You're not a marketer. Stop building a business like one.

You're good at what you do. Like, really, really good. People who hire you tell their friends, they come back again and again. The work has never been the problem.

It's everything around the work that is the problem.

The marketing, the posting every day, the funnel you tried to build in 2022 that still makes you sad, the email newsletter you forget to send out every week...

You're damn good at what you do, but you're constantly left with this sense that everyone else has it all figured out - and they're not letting you in on the secret.

Here's the real secret: most of them are just winging it, too.

The Instagram-worthy highlight reel of business you've been sold? Well, it's been selling you something because it has to. Their model just doesn't work without constantly hustling for new sales.

Scaling your services just means trading client work for marketing work.

This is what you've been missing. Their marketing works, their system works, their content methods and their posting rhythms and their email copy all work!

But just like an influencer's house never actually looks like their Instagram reels, the marketer's highlight reel showing you the $200k launch doesn't show you

• The 18-month grind to get there
• The 18 hour days during
• The massive expenses they pay off out of it
• The burnout it causes (but they have to keep posting daily anyway)
• Or the 6 months that money has to last before they can do it again.

A few people get lucky, and they scale to a point where they are making more money than they were with services. Maybe they even have time periods with fewer demands. But make no mistake.

The vast majority of people who use those marketing methods end up spending 80% of their time marketing.

If you also have to spend 80% of your time actually providing your services? That's 160% of your time.

Last time I checked, that's not how percentages work, so you actually just end up working more - for the same results or less.

The good news is that there is a sustainable, service-based path forward for you that doesn't force you to become a marketer. And it might be the right one for you.

If you're here, I have a few guesses about what's happening for you in business right now.

I've been running Solo School since 2023, and actively coaching neurodivergent service-based business owners since 2021, and when you have worked with over 200 people across five years? Some trends start to emerge.

You keep "falling behind" on marketing.

You start strong, keep it up for a glorious week and a half, and then a big project lands or your energy dips or your life is just... Lifing... And the whole thing falls apart. You ghost your follow ups, you stop posting, your email list doesn't hear from you for three weeks, and then you beat yourself up again.

You've got courses and ebooks and programs galore that you will never finish.

You're not sitting there wondering what to do because you don't have the knowledge available. Half the problem is overwhelm from too much information. You've got funnels, ads, a Library of Alexandria worth of half finished content ideas, a Canva folder named "MARKETING (USE THIS)" and then another one called "MARKETING (THIS ONE FOR REAL)". Each one made sense when you bought it, but none of them stuck because they weren't build for the way you work.

Your income is a rollercoaster and the rollercoaster is stressful.

Good month, terrifying month, good month, okay month, 😱😱😱, and then 🤑🤑🤑 - with seemingly no rhyme or reason and a few bouts of burnout in the mix. When things get tough, you market constantly (hence the "falling behind" feeling) and when things get good, you forget about it completely. You don't have a baseline system that keeps the lights on.

You don't actually want to be an influencer.

You just want to do your thing, whether your thing is designing or writing or building or teaching or coaching or counseling... You enjoy what you do, you just wish it was more sustainable, that you could take more breaks, that things wouldn't fall down when you had a bad day, that the money wouldn't stop every time you stopped. And you don't want to have to become a full time content creator on top of that work just to make a living.

If you want to be a marketer, the "thought leadership" path is an amazing path for you.

Look, I am a marketer. It's what I love to do. So I'm not out here saying, "don't do it! Marketing sucks!"

But I am saying that if there's a thing you love to do, and it isn't marketing? Running your business like someone who is spending all of their time running a content campaign isn't going to bring you joy, even if it brings you clients.

And then there's the elephant in the room.

If you're neurodivergent, I need to tell you what I wish I knew before I went this route:

Becoming a thought leader requires consistency.

There are ways to do it in bursts and stop-start, and I've found my rhythms with it, but social platforms in particular don't care if you're having a rough week. They are hungry beasts, and they want content, and they won't keep showing your posts to your audience if you don't feed them.

If you're ADHD? Doing the same thing every day is like 365 tiny cuts, driving you mad.

If you're autistic? Doing the same predictable thing every day sounds amazing except for the part where the results aren't predictable so it's actually frustrating as all hell, and sometimes you're having a bad sensory day or an overload day or a meltdown day and the demand to post exceeds your available supply of f*cks.

If you're both? Well then the social media content marketing playbook is daily papercuts that give unpredictable, frustrating results and demand you to feed them even when you're having a bad day.

Truth #1: 80% of all small businesses in the US sell services.

There's nothing objectively wrong with being a service provider and doing client work. You haven't failed if you're still serving your clients every day. You don't need to scale to massive heights and multi-million dollar launches and a big team for your business to mean something.

You just need to fix the parts of your model that aren't working for your neurodivergent brain, so that showing up for your clients and providing them with services does the three things a solo business should:

• Provide a sustainable income for it's founder
• Add value to the community it operates within
• Be flexible enough for the founder to have a life

That's it. That's all a solo business really needs to do, and that's likely all you want it to do.

Truth #2: 85% of small businesses get the majority of their leads and sales from word of mouth.

Realistically, when word of mouth is the deciding factor behind up to 50% of all purchasing decisions? When 88% of consumers trust a recommendation over any other data? When someone is four times more likely to buy something from a recommendation than any other source?

How could that not be true?

And the marketing industrial complex - with billionaire VC-backed social media platforms at the top of the heap - have spent decades and a lot of dollars trying to convince you otherwise.

The reality is, a lot of people with a lot of very expensive things to sell you have spent a lot of time teaching you that services itself is a broken model, that "trading time for money" is a trap, and that building a huge marketing system with funnels and content is a way to break free...

... but it's actually what the vast majority of successful businesses in the world are already doing. It's just that nobody taught you how to do it in sustainable ways.

Attending Cheryl's coaching and getting real support that DID change my business for the better. I was struggling to get clients and within 3 months, I was drowning in them. Now I'm struggling with being consistent with my marketing since I've dipped again but I know this is problem I have so I can also work on not letting it happen again.

- Anon, Solo School Student

There's nothing wrong with selling services. I'm here to teach you how to do it sustainably.

I tried to scale my marketing business into an agency, and realized... I don't actually like managing people that much. So I started teaching others how I had gotten clients for my marketing business while still having time for things like:

• Taking two weeks off every quarter, completely disconnected
• Doing all of my client work
• Keeping my pipeline reasonably full
• Taking random weekdays off to hit the beach or take a roadtrip

And I did all of that for nearly 20 years, without:

• Having a single social media presence (seriously, before this I never used social for business)
• Running ads or building funnels
• Attending 6am networking meetings with realtors and lawyers and accountants
• Growing my email list beyond like 100 people I rarely emailed

Because honestly? I kept trying all those marketing things, and they didn't work because I didn't have time to run them all and run a service business. Now I do, because I changed my model so I could spend more of my time marketing.

If you don't want to spend more of your time marketing than doing client work, going into a higher-volume sales-focused business isn't the right move.

Here's how you build a sustainable service business as a neurodivergent solo founder:

It is 7x easier to sell something to an existing customer than a new one, and people are 4x more likely to buy based on a recommendation from a friend, so the lifeblood of your business isn't new clients - it's your existing ones.

(Don't worry if you don't have existing clients yet, we'll get there.)

This entire model hangs off of a specific offer and ascension model.

A paid audit or assessment first.

No more free discovery calls and diagnostics. You know that feeling where you go to build a proposal but don't know what the client will want or how to make sure the plan is a fit for them? That's because you didn't do enough discovery to really answer those questions. So, propose a paid strategy engagement first. We have a whole system for building these, supporting them with automation, and selling them successfully through a combination of calls and proposals.

Then implementation.

The game has changed in 2026. Charging for hours instead of outcomes used to be hard and unpredictable for service providers, but now clients actively shy away from it. We've got entire models for creating human-first, tech-supported services that utilize the AI tools clients expect you to be using - while keeping the human judgment and human value intact.

This is one through projects with specific timelines and end dates, and a list of deliverables - giving you day-to-day flexibility, autonomy, and preventing the permanent wheel-of-doom feeling that retainers can cause.

We even have a one-of-a-kind assessment to help you determine exactly the human-first work you should be doing most, so you can center your offers around your best skills and attributes.

Then referrals and renewals.

This becomes the engine. Each time a project ends, you ask the client for three things:

• A testimonial, backed up with the proof of progress we teach you to gather
• A referral, so you can add more people to your pipeline and build new leads
• And a renewal, so they keep working with you (and we teach you how)

This means your initial handful of clients becomes a flywheel that runs forever in your business, constantly landing you new connections, new clients, new referrals, new testimonials, and higher rates as demand increases.

And of course, low-lift marketing tactics that build your network.

Relying solely on referrals and renewals can feel shaky for those who aren't used to it, so we also teach specific network-based (social media free!) marketing tactics that work for ND brains. You can choose between things like guest trainings and workshops, podcast tours, event networking, and if you're really introverted, guest writing, SEO, and chatbot recommendation optimization.

The goal isn't to get you visible or turn you into an influencer, it's to make you the secret weapon in everyone's back pocket - the name everyone drops when someone is looking.

Here's what that actually looks like:

Every coach I've had before has given me the same list of questions to answer. And it was up to me to sort through all the thoughts in my head to find those answers, then to just hope they were "right" for what I wanted to create.

For the first time, I not only believe that I can reach my revenue goals, but I can actually see logistically HOW I'm going to get there!!! Cheryl is more than just a coach, mentor, guide, guru, whatever she wants to call herself. She is an incredible person who truly cares about helping people reach (and exceed) their own potential in a way that actually feels good and honors who we are as humans.

- N.W., Solo School Student

We run in three semesters per year, because ND brains need breaks.

Our semesters run January through March, May through July, and September through November. We take call breaks in April, August, and December. You are expected to lean back and do only baseline activities during those times. The rhythm of rest is built into the program, so you can beat burnout before it happens.

The way Cheryl translates marketing for neurodiverse people really makes me understand some things that had never clicked before.

- M.M., Solo School Student

Our next semester starts September 7. You in?

Have questions? Reach out to team@soloschool.ca

I made more progress right off the bat than I had all year. I felt seen, supported, and like I had traction.

- D.T., Solo School Student

No one shamed me for using my business to source my dopamine hits, and have been gently helping me course correct as I hope to make my business viable income and not self consuming.

- A.R., Solo School Student

Working with Cheryl was a blessing! I was able to create extreme clarity around my offers & services for two businesses which provided direction, focus & sustainable results. Within the 30 days I was able to presell an entire retreat & created long term marketing strategies for future success.

- S.G., Past Client