Starting over is one of the biggest mistakes I see in business. Every time something feels off, it’s tempting to reset. New strategy. New plan. New direction.
But what I’ve found, working closely with so many business owners, is that most businesses aren’t broken. They’re just unclear.
In this episode, I walk you through a simple framework I use with my clients:
Preserve. Remove. Refine.
I break down how to identify what’s already working in your business, what might be creating unnecessary friction and how small, strategic refinements create real impact for your future clients and therefore real growth for you!
This is a smarter, more sustainable way to approach your marketing, especially in the health space where clarity builds trust. If your business feels a little off right now, this episode will help you reset your thinking without starting over.
SUMMARY
0:00:00 – 0:03:00 Opening, Context & Real-Life Setup
0:03:00 – 0:06:30 Introducing “Preserve. Remove. Refine.” + Hair Analogy
0:06:30 – 0:09:50 What’s Actually Going Wrong in Health Brands’ Marketing
0:09:50 – 0:13:00 Client Story: Applying Preserve–Remove–Refine
0:13:00 – 0:15:30 Consistency, Visibility & Energy
0:15:30 – 0:17:00 PRESERVE: Start with What’s Already Working
0:17:00 – 0:18:00 REMOVE: Cutting Friction & Confusion
0:18:00 – 0:19:30 REFINE: Where Real Growth Happens
0:19:30 – 0:19:48 Final Takeaways & VIP Day Invitation
Hayley Osborne
Hello, and it is good to be back in your ears for my podcast, the Hayley Osborne show for another week. I am your host, Hayley, and I am glad that you are listening with me today, wherever you are. I hope that you’re multitasking, because that’s really important in my eyes, that is how you get shit done and you get it done fast. So as you are listening to this, I am I this is prerecorded, obviously, this episode, but it is on a Sunday right now for me. And I just have so much on this coming week that I thought to myself, I have the energy I also have and I look okay. And I thought, you know what?
One thing that I can get done early on Sunday, to make sure that I have a really great head start for the week ahead, because it is busy, is pre-recording the podcast on Sunday, and so that’s what I’m doing, because I haven’t been doing that recently. It has been in daylight, in working hours, and it’s felt lovely. But you know what? It’s not always like that, and I’m not going to glamorize this at all, because it’s hard work. And you know nothing, what’s the word nothing? Nothing that is eat, that looks easy is nothing. For the first time, I’m lost for words.
No, you know what? Sometimes it looks very glamorous from the outside, but I can tell you that it is a lot of hard work, and sometimes you have to do things that are really shit hours or shit times or things, sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to. So I chose to record this on Sunday, and it feels really nice because it’s made me feel really organized. And just before I jumped on to record, I went through all my emails, and so now I have zero emails to open tomorrow, so I can just get started straight into things which feels really nice and I don’t have to worry about it. So I have got myself off on the front foot, which is beautiful anyway.
So the topic of today is preserved, removed, refined. And so recently, I had those three words come up in a book that I was reading actually that has nothing to do with marketing. And I thought, wow, that is a really great they really three really great words that can be incorporated into how we think about our marketing, and I’ve actually, it actually made me think about my clients of late, and how and even myself, and how it sometimes feels, feels so much easier to just like. I hate these words, but I don’t really know what else to say to burn the business down, to do everything that you’re doing and start from scratch when really, it’s actually not as easy as you think.
It’s actually easier to, you know, refine, to remove or really preserve, but not, not completely burn it down. And so I think that you know, starting over, burning down your business is one of the most massive, massive, massive mistakes I see business owners make, and I see it online all the time. I burnt down my business, and now I like, cut the crap. It sounds so, just ill off, okay? You don’t necessarily need a new strategy. You don’t necessarily need a new plan. You don’t necessarily need a new everything. Okay, that I think the businesses that I see that are growing at a beautiful rate, are refining. Hence why I thought about the Preserve, remove, refine, okay.
And I heard it in relation to hair, all right. Someone was talking about it in relation to hair. Do you chop it off? Do whatever you want. And it got me thinking, because right now, I’m recording this episode, and it is on YouTube. I’ve got my hair down at the moment, and I’m just looking at the camera. You can sort of see I’ve got this sort of halo around my head, where the hairs are a lot thicker, closer to my scalp. It’s probably about, I don’t know, two or three inches really thick, like curly, curly hair, and then the length is not so curly.
And you can kind of see through those curls a bit. If you have a look at any of my videos on my Instagram, you’ll be able to see that. How much hair I lost and how much is growing back since the birth of my son. Okay, so my hair now for the first time in five years, because I had three babies in three and a half years. My eldest is now five, and my youngest is now just over 18 months. So it’s taken like, almost three inches in 18 months, when you, like, end up shedding all the hair, because you don’t lose any when you give birth.
Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent right now, but I’ve got this kind of, like Halo, and it’s becoming more and more evident as my hair gets longer. And it’s kind of honestly, if I go to the hairdressers and I come out with a really short style. That’s why, because I’m just over it. It’s just really thick at the roots of about three inches, and then it just goes a bit fine at the ends. And that’s why, because it’s all growing back, and my hair will be a much thicker, beautiful mop, like it used to be before I had babies. I had babies, I can’t even remember how it felt so long ago.
Anyway, we digress. So that was the kind of talk about, preserve, removal, refine. What do you do? Do you preserve what you’ve got when it comes to your hair? Do you remove it and, like, get a nice pixie bob cut? Or do you refine it? Do you kind of add in some layers and keep the length? Like, but this can be interpreted in a marketing sense as well, and how you approach the way that you sell things in your business. Okay? Because your business probably isn’t broken, it just needs a little bit more of a strategy and a little bit more clarity.
So here’s what I think is actually going wrong, because I’ve sat with this, and I really like these three words, and so I thought I’d share it with you. And it’s really nice to think about that in relation to your business, I mean, and in relation to your hair, if that’s if that’s your jam. But I think when things are feeling a little bit off, especially in the health space, I think maybe your content isn’t landing the way that it used to. Maybe your growth is sort of slowed or plateaued, or maybe you just feel like you’ve outgrown where you are, and that’s okay too.
So, but I think we all assume that something isn’t working, and instead of having a look at it because you’re busy in the rats and mice of your business, you restart things, you scratch this offer, you change this around you, you know, remove a couple of things when I think, you know it’s important that maybe there’s a pivot in your messaging. I think that without understanding or making decisions like before actually understanding what’s actually working or what’s not working. I think that it’s important to refine and have a think about like, what, what is actually the issue here, is it the landing, how it’s not meant to is it, you know, the fact that your growth has slowed, or, you know, plateaued, or you’re not growing at all, or is it that you’re no longer that person that you used to be, and you’re moving into this direction, and that’s totally cool.
Do not stay stuck where you are. If you are moving in a direction that is different, I know that I have definitely morphed and changed into where I am now. I haven’t been the same. God. If I was the same now as what I was when I started my business, my business wouldn’t even be this name. It would be the old name that I had. And if you’re curious about what that was, just ask me in my DMs, but it would be the old name, and it’s like, no, I’ve had to refine, refine, refine, because I’ve also leveled up.
Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about is story and storyline. I have had a conversation recently as well, and this is why this stuck out so much to me in this book that a business owner said to me, like, I feel like I need to burn everything down in my business and start again. And when we actually sat down and looked at her business properly, we found that her best clients were coming from one specific type of content, and that her messaging was landing in certain areas and not others, and that one of her offers was converting really well, but she didn’t realize she couldn’t see it, and everything felt a little bit messy and a little bit all over the place, and that’s why the instinct and your gut is like, well, I need to start over again.
Okay? But instead, we did something different. We preserved what was working, we removed what wasn’t. We removed the noise and the messiness, and we created a nice funnel. Where it actually felt like there was a bit of a system and process in the back end, and we refined what had potential, okay, because sometimes all that needs to happen is just refine and reshape, okay? And within, you know, about a month, things started to move again. So about a month. So five to six weeks is how long it kind of takes for you to turn things around, especially when it comes to being a bit more visible. Okay, you can’t expect things to turn around in a week.
Consistency isn’t Oh, I posted every day for seven days. Or my marketing was, you know, I sent an email to my database once a week for the month. No consistency. It is a good six weeks of showcasing your zone of genius consistently, not once a week consistently. So that should look like pretty much every day, sorry to say it. But, you know, with the help of AI, with your brain as the driver, okay, you are the expert, not the intern, and we spoke about that last week or the week before. You as a driver. You can do that often, and you can have content running every, every day, for seven days, for six weeks, for the year, for two years, for three years, okay?
And I think once, once that kind of thing has happened and ticked over, okay, things start to change. And that’s just the way it is. Where your energy goes, okay, momentum flows where your energy goes, money flows. And that is just the law of the way people are attracted to you, and the way that the Universe works, okay, wherever you put your energy. And I’m sure you are listening to this. You are a business owner. You know that when you actually sit down and do the work and put in the energy, the results follow, okay?
Because you can’t just expect to grow a business without actually adding value to it and doing the work where your energy goes, momentum flows, and also money. Okay? The second, well, the third thing I want to talk about is preserving. Okay? We’re not talking about chilies or fruit or anything like that. We’re talking about business. And you know, when I hear the word preserve, I’m like, oh, what are we making today? But let’s break this down. Okay, so preserving is where the strategy actually starts. Okay? What is already the thing that is working in your business? What is the thing that we need to preserve?
What is the thing that we need to keep? What’s working and what content gets engagement? Okay, I don’t know if you go back and have a look at your stats across your social media, what performs the best? That’s the thing that you need to keep doing. And what conversations are you having that lead to clients, what offers that you have converted the best and what messaging feels really natural and clear. Okay? They’re the things that you need to preserve. There are always signs, all right. And smart business owners don’t ignore them, all right.
They lean into them, and then they build from there and preserve what works, because you’ve already done the work right and now, you’re just building on that. That’s the thing that gets it. That gives you leverage over anything else. Is preserving and then growing on that. Okay? So think about what that looks like in your world, and start to grow from that the third word, obviously, is removed. Okay, so this is the part where momentum is either created or lost, all right? And then we give it a bit of a snippety, snip, snip, we remove it. What’s creating friction? Not necessarily people are buying but it could be, what’s creating friction for you?
What do you feel like? It’s hard work? You don’t have to always lean in, even if, you know, I know business owners definitely have the mentality of, you know, it’s I can do whatever. I can do everything. I can do anything I set my mind to, even if it’s hard, I’ll just make it work. Sometimes the thing that’s creating the friction just needs to be removed. You don’t necessarily. You don’t need to be wading through thick mud in order to get to the other side. Just cut it. Cut it off, remove it. Get rid of it. And actually focus on what is working or create something else that would work with messaging that does align to the people that you want in your world. Okay, so it is okay to remove the friction. It’s okay to cut loose those dead ends.
Cut it off, cut your hair off, if that’s how it feels. And then. And same as with your content, when it feels forced, I think it drains you, okay? And it also drains your audience because they’re confused about who you are and what you do. So if you can’t articulate that, well, there’s no chance that your audience is going to be able to do that either. It’s confusing, okay? In layman’s terms, it’s very confusing.
And it’s confusing when your offers aren’t aligned, and then you keep mixing things up and changing things like people are confused, and especially with the amount of, you know, marketing that we’re we are, that are pushed on us every single day, as soon as we step out of our house, you know, you drive down the street and you’ve got bus shelters, you’ve got signage on shops, you’ve got billboards, you’ve got busses, public transport coming past you with all sorts of shit all over it.
And then we jump on our social media, and we’re, we’re given another array of endless, like, reams of content, and the show goes on, and then you listen to podcasts that are laced with ads, and it’s like everything that your ideal client ingests just makes it that little bit harder for you to cut through. And so if it’s not aligned with you, if it feels like it’s friction, it probably is for them too, and they’re going to skip straight past it. So removing what doesn’t work helps to create heaps more space for you, and then that space helps you to create more clarity in actually what you want to talk about, who you serve, who you help, and what you want to achieve in your business.
The next thing is refining. Okay? And this is the part that people skip, because this is the part that they think they need to burn down their whole business when they don’t Okay, this is the part where growth actually happens. And I don’t think it’s through massive changes. You don’t need to have something like a revelation to be able to refine something. It’s not drama or dramatic, but I think it’s the small little things that you can do to just tweak, tweak messaging, tweak creative, tweak your positioning, just refine that. Improve an offer, change the wording around simplifying your strategy is just refining. And you know, refining something is the beautiful thing in life.
Okay, when something is refined, it’s usually associated with being very beautiful, like a luxury brand, luxury spaces, luxury places, luxury vehicles, they’re refined. And what does that look like for you? Have a think about it. And over time, what that does is create some serious momentum, and that is a beautiful place to be in. Now that is the end of this podcast, and I wanted to leave you with a few things that I think are important. I think that you don’t need to start over. I think that you need to evolve. I think you need to pay attention to what’s working and what’s not. I think you need to adjust and tweak the things that you have and make them smarter to land where your audience are at.
Okay, so think about this in a really logical sense: what is your ideal client googling? And does your business answer that question on the other end, it’s that simple, okay, people are looking for clarity. They’re looking for trust, and they’re looking for somebody who feels certain in what they do, and I think that’s a nice thing to be close with. So if your business is feeling off right now, don’t start over. Okay, start paying attention. Okay, listen in to what people are saying, all right, and be honest with yourself about what’s not working, and refine what actually matters. So if you want help to do that properly, that’s exactly what my VIP days are designed for.
We step back, we look at your business clearly, and we work through what stays, what goes, what gets refined, refined. Okay, what’s preserved, what’s removed, and what’s refined. So you leave with a strategy that actually moves things forward, not backwards. You can find a link in the show notes, or just send me a DM in Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn, wherever you hang out the most. I am on those platforms every single day. I’d love to chat with you. You might get a voice message from me back, which I also love. That is it my friends, my beautiful friend, because you are the only one listening with me in your ears right now. So have the best rest of the day. And if you have any questions, just holler. I’m very approachable. All right. Bye for now.
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