I called myself a growth strategist. Nobody knew what I did.

For about a year, when someone asked me what I did, I said:

"I'm a growth strategist."

I thought it was a good answer. It was professional. It sounded smart. And it gave me room to move — I could apply it to almost any business problem, work with almost any kind of client, take almost any kind of project that came my way.

That flexibility felt like an asset. I was proud of it.

Here's what "growth strategist" actually meant in practice: nobody knew what I did.

To be clear — the work itself was interesting. I was genuinely good at it.

I did a dozen other things across a dozen other contexts.

Each project, in isolation, felt pretty good — and the results were real.

The sales team raved about the work. The new messaging and deck became a core part of their sales process — they built an entire internal certification method around it so every salesperson could learn and replicate the approach. It completely changed how they sold their product.

The trade association was so pleased they invited me to speak at their annual event, covered all my travel, and paid me for it.

These weren't projects that just felt good. They worked. The clients were genuinely better off.

The variety kept me engaged and I told myself this was the beauty of being a generalist — I could go anywhere, do anything, bring value to any kind of organization.

What I couldn't do was answer the question that matters most in building a consulting business: when this project ends, where do I go next?

I had no idea. Every time an engagement wrapped up, I was starting over from scratch. No clear type of client to go back to. No clear problem I was known for solving. No obvious next conversation to have.

And referrals — the lifeblood of a service business — got rarer and rarer. Not because people didn't like working with me. Because they didn't know what to tell people about me. "You should talk to Kasey, she's a... growth strategist" doesn't mean anything to the person hearing it.

They don't know if they need one. They don't know if you're one.

The result was feast or famine. Some months I made really good money. Some months I made nothing.

And the stress of not knowing which kind of month was coming — of having no foundation under the business, no direction, no flywheel — was quietly wearing me down in ways I wasn't fully acknowledging.

About a year in, I'd partnered with another consultant on the trade association project. A few months after that work wrapped up, he reached out. He worked for a larger professional services firm focused on trade associations. They were building out their own consulting practice. Did I want to come in-house?

I said yes.

Not because it was my dream. Because I was exhausted, the money wasn't consistent, and I didn't know what else to do. Going back in-house felt like the safer choice, and I took it.

I want to be honest about that — because I think there's a version of this story where I pretend it was a strategic move I made from a position of strength. It wasn't. It was a reset I needed and was honest enough with myself to take.

And here's what I want to say about that, because I say this to my clients all the time.

Entrepreneurship is a long game. And playing the long game sometimes means putting a pause on being an entrepreneur.

That year in-house got me caught up financially. It gave me distance from the grind of being on my own — working with a lot more clients, in a more structured environment, without the constant anxiety of where the next project was coming from.

When I came back to entrepreneurship a year later, I was in a completely different headspace. More rested. More grounded. More clear.

I don't think I would have been able to build what I've built with Essentialist CEO without taking that pause. The reset is a direct reason for the success I have now. I'm not embarrassed about it. I'm grateful for it.

When I left that firm, I made myself a promise.

I was going to do for my own business what I would do for a client's. I was going to stop calling myself a growth strategist — or whatever the version of that was — and actually get clear on who I helped, what situation they were in, and what outcome I got them to.

Not a menu. Not a flexible, keeps-all-options-open answer. A real position.

It felt uncomfortable. The fear Thursday's newsletter talked about — that getting specific would narrow my appeal, that I'd miss opportunities — I felt all of that. I had spent a year telling myself that flexibility was my competitive advantage. Letting go of that meant admitting it had been costing me.

But I did it. And what happened next was exactly what I described on Thursday: simpler to sell, easier to find the right clients, less explaining and more recognizing. The people I was built for could finally see me. The people who weren't my people stopped taking up my time.

The feast-or-famine started to smooth out. Not overnight — and I want to be specific about that, because I think the timeline matters.

Within nine months of leaving that firm, I was making consistent $10-20K months for the first time in my solo consultant life. A little over a year after that, I was consistently at $30-40K a month and those numbers keep growing. That trajectory — from never having consistent revenue on my own to $50K+ monthly — is what ultimately became the foundation of Essentialist CEO.

Here's what I want you to hear about that timeline, because it runs directly counter to everything you see online.

Ninety days isn't going to transform your business. Ninety days is going to get you started.

It's going to give you the foundation, the clarity, the first real signal that things are working differently. That matters. But where it gets genuinely interesting — where the numbers start to move in ways that feel real and sustainable — is when you stick with it for a year. Two years.

The 90-day transformation promises you see everywhere are selling you the beginning of a process and calling it the whole thing. The real result is what happens when you don't stop.

If you're reading this and something is resonating — if you have a version of "growth strategist" that you've been saying confidently while privately knowing that nobody really understands what you do — I want to offer you two things.

First, the clarity is available to you. It's not a mystery. It's work, but it's doable work, and it changes everything downstream when you do it.

Second, if you're in a season right now where the feast-or-famine is wearing you down, where you're wondering whether to keep pushing or step back, where the uncertainty is louder than the vision — give yourself permission to play the long game. That doesn't always mean grinding harder. Sometimes it means being honest about what you need to reset, and doing that, without shame.

The goal isn't to never pause. The goal is to come back clearer than you left.

In love, growth, and clarity,

Kasey

P.S. If you've been carrying a version of "growth strategist" — a title or a pitch that keeps all your options open and means nothing to the people who hear it — hit reply and tell me what it is. You don't have to have the answer yet. Sometimes just naming the problem is the first step.