Almost Shut It All Down. Here's What Changed Her Mind.

I want to introduce you to Laura Kleber. Laura's been in the Inner Circle for more than five years. She's owned her business, My Home Matters, for even longer than that. And two years ago, she was seriously questioning whether to keep going.

If you're in that place right now, staring at your numbers and wondering what the heck you're doing with your life, I want you to sit with Laura's story. Because I don't think what she did is the most important part, I think how she got there is.

What "struggling" actually looked like

A couple of years ago, Laura's business was a subscription box for home decor, plus individual pieces she sold on the side. She was showing up. She did a live show every month, sometimes more. She had proof of concept.

She just never had enough of it.

She'd gain a few subscribers, lose a few. The box itself was heavy, literally and mentally: buying product, assembling it, packaging it, and never quite having enough subscribers to know if this was a real business or just something clogging up her house and her head. She was making money, technically. Just enough to pay everyone else.

And underneath all of it sat something a lot of us don't say out loud: guilt. Laura had accumulated business debt, and that debt colored everything. She told me she felt like she was draining money from her family. Stomping around mad about it. Telling herself that if she had a real job, she'd be contributing something. All while some part of her still believed she had something real here.

“In my gut, I just knew I wasn't ready to give it up. I had a gut feeling: you just need to go all in, be intentional, be consistent, and see what happens over a period of time. That's when I made the decision, and that's when everything changed.”

One of our Inner Circle coaches, Chantal, gave her a piece of advice that turned out to be the first domino: pause the subscription box for three months. Don't decide anything. Just sit with what it feels like not to have it.

The relief Laura felt was immediate. She still felt guilty about the customers who loved that box. But the relief told her everything she needed to know.

The unexpected thing that gave her clarity

While she was still running My Home Matters, part-time and overwhelmed, she went through her own health transformation. It went so well that she became a certified health coach, helping other people do the same thing. And it worked. She started making real money. Enough to pay off the business debt she'd been carrying.

She told me something that's stuck with me: 

Getting physically healthy gave her the clarity to make hard decisions everywhere else in her life. Once the debt was gone, so was the biggest stressor she'd been carrying. And once that stressor was gone, she could finally look at My Home Matters without panic in the driver's seat.

That's when she made the real decision: go all in, be intentional, be consistent, and see what happens.

Why "just try harder" was never the problem

Laura told me something I want every one of you to hear: "I graduated second from the top of my class. What the heck is wrong with me?"

We all think this. We know we're not stupid. We solve problems every day. So why does this feel so hard?

Here's what Laura landed on: 

It's so hard to take the emotion out of a business decision, because the business is your baby. You built it from nothing. But the moment she learned to separate the emotion from the data, everything changed, because that's exactly the skill she'd already built in her health journey. 

Look at the numbers. Decide what's next. Do more of what's working. Change what isn't. She just hadn't been applying it to her business yet.

The pivot that actually worked

Once Laura settled into consistency, last fall, everything started to move.

It started with Reels. Simple footage of her making a project, mostly her hands, not her face. No big production. She filmed on weekends. She kept showing up, even when it felt slow, because she'd heard me say it a hundred times: don't try something for two weeks and quit. Give it real time.

It took a few months before the first reels started catching on. Then a couple of them got shared. Then shared again. Then the algorithm started doing what algorithms do when something takes off, and her page went from stuck around 25,000 followers for years to roughly 80,000 since last fall.

But the follower count isn't the real story. The real story is what she built her content around.

Laura found her hero product almost by accident: iron-on napkin techniques. 

Once she stopped trying to be everything to everyone and let one thing become the center of her business, her whole world simplified. Her email flows, her website, her social content, all of it started pointing back to one clear thing. 

New beginners started finding her page specifically because they'd never seen the method before. People started tagging her in decoupage groups, telling friends to go check out My Home Matters.

That's the part I want you to take with you. It doesn't matter what your product line looks like. Having one hero product that all your roads point back to is how customers find you and remember you.

What her business looks like today

In May, Laura did roughly 475 orders. She hired a high schooler to help pull and pack orders so she could stop being the one filling every single one. She's watching her Reliable Revenue numbers daily now, and for the first time, they don't make her want to cry. They're fun to look at.

She told me she feels more confident, clearer, more in control of her own decisions. Her average order value still needs work, but she's not panicking about it anymore. She knows she'll get there.

What's next

I asked Laura what she wants the business to look like a year from now, and her answer was simple: predictable revenue without her constant involvement. Working smarter, not harder. Fewer hours spent filling orders at what amounts to a fifteen dollar an hour job, more time built around the parts she actually loves, which are the connection, the lives, the reels.

She's solved the sales problem. Now she's solving the next one: how does this business work for her, instead of the other way around.

If this is you right now

Laura's advice for anyone sitting where she was two years ago:

Make the decision. Draw the line. Go all in, not on everything, but on the one main thing you want to build around. Point your social, your emails, your content all back to it. Be consistent even when it feels like nothing's happening yet, because it probably takes longer than you want it to.

And be honest with people. Laura still writes handwritten thank yous with her orders, not because she has to, but because she doesn't want to be "a company." She wants to be a person people choose to buy from again.

If you've got debt weighing on your decisions, or guilt about the time and money you've put into something that isn't working yet, know that this business doesn't have to be the thing that solves that today. Find another way to relieve that pressure if you need to. But if you keep showing up for the thing you believe in, you might be surprised what a year of consistency can do.

Laura still shows up in the Inner Circle, even on the weeks she doesn't say much, because she knows what it's worth. That's where I'll see her next. If you want to follow along with what she's building, find My Home Matters on Facebook or visit shopmyhomematters.com.

RELATED LINKS:

This Artist narrowed her focus, and quadrupled her sales https://www.thesocialsalesgirls.com/blog/this-artist-narrowed-her-focus-and-quadrupled-her-sales-episode-317

The habits I see that lead to success https://www.thesocialsalesgirls.com/blog/the-habits-i-see-that-lead-to-success-episode-311

Create a Successful, Stress-Free Video Strategy https://www.thesocialsalesgirls.com/blog/create-a-successful-stress-free-video-strategy-episode-276

How a Maker Scaled Her Sales and Replaced Her Teaching Salary in 4 Months https://www.thesocialsalesgirls.com/blog/how-a-maker-scaled-her-sales-and-replaced-her-teaching-salary-in-4-months-episode-327