Hitting ~$330K should've felt like a win. Instead, it revealed the real bottleneck: complexity.
In this episode, Austin talks about how pruning services, projects, and obligations—less, but better—created the space for saner, more sustainable growth. You’ll get the tomato-plant metaphor (shoutout to Grandmother Martha), insights from Katelyn Bourgoin (“What should you stop doing?”), and even an Apple-style reset moment.
Plus, Austin walks through a practical 7-step Subtraction List to help you focus on the work that actually moves the needle.
(Feel free to grab the free worksheet under Resources)
What You’ll Learn
- Why “more” often makes things worse
- A simple metaphor to decide what to cut
- How world-class companies used subtraction to win
- The exact 7-step process to simplify your business now
The 7 Practical Steps
- Take inventory
- Find keepers (money, freedom, satisfaction, impact)
- Compare results (what to double down on / stop)
- Cut fluff (Do / Defer / Delegate / Delete + first actions)
- Make a Don’t List (keep distractions from creeping back)
- Create rules (avoid default yes—protect your best work)
- Record decisions (build confidence and course-correct faster)
Resources & Links
- Grab the Subtraction List Worksheet: https://bit.ly/SubtractionListWorksheet
- Apply to the Freelance Cake Community: https://freelancecake.com/community
- Katelyn Bourgoin’s Twitter thread on subtraction: https://x.com/KateBour/status/1620795412641718318
Notable Quotes
“Once you reach a certain point, complexity blocks further growth.”
“Complexity is that sneaky saboteur in the kind of successful but exhausting freelance business.”
Transcript
00:42 If your business is too complex with too many services and offers, if you're being pulled in too many directions because you have too many priorities, if deep down you know that adding more won't solve the core complexity problem and only scary but necessary pruning is the answer, then I encourage you to listen to this episode about growth by subtraction.
My name is Austin L. Church. I'm the host of the freelance cake podcast. I'm the founder of the freelance cake community, which connects advanced freelancers to each other, as well as to the right resources and advice. In this episode, I'm going to tell you about how I grossed over $330,000 in 2023 and why that ended up being a turning point in my business, but not in the way you would think. I wasn't throwing fistfuls of cash into the air and thinking, watch me dance on the table. No, I was thinking, something has to change. I can't do that again. 2023 was a little confusing, also very exciting. My consulting and coaching business grossed over $330,000. That extra income enabled my wife and me to pay off her business line of credit, to pay off a new HVAC unit that we had to put in, and to also pay off some lingering debts from house projects after we moved into a new house, we were debt free.
02:27 Again, yay, and it felt like the opening line from the novel by Charles Dickens, a tale of two cities. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. It was the age of foolishness. In case you're wondering, here's what I did in 2023. Finished free money, hired developmental and line editors and readied the book for publication with Tilt Publishing and Lulu Press. Started and finished one-on-one coaching engagements with advanced freelancers lasting six months, each of them. Did various one-off clarity sessions and custom business roadmap engagements. Created and launched seven new playbooks, which I put together in the advantages bundle. Did various one-off branding strategy and consulting engagements served as a guest expert for Paulins private community, kept my commitments for various brand sponsorships and juggled three to four fractional CMO engagements at a time. get tired even just reading that list off. So 330k was a new record for me. It was my best year yet. Why was it as Charles Dickens said also the age of foolishness?
03:55 My business was super complex. had too many offers, too many relationships, meetings, projects, priorities, tasks, expectations, messages, processes. My clients were mostly, I'll put mostly in quotation marks, mostly happy, but I wasn't doing the fractional CMO work at the level of rigor and discipline that I wanted. I was hacking away at my family's debt. Sure.
04:25 But could I really say that I loved the way my days looked, my calendar looked? No, as revenue grew, so did complexity. Complexity is that sneaky saboteur in the kind of successful but exhausting freelance business. Mine became one of those. Complexity makes it hard to notice, prioritize, focus, execute.
04:56 As a result, complexity also makes it hard to measure, diagnose, iterate, improve. Once you reach a certain point, complexity blocks further growth. What if I had only exclusively focused on selling and delivering world-class fractional CMO engagements? Or what if I had launched my book the way it deserved to be launched with more of my focus, more of my creativity, more of my time. Or what if I'd gone all in on business coaching, one-on-one coaching with freelancers? There was no way any part of the business could grow as quickly while I was spreading my attention across 11 other interests, projects, lines of business. Sure, it was cool to hit my goal and set a new personal record by the end of 2023.
05:52 But by the end of 2023, believe it or not, that 330k was already spent. How was that even possible? And I was left thinking, can't do that again. That's when I was finally ready to embrace a different strategy, one that I had known about for years. Here it is. Growth by subtraction, less but better. I'm going to tell you exactly what I mean by that. But first I want to tell you about my grandmother Martha's vegetable garden. My first lesson in growth by subtraction came from my maternal grandmother, Martha. She grew up on a small farm in Fayetteville, Tennessee, about 12 miles north of the Alabama state line. And by the time she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where I grew up, she always kept a vegetable garden because Martha AKA grandmother was basically my favorite person in the world. When she would go out to work in her garden, I would follow her. I might get put to work, but that was OK because working with grandmother was more like play than labor. Grandmother was and still is this kind lit up laughing person. One job I could do was pinch off suckers.
07:18 For those of you who aren't familiar with tomato plants, no garden in the South is complete without tomato plants. And grandmother showed me how in the crooks or the splits where a vine would meet a stem or a stem would grow out of a vine in those V shaped crooks, little sprouts would appear. These new sprouts she called suckers and she explained that we needed to pinch them off. Why did we need to pinch them off? Well, when left alone, suckers would keep growing and they would take up the water and the nutrients that should have gone to the tips of the bigger, more established vines, the bigger, more established stems. That way there, the water nutrients could become flowers and the flowers would then become tomatoes. So for an inquisitive kid like me, pruning tomato plants seemed backwards, counterintuitive. How do you get more tomatoes when you have less plant? I was in math class, but I certainly hadn't learned addition by subtraction. Grandmother always came up with the proof later, though she would have these mounds of beautiful red tomatoes, more than enough to share with her daughter's family, my family, and all the neighbors. You pinch off the suckers, get higher yields. Right you are, grandmother. So let's go back to growth by subtraction. What does it mean beyond pinching off suckers? What is it? Oh, it's exactly what it sounds like. Your business will grow faster after you cut parts of it. You cut services and offers. You cut markets or audiences. You cut marketing strategies and tactics. You cut platforms and activities. You step away from commitments and responsibilities. You don't pursue certain relationships and opportunities. You turn down certain projects and client requests.
09:40 You reduce decisions and distractions. You RSVP no to most events and meetups. You say no a lot more often. It's only by taking out your pruning shears or your, your pinching fingertips and saying no a lot more that you will clear out all the stuff with less potential and concentrate, concentrate all of that time and attention and resource on your best opportunities. You start doing less, but better. You always knew you were smart, talented, very capable. And once you create the environment where you can put all of your focus into only one or two best opportunities, it's only then that you will see the results that you always dreamed about.
10:36 I'll share a couple of concrete examples before I give you some practical ways you can embrace this growth by subtraction principle. Example number one, Katelyn, I'm going to mispronounce her name, Bourgoin, B-O-U-R-G-O-I-N. Sorry, Katelyn, I should have looked up pronunciation before I started. Anyway, in February of 2023, a Canadian marketer named Katelyn B. Let's go with Katelyn B. posted a Twitter thread about her business growth. It started with this tweet and I quote, my little one person business made $127,305 in January. How? Subtraction. There it is. Growth by subtraction. Later in that same thread, she talks about the default response that most of us have, which is adding more. I'm gonna quote the tweet again. Addition rarely solved the root problem in the business. It just created new ones. When I became a new mom in 2021, I knew something needed to change. I only had 10 to 15 hours a week to work. Adding wasn't an option. I had to do less but better. Katelyn goes on in another tweet in the thread to share four specific things she stopped doing that paid off before she ends with the right question to ask. After years of hunting for a silver bullet that would propel my business growth, it turns out that I was asking the wrong question. Don't just ask, what should we do? Ask yourself, what should we stop doing? In summary, don't do more, do less but better.
12:30 I to pause for a second. Let that sink in. Doesn't that last line fill you with hope? Don't do more, do less, better. In early 2024, coming out of my record year, knowing that I couldn't do the same thing all over again, I stumbled across this tweet and I thought, that's got to be right. I know that's right. I knew in my bones that growth by subtraction was the way forward for me, I knew that the underlying principle had always been true and I just needed this thread on Twitter to remind me of what my grandmother had taught me decades before in her garden. Strategic subtraction produced superior results for Katelyn. It could produce superior results for me. Example number two, Apple. You knew what was coming, right?
13:29 Oh, it's always Apple. Anyway, one of the more famous stories about growth by subtraction unfolded after Steve Jobs returned to Apple in July 1997. So just to take you back to that point in time, Apple had roughly 350 active products and projects. Jobs, when he came back, described the product strategy as a quote, mess. That was at Macworld in August 1997. And over the months that followed, he and this product designer, Jony Ive, developed what is now their famous two by two product matrix, consumer versus professional, and then desktop versus portable. So they developed this matrix and by the next year, by the middle of 1998, Apple, had cut 97 % of their product and project lineup. They only had 10 products. So they went from 350 projects and products to 10 products. Now you might be thinking, that probably took some guts. That's neat. But listen to what happened with their numbers. So in 1997, the year that Steve Jobs returned, the company had 7.1 billion in revenue in the fiscal year, but they lost $1.04 billion. It was the worst fiscal year in company history. However, the next year in 1998, Apple had an eye popping turnaround. This is crazy. So they went from 1.04 billion in losses to $309 million in profit in a year. Revenue rebounded to $6.1 billion in 1999, and then the profits kept climbing from there. Strategic subtraction produced superior results for Apple. Could strategic subtraction produce superior results for you? I think so. So at this point, you might be wondering, How can you embrace this principle? I'm going to give you seven practical steps. It won't take me very long. Then we're going to close. Step number one, take inventory, write down all of your projects, services, products, ventures, commitments, responsibilities. Step number two, find keepers. Most of us want more money, freedom, satisfaction, and impact. We want all four, not just money, but all four.
16:25 So go back to each item in the list that you just made, write any of those four, money, freedom, satisfaction, and impact that apply next to each item in your list. And then circle, I know this is a real complex exercise here, but circle the items in your list that have a clear and high correlation to the business you want to build and the life you actually want to live.
16:56 So we can't always do what we want and get what we want. That's true. However, we can start to look for the things that we're already doing that do have a high correlation to the business we want and the life we want. It's easier sometimes to give up freedom or money or to sacrifice short-term satisfaction as long as we know we're headed the right direction for long-term impact, right?
17:26 So once you take a look at that list, it's usually pretty clear which things in your list are the keepers. That's what you circle. Step number three, compare results. You may want to keep certain services or continue in a certain direction with your business. And strategic subtraction would dictate that you look for ways to get better results with less effort. As you look at the things that you circled, you ask yourself what's working or what should I double down on? You also ask what should I stop doing? Once you identify the keepers, once you start to compare results between different items on your list, you'll know your keepers and you'll also start to zero in on what to subtract. That's step number four, cut fluff.
18:24 Now that you have clarity, you're going to have to find your courage. You're going to have to make some definitive decisions. What will you do? What will you defer or delegate? What will you delete? Write one of these words down next to every single item on your list. Do, defer, delegate, delete. Then you can write that action step next to each and every item on your list. So for example, one of your do action items might be email Suzanne to let her know I need to step down from the board. So your first set of actions should be those related to defer, delegate and delete so that you can free up time inventory to focus on your do list. Does that make sense? It will be easier to focus on your do list if you defer, delegate, and delete first. For example, in my freelance cake community, we did a monthly challenge in September of 2025. It was the most popular one we've ever done. And it involved making that subtraction list. We didn't say, hey, what really should you be doing with your time? We said, what should you not be doing? What do you need to subtract? Because that's how you come up with more time to do the things that really matter to double down on what's already working. right, step number five, I'll speed it up a little bit. List don'ts. Projects and commitments have a way of sneaking back in, don't they? As soon as you create some space, it's like nature abhors a vacuum and then suddenly all these new things try to take up the space that you just created. Anyway, while everything is fresh on your mind, going through this exercise, make a don't list capital D capital L. You've just gone to the trouble of eliminating distractions, you'll need to maintain your vigilance, create that don't list. Step number six, create rules. It is so easy to say yes. It's the default answer for most of us. So easy. Is it to say yes, that a Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist named Daniel Kahneman decided, I'm not going to make decisions on the phone anymore. He spent his entire life studying cognitive fallacies, studying decision-making. And even though he knew all of those cognitive fallacies, all those little quirks of human psychology, he still found himself defaulting to yes. And then later on he'd kick himself and he had come to regret enough of those yeses that he realized the only way to avoid them was to make a rule about it. Instead of relying on his own clear thinking and willpower in the moment, he just made a rule. I don't say yes on the phone. So in order to shore up your resolve to do less, I would encourage you to follow Daniel Kahneman's example and rely on rules. Maybe one of your rules is no last minute client projects. Like if the project has a deadline that's 48 hours or less, it's an automatic no. Or maybe a new rule is no projects with a budget of less than $1,000 or $5,000. You may need to have a new minimum engagement so that if a client comes to you and they're like, hey, we'd love to work with you. We have a budget of $2,000. You say, I'd love to work with you too. Unfortunately, my minimum engagement is $5,000.
22:16 And that's just a rule. It's automatic. It's an automatic. No, maybe you need to set a rule that you have no meetings before 11 a.m. so that you can actually protect your best creative time in the mornings and spend it on writing and building your authority online. Create rules. That's step number six. Step number seven. Record decisions. Strategic subtraction led me to the decision to go all in on freelance cake.
22:46 If you're wondering, okay, what happened with Austin in 2024 after he decided he couldn't do a repeat of 2023? Well, what happened was me thinking, I need to grow by subtraction. What am I going to keep? And I decided I wanted to keep freelance cake and I wanted to do less fractional CMO work. Well, the thought of not proactively pursuing FCMO engagements scared me. Like I've always relied on service income. I didn't know what it would look like even to go all in on the creator side of my business. My wife pointed out something important. She said, well, can't you always go back to consulting? And I realized, yeah, that's true. But the crux of it was here was this thing I'd always dreamed about. What if I really went after it and it didn't work. What if I swung for the fences and I whiffed? We can what if ourselves straight into paralysis? I had to acknowledge my fear and then I made a point of keeping a decision journal. When we're afraid, when we're anxious, we start to second guess ourselves. I wanted a clear record of my thought process and of my decisions that I could return to on the days when I would inevitably second guess myself so that no matter how I was feeling on any given day, I could trust the methodical, sensible thought process that had led me to that point. And if I was misjudging something, I'd have an easier time pinpointing it. Okay, that's the last of the seven steps.
24:42 Record decisions. Let me offer a quick summary before we close. If you're like most advanced freelancers and consultants I've spoken with and worked with, your business is too complex. You offer too many services. You have too many priorities. You get pulled in too many directions. Adding even more stuff to your plate isn't going to solve the core complexity problem and get you the growth that you want. So my friend, figure out what your best opportunity is right now. Take out the pruning shears, courageously cut the rest. It took courage for Katelyn to grow by subtraction. It took courage for Steve Jobs and Jony Ive to cut 97 % of Apple's product and project lineup. You have to start saying no a lot. That takes courage. But if you can find your courage, strategic subtraction will produce superior results for you the same way it did for Apple, the same way it did for Katelyn, the same way it did for my grandmother's tomato plants, and honestly, the same way it's doing for me right now.
26:07
Before you go, let me invite you to join our community for established advanced freelancers. It's called the Freelance Cake Community. One member named Michelle had this to say, quote, I'm just so impressed by the quality of the conversation that's happening in the group. The in-depth questions, experiments and thoughts being shared are just so refreshing. In the other communities I'm a part of, it's all beginner questions, which is fine, but it's awesome to find a more advanced space where it's okay to ask more advanced questions. Each week in the community, we do live group coaching and live coworking. You get access to a massive resource library and the community itself, which is hosted on Circle. Of course, the people are the best part of the community. People like Michelle. It really helps to surround yourself with smart, accomplished, and optimistic people who are taking risks and getting results. So visit freelancecake.com forward slash community to learn more and apply. You can find that link in the show notes. I hope to see you there.