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The Deep Dig Podcast

Episode: The One Where Tracy Stanger Talks Doing Business Your Way

Guest: Tracy Stanger (she/her) Host: Bridget Baker (@bridgetbakerbranding) Find Tracy: Instagram @tracy.stanger | tracystanger.com

Episode Overview

Tracy Stanger — business coach, questioner, and future author — joins Bridget for a wide-ranging conversation about rejecting the "right way" to run a business, building your offers and marketing around your actual personality, and why the most radical business move might be simply doing things your way.

What We Cover

The Current Mood Tracy opens by admitting she's pissed off — and that anger is fuel. She's been deep-diving into off-grid living (voltage, amperage, food storage), questioning every system in business, religion, and government, and channeling all of it into her upcoming book, The Most You Business Book.

The Business Guru Cycle The conversation digs into a frustrating pattern: big-name coaches selling you "the secret to business" — then years later telling you everything they taught you is now dead, and selling you the new secret. Sound familiar? Bridget and Tracy compare it to fashion trends: everything cycles. Knowing that frees you from chasing it.

Personality Typologies as a Tool (Not a Box) Tracy uses frameworks like Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies, DISC, Clifton Strengths, and the Enneagram in her work — but not as rigid labels. She's a Questioner (Four Tendencies) and an Enneagram 1, and she's clear that these tools shift over time based on stress, life circumstances, and growth. The point is to use them to find your way, not to lock yourself in.

The Work Tracy Does Her offer, The Space You Want, includes:

Most You Biz Space — her entry-level community, built around the Sort, Purge, and Organize course

The Junk Drawer — a small cohort format for working through it together

1:1 Coaching via Voxer — async, on your schedule, because she's never wanted to do 10 Zoom calls a day (or any, really)

The Voxer model wasn't just a workaround — it was a deliberate choice made when she had a one-year-old and couldn't reliably be anywhere at a specific time. And it turns out her clients love it for the same reason: when you're in the middle of a crisis, you don't want to wait until Thursday's call.

Why "Sort, Purge, and Organize"? Think of it like a home organizer coming to your kitchen. You pull everything out, look at what's actually in there, and figure out what you've been hiding in the garage that you wish you had space for. In business terms: what are you actually doing, what do you actually want, and what revenue do you actually need to support the life you want — not the life a coach told you to want.

The 10K/Month Trap Both Bridget and Tracy push back on the default metric of "make 10K a month" (or 7 figures, or now apparently 8 figures). Tracy's work helps people figure out their number — which might be $3K, might be $15K — and then reverse-engineer an offer and a marketing approach that actually fits. One client realized she only needs to sell 7 of her premium offers per year. That's her scaling strategy, and it energizes her.

What AI Can't Do Tracy is openly not into AI. The conversation gets into why: AI can handle the checklist-style coaching that's already too formulaic to be valuable. What it can't do is hear the change in a client's voice when they're in their luteal phase, or notice that the panic spiral at 11pm is cyclical, not a sign to burn the business down.

On Writing the Book Tracy has always known she'd write a book. The motivation: she got pissed off that the business book she needed didn't exist. The Most You Business Book is meant to be the antidote to generic business advice — a guide to building offers, marketing, and daily work around who you actually are, not who the gurus say you should be.

Living Like You're Already Retired Tracy's been saying since college that she wants to live like she's retired — not waiting until 65 to enjoy her days. The conversation unpacks what that actually means: not quitting work, but building work that fits your life, not the other way around.

Quotes to Remember

"Fuck you to the way business is done — building your offers, your marketing and sales, and literally what you do each day, around you." — Tracy

"Or just don't do that shit to begin with. We don't have to pay someone else to do it if it's a thing that doesn't need doing." — Tracy, on the VA-and-AI trend

"When you do the thing that is you, it calls in the right people." — Tracy

"Life is too short." — Tracy's friend, at 29

Resources & References Mentioned

Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies framework (Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, Rebel)

DISC personality profiles

Clifton Strengths (StrengthsFinder)

Enneagram

The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss (and why Tracy has feelings about it)

The Devil Wears Prada (the cerulean sweater scene, specifically)

Tracy's Sort, Purge, and Organize course inside of the Space You Want

Tracy's upcoming Dream Days exercise

The Deep Dig Podcast

Episode: The One Where Tracy Stanger Talks Doing Business Your Way

Guest: Tracy Stanger (she/her) Host: Bridget Baker (@bridgetbakerbranding) Find Tracy: Instagram @tracy.stanger | tracystanger.com

Episode Overview

Tracy Stanger — business coach, questioner, and future author — joins Bridget for a wide-ranging conversation about rejecting the "right way" to run a business, building your offers and marketing around your actual personality, and why the most radical business move might be simply doing things your way.

What We Cover

The Current Mood Tracy opens by admitting she's pissed off — and that anger is fuel. She's been deep-diving into off-grid living (voltage, amperage, food storage), questioning every system in business, religion, and government, and channeling all of it into her upcoming book, The Most You Business Book.

The Business Guru Cycle The conversation digs into a frustrating pattern: big-name coaches selling you "the secret to business" — then years later telling you everything they taught you is now dead, and selling you the new secret. Sound familiar? Bridget and Tracy compare it to fashion trends: everything cycles. Knowing that frees you from chasing it.

Personality Typologies as a Tool (Not a Box) Tracy uses frameworks like Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies, DISC, Clifton Strengths, and the Enneagram in her work — but not as rigid labels. She's a Questioner (Four Tendencies) and an Enneagram 1, and she's clear that these tools shift over time based on stress, life circumstances, and growth. The point is to use them to find your way, not to lock yourself in.

The Work Tracy Does Her offer, The Space You Want, includes:

Most You Biz Space — her entry-level community, built around the Sort, Purge, and Organize course

The Junk Drawer — a small cohort format for working through it together

1:1 Coaching via Voxer — async, on your schedule, because she's never wanted to do 10 Zoom calls a day (or any, really)

The Voxer model wasn't just a workaround — it was a deliberate choice made when she had a one-year-old and couldn't reliably be anywhere at a specific time. And it turns out her clients love it for the same reason: when you're in the middle of a crisis, you don't want to wait until Thursday's call.

Why "Sort, Purge, and Organize"? Think of it like a home organizer coming to your kitchen. You pull everything out, look at what's actually in there, and figure out what you've been hiding in the garage that you wish you had space for. In business terms: what are you actually doing, what do you actually want, and what revenue do you actually need to support the life you want — not the life a coach told you to want.

The 10K/Month Trap Both Bridget and Tracy push back on the default metric of "make 10K a month" (or 7 figures, or now apparently 8 figures). Tracy's work helps people figure out their number — which might be $3K, might be $15K — and then reverse-engineer an offer and a marketing approach that actually fits. One client realized she only needs to sell 7 of her premium offers per year. That's her scaling strategy, and it energizes her.

What AI Can't Do Tracy is openly not into AI. The conversation gets into why: AI can handle the checklist-style coaching that's already too formulaic to be valuable. What it can't do is hear the change in a client's voice when they're in their luteal phase, or notice that the panic spiral at 11pm is cyclical, not a sign to burn the business down.

On Writing the Book Tracy has always known she'd write a book. The motivation: she got pissed off that the business book she needed didn't exist. The Most You Business Book is meant to be the antidote to generic business advice — a guide to building offers, marketing, and daily work around who you actually are, not who the gurus say you should be.

Living Like You're Already Retired Tracy's been saying since college that she wants to live like she's retired — not waiting until 65 to enjoy her days. The conversation unpacks what that actually means: not quitting work, but building work that fits your life, not the other way around.

Quotes to Remember

"Fuck you to the way business is done — building your offers, your marketing and sales, and literally what you do each day, around you." — Tracy

"Or just don't do that shit to begin with. We don't have to pay someone else to do it if it's a thing that doesn't need doing." — Tracy, on the VA-and-AI trend

"When you do the thing that is you, it calls in the right people." — Tracy

"Life is too short." — Tracy's friend, at 29

Resources & References Mentioned

Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies framework (Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, Rebel)

DISC personality profiles

Clifton Strengths (StrengthsFinder)

Enneagram

The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss (and why Tracy has feelings about it)

The Devil Wears Prada (the cerulean sweater scene, specifically)

Tracy's Sort, Purge, and Organize course inside of the Space You Want

Tracy's upcoming Dream Days exercise

Episode 1: The Business That Found Katy Miller

Welcome to the very first episode of The Deep Dig! And what a full-circle way to kick things off — my guest Katy Miller of The Miller Social is the person who had me on her podcast years ago, so it only felt right to return the favor.

Katy Miller is a learning experience designer who helps entrepreneurs turn their expertise into digital offers like courses, trainings, or product suites. She's the founder of The Miller Social and host of Katy Calls BS podcast. Katy is known for combining strategy, structure and her no BS approach. She's a single mom to two boys, can't start the day without coffee, and loves Taylor Swift.

Her top values are: Empowerment, Honesty, Innovation, Practicality, Motherhood or Parenthood, Respect, Education

In this conversation we get into all of it: burnout, boundaries, the winding road that led Katy from "I'm going to be a classroom teacher" to "wait, I forgot I have a master's degree," and why building a digital product might be the best business preparedness move you're not making.

What we dig into:

How Katy went from social media manager → strategy → course designer (and how burning out became the turning point)

Why she almost forgot she had a master's in instructional design — and what finally made her lean all the way in

The biggest misconception about courses: you can't just build it and wait for money to appear

Why the content isn't the problem — it's how your audience needs to receive it

The course platform conversation: you don't actually need one (yes, really), and if you do invest, what to look for

Why Katy considers digital products a "safety net" — and why you should build yours before you need it

Her personal anti-burnout stack: mental health runs, house projects as digital detox, and firm boundaries around access and weekends

Connect with Katy:

Website: themillersocial.com

Instagram: @themillersocial

Podcast: @katiecallsbs

My episode on Katy Miller's podcast aired January 22, 2024 on the Real Background of Branding.