sustainable Success System is your Goals, Business Model, and Niche. Once you have these, you’ll go on to build the foundations of your Audience, which you’ll then execute through your chosen strategies and tactics. Your Audience provides the context for your Offers, which empowers you to build your Offer foundations and execute them through your chosen strategies and tactics. Audience and Offers provide the context for Messaging, which empowers you to build your Messaging foundations and…you see where I’m going with this. 

Upon making one full turn through your Sustainable Success System—having built the foundations and chosen your strategies and tactics for each element—you then take everything you’ve learnt through that process as the context of your Audience, and so the process progresses. This continues on pretty much in perpetuity or as long as you’re in business, turning your business into an even more resilient, sustainable, and eventually regenerative ecosystem which brings with it all categories of “success.” (e.g. fulfillment, joy, free time, money—you get the jist.)

Each of the six elements in your Sustainable Success System have their own foundations. Let’s look at what these are, now.

Audience Foundations

There are (4) foundations of your Audience. These are: 

1. Ideal Client, or, who you want to work with.
2. Best-positioned to Succeed Client, or, who already has the characteristics, values, priorities, and/or past experiences that position them to get the most out of your approach and work.
3. Purchase-Ready Client, or, who is already problem-aware and actively seeking a solution to their problem.
4. Ready-to-Transform Client, or, who has the physiological capacity to do the work required in order to achieve their desired outcome, result, or transformation.

Together, these four foundations make up what we call here at WholeCo the “Right Fit” client. Take a deeper look at these four audience foundations with this blog post: 4 Questions to Find Your Right Fit Client.

While there aren’t a ton of strategies explicitly for Audience, your Audience foundations provide crucial context for every other element of your business. For example, however you end up marketing to your audience, you need to know who your Right Fit client is, so that you can ensure you’re actually talking to the right person. 

The primary Audience-specific strategy my clients engage in is figuring out what to call or name their audience, and/or how to reference them. For example, one business coach could choose to refer to their audience as “visionary leaders” while another might choose to use “creative powerhouses.” This strategy, when done well and in alignment with your Audience foundations (of course!), serves to call your audience into a shared space where they feel seen, understood, and aligned with your brand values. It creates an identity that Right Fit clients feel proud to adopt. Note that, as with any other strategy, it’s easy to get caught up in trying to make this one “perfect.” However, also as with any other strategy, the strategy itself doesn’t matter. It’s the foundations that are necessary. If you don’t quite know what to call your audience just yet, don’t get stuck here. Allow this to grow organically as your understanding of your audience deepens.

Offer Foundations

Once you’ve built your Audience foundations, you can move on to that of your offer/s. There are (5) foundations of your Offer/s:

1. Proprietary Process, or, the exact steps that your Right Fit client must take in order to achieve their intended outcome, result, or transformation.
2. Offer Structure, or, how you structure the offer to provide the “container” within which they can reliably take those steps.
3. Offer Inclusions, or, what supports and systems you provide the client so as to facilitate them in taking those steps.
4. Price Point, or, what you charge for this offer.
5. Offer Alignment, or, whether this offer is one that you actually want to sell and deliver. 

Here’s a couple of blog posts that go deeper on some of these foundations: 

• Systematize Client Transformation with a Proprietary Process
• The Art of ‘Enough’: Build Offers that Deliver Exactly What Your Clients Need

There are a ton of Offer-specific strategies. They range from being explicitly about the Offer Structure—memberships, VIP days, done-for-you packages, etc.—to being about your Offer Suite as a whole—are you using a value ladder, an ascension model, an offer solar system, etc. Once again, any of these strategies can work, so long as you have your Offer foundations in place first (and they’re designed within the context of your Audience!).

Messaging Foundations

There are (10) foundations of Messaging. In this case, we’re talking of offer-specific messaging (which is different from your brand messaging; more on that in another moment). These are:

1. Want, or, what your Right Fit client for this specific offer wants.
2. Why, or, why your Right Fit client for this specific offer wants that.
3. Obstacles, or, why—from the perspective of your Right Fit client—they don’t have what they want.
4. Outcomes, or, what will have happened to those Obstacles when the Right Fit client for this offer has completed this offer.
5. Offer Overview, or, the journey the client will take to achieve their intended outcome, result, or transformation.
6. Identity Shifts, or, how they want their self-perception and the perception of others about them to shift.
7. Hesitations, or, the final questions or concerns they have before stepping in and making the investment.
8. Resources, or, how this offer will impact their time, energy, and money.
9. Motivations, or, why they are motivated to step into this offer right now.
10. Differentiation, or, how this offer is different from other options your Right Fit client might be considering or looking at.

psst! Wondering what messaging is, and how it differs from your marketing, copy, content, or the somewhat confusing term, “marketing messages”? Read this blog post: What is Messaging?

Your Messaging foundations are utilized anywhere that you’re talking about your offer. Common strategies include: website copy, networking pitches, referral or affiliate marketing assets, etc.

Completing the foundations of your Audience, Offers, and Messaging completes the first half of your Sustainable Success System. Together, they create what we call AOM Alignment™, or, how you reliably facilitate results for or with your clients. AOM Alignment is how you inspire rave reviews, referrals, and repeat sign-ups (where applicable), all of which are crucial to lasting Sustainable Success. Your AOM Alignment must be solid in order for the next three elements of your Sustainable Success System—Marketing, Lead Generation, and Sales—to be effective. 

Marketing Foundations

There are (6) foundations of Marketing. These are:

1. Mindset, or, the energy and approach that you bring to your marketing.
2. Purpose, or, the very practical why behind your marketing efforts.
3. Medium, or, the platform and/or channel where your marketing lives.
4. Structure, or the how that provides the overarching context for every piece of your marketing efforts.
5. Perspective, or, the ability to deeply understand and embody the worldview of your Right Fit client, ensuring your marketing speaks directly to their needs and desires.
6. Content, or, the tangible output of your marketing.

There are also four foundational “types” of content. These are:

1. Stories
2. Educational
3. Aspirational
4. Sales

There are countless Marketing strategies, as I’m sure you’re aware given that marketing strategies are often what’s marketed the most to online businesses. Some strategies are Medium-focused—”You need to have a podcast!”—others are Structure-focused—”You need to have a welcome sequence!”—while others are Content-focused—”You need to create Reels!” 

As I like to remind my clients, especially when talking about marketing: there is no “right” or “wrong” strategy, there is only what is right for you, your goals, your business, and your audience. The success of a strategy ultimately comes down to how strong your relevant foundations are as well as your commitment to the strategy. That’s it.

Lead Generation Foundations

There are (3) foundations of Lead Generation, which you’ll see as necessary across every form of lead generation from live launching to evergreen funnels and everything in between. These are:

1. Hand-Raising Opportunity (HRO), or, the way in which you facilitate Right Fit prospects identifying themselves to you as prospects.
2. Pitch, or, how you issue a clear invitation into the paid offer.
3. Follow Up, or, how you stay connected with the prospect during their purchasing-decision.

Once again, there are so many Lead Generation foundations. Most are HRO-oriented: 5-day challenges, webinar, free PDF lead magnets, paid workshops, even sales calls are technically a HRO strategy (though once the sales call begins, it relies on your Sales foundations). Again: there isn’t a “right” or “wrong” Lead Generation strategy. And the beauty of having your foundations rock-solid is that you can make informed decisions about which will be best-suited for you, your goals, your business, and your audience.

Sales Foundations

Finally, there are (5) foundations of sales. These are:

1. Energetics, or, the energy you are bringing to the sales container.
2. Your Role, or, how you show up and what responsibilities you take on within the sales container.
3. Entry Point, or, how your Right Fit client enters the sales container.
4. The Sales Container, or, how you filter who is and isn’t a Right Fit for the offer in question.
5. Invitations, Questions, and Expectations, or, where details are finalized before the Right Fit client decides to step into the paid work.

Strategies for sales include anywhere where a sale is being made: sales and/or cart pages, sales call, proposals, etc. But they also can include various layers of strategies, such as by adding an application to work with you before a sales call is offered.

The foundations of Marketing, Lead Generation, and Sales together—our final half of the Sustainable Success System—empower you to create a Demand Generation System.

A Demand Generation System is the way in which you bring a steady stream of Right Fit, ready-to-buy prospects into your business and offer/s. Because the goal of a Demand Generation System is explicitly to bring Right Fit prospects into your work—and, specifically, into your right-for-them work—it must be built on top of strong AOM Alignment. Without AOM Alignment, you might be able to attract a lot of people into your free and paid offers—you also might not—but if they are not Right Fits, they will not reliably get the intended result of your offer/s. If a vast majority of your clients are not reliably getting the intended result of your offer/s, you’re severely weakening your Sustainable Success System, since the side effects of AOM Alignment—rave reviews, referrals, and repeat sign-ups—feed your Demand Generation System to make it even more effective and efficient. (Think about how hard it is to sell an offer at any price point without social proof, such as testimonials. Quality social proof is a direct result of AOM Alignment.)

The Practical Execution of Foundations and Strategies Might Look Like This…

Let’s say you want to build an evergreen webinar funnel to filter clients into your paid membership. We’ll say your evergreen webinar funnel is ultimately comprised of:

• A prerecorded webinar, during which you pitch a
• Time-sensitive discount on your membership, which you continue sharing about in an
• Automated sales email sequence, which invites people to sign up on a
• Sales page (with embedded cart) for your membership.

You’re attracting people to the webinar via your organic Instagram content, and they have to share their email address to a form on an opt-in page on your website in order to access the webinar.

This evergreen webinar funnel is primarily a lead generation strategy. In order for it to be effective, first it must be built within the context of the previous elements of your Sustainable Success System: Audience, Offers, Messaging, and Marketing. To give a few high level examples (there’s so much more detail for each of these than we have space for in this blog post):

• You must know who the Right Fit client is specifically for your membership. (Audience foundations)
• You must have the membership built in such a way that it reliably delivers results for that Right Fit client. (Offer foundations)
• You must have messaging for the membership that proactively filters out wrong fits and filters in Right Fits. (Messaging foundations)
• You must also have messaging for the evergreen webinar that proactively filters out wrong fits while filtering in Right Fits. (Messaging foundations)
• The webinar, itself, must also be designed to reliably deliver on the results or outcomes you say that it will in your webinar messaging. (Offer foundations)
• Your marketing content must be speaking directly to these Right Fit prospects, so that they are who are attracted to the webinar. (Marketing foundations)

With the context of Lead Generation done, now you can build out your lead generation foundations:

• For the Hand-Raising Opportunity, you choose a prerecorded webinar as your strategy.
• For the Pitch, your strategy of choice is to pitch in the webinar itself, as well as in the automated email sequence that follows it.
• For the Follow Up, you choose the strategy of sending an automated email sequence to opt-ins.

Finally, continuing to the fourth and final step of WholeCo’s Hierarchy of Steps, you can make tactical decisions. For example:

• How long will your webinar be? 
• Will you share slides the whole time, just your face, a combo of both, or something else?
• When will you pitch during the webinar?
• Will you use software that enables you to pretend the webinar is being run live, or will you be clear about the fact that it’s prerecorded?
• Will you run the webinar live once or twice before finalizing it as an evergreen asset?
• What will the title of the webinar be?
• What type of urgency will you use to incentivize a sign up into your membership?
• When will the automated email sequence start?
• How long will the promotional period be?
• How many emails will you send, and with what timing?
• Will people have an option to opt out of the promotional sequence?
• etc etc etc (there are a LOT of tactical decisions to make, in everything but especially in lead generation!)

Of course, you’d also need to continue through your Sustainable Success System onto the next element, Sales, in order to properly invite those prospective clients into your membership.

What happens if you don’t have your foundations?

What would happen if we skipped straight to the strategy—in our example, “I’m building an evergreen webinar funnel!”—before building your relevant context and lead generation foundations?

• Without first knowing who your Right Fit client is for your membership, you might attract people to the webinar, but they might not actually be ready-to-buy (and now you have an audience of so-called “freebie seekers”).
• Without first building out each of the Offer foundations for your membership, you might successfully attract new clients into it, but have a high churn rate (meaning very few people are staying in the membership).
• Without first creating and utilizing all of your Messaging foundations for your membership, you might attract a lot of wrong fit or not yet Right Fit clients into it, and they won’t reliably get results (and will likely be draining for you to work with).
• Without first ensuring that your Messaging foundation for your webinar itself is also speaking to your Right Fit client, you might not attract anyone into the webinar (even though it’s free!).
• Without creating Messaging foundations for your webinar, you might follow an opt-in page copy template, but you won’t really know what you need to be saying in order to attract a Right Fit prospective client.
• Without setting up your webinar to reliably facilitate the result/s and/or outcome/s you say it will, you might attract people to the webinar, but they’ll leave disappointed, confused, or feeling uninterested—even if they were, in fact, Right Fit clients who were actively seeking your solution.

…as you can see, I could keep going. There are so many variables of things that could go wrong and/or not work out if even one of your foundations are not what they need to be (or non-existent).

“Does that mean I have to get everything perfect before seeing any results!?”

While there are so many ways that things could go wrong, when you do already have your foundations—even just a preliminary draft of each!—you’re much more likely to see success from the implementation of your chosen strategy than if you didn’t have those foundations in place, first.

However, I do need to do a bit of de-influencing for a second. You know all those rags-to-riches stories where people are like, “I did this ONE THING and then suddenly I made a million dollars” or “had my biggest month ever”? Yeah, they did that one thing after lots of trial, error, learning, and trying again. 

That’s why I always encourage my clients to approach their business like one giant experiment. Note that an experiment is different from “throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping something sticks”—the latter of which is gambling, not experimentation. You can only run a true experiment when you know what you’re working with and what to look for. Sure, I could personally try to run an experiment to see where the content of my dreams comes from. But if I don’t know anything about the brain, sleep, or [other things that I wouldn’t even know I need to know about], I wouldn’t know what to look for, so I wouldn’t know if what I was doing was working or producing any sort of useful data. I’d be “throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping something sticks.” I’m not making informed hypotheses and ensuing decisions; I’m gambling.

(By the way, that’s why knowing your foundations and being masterful at executing them is a core part of your CEO Skillset, which includes: business-building acumen—starting with foundations!—and self-trust. You can’t make informed decisions or run useful experiments in your business without understanding business foundations.)

Your foundations don’t need to be “perfect” before you’ll ever see results because you’re running an experiment. You’re going to set a hypothesis—”I think that an evergreen webinar funnel is the best way to reach my goal of 100 new members in my membership per quarter”—and you’re going to implement it. Along the way, you’ll learn what is and isn’t working, and adjust accordingly, each time learning from the results and from your adjustments. At each step, you’ll create compounding results: maybe the first month, you only bring in 10 new members, but you extend the length of your sales sequence in month 2 and find yourself now with 50 new members. Through this process, you’ll find your way to an optimized strategy, at which point you can systematize it (if it isn’t already) and then point your attention and resources elsewhere while this one continues on working for your business.

This is why I don’t really agree with asking questions like, “How long should I stick with a strategy before deciding it didn’t work and trying something different?” Any strategy you want to use can be successful so long as it’s built on top of solid foundations and you stay committed to it. If a strategy isn’t working, it’s likely not that there’s something inherently wrong with the strategy or that it just isn’t going to work in your business. It’s likely that you need to adjust something within your foundations.

Your Next Steps

As I hope you can see, you have to know how to build these business foundations for yourself as part of your CEO skillset. Without them, you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping something sticks. With them, you’re making informed hypothesis after informed hypothesis, learning from each experiment, and ultimately making steady, compounding toward and beyond your biggest goals for your business.

If you’re ready to build these foundations in your business and master your CEO skillset, apply to join me inside our 9-month live cohort of EXPAND. Kicking off in February 2025, this comprehensive business training program equips you with the skills and self-trust to embrace your role as CEO, systematically setting your business up for long-lasting Sustainable Success.

Applications close Tuesday, January 28, 2025. Learn more and apply for EXPAND today!

I’m also running a free live masterclass on January 8, 2025 called The Sustainable Success Blueprint. At this masterclass, you’ll learn the roadmap for turning your already up-and-running business into one that’s thriving, sustainable, and built for long-lasting success.

Register for The Sustainable Success Blueprint here! (It’s free!)

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