Campfire Chronicles Vol 9 -We went to the Bat Cave.
I’m going to be honest with you.
Last week, Alex and I took our quarterly adventure to the Bat Cave to work on our business. Two days locked in a co-working space with Alex, running our own methodology on ourselves, coming out with a completely overhauled brand, an updated website, a new service structure, and more than a few uncomfortable realizations about how far our own positioning had drifted.
So, I had a whole Bat Cave newsletter ready to go. It was going to be a good one.
And then April happened. Clients needed us. Projects hit crunch time. Deadlines showed up like they always do — without warning (that’s how they work, right? No warning?) and without apology – not the least of which was Alex’s looming vacation.
So, the newsletter that was supposed to go out about how we finally did for ourselves what we do for clients… got bumped by the actual work of doing it for clients.
Which is, I realize, a very on-brand problem to have.
The cobbler’s kids are finally getting their shoes. They’re just not quite laced up yet.
Here’s what I can tell you: big changes are coming. The new site is almost live. We’ve put words (and a name!) to the way we work. The service pages actually reflect…well, our services. We retired some language that was quietly filtering out the right clients and attracting the wrong ones.
The full story — including what we found when we audited our own brand and what actually changed — is coming in the next issue.
But I didn’t want to just… not show up. So while you wait, here’s the exercise that started the whole Bat Cave conversation.
The Keep / Kill / Combine Exercise
Before Alex and I could rebuild anything, we had to figure out what was worth keeping. Most businesses never do this — they just keep adding (she says, ironically side-eyeing the old STWS service listing with 90 SERVICE ITEMS). New services, new offers, new content lanes, new tools. The pile grows. The clarity shrinks.
The content strategy genius, Katelin Tiernan, introduced me to this exercise when we were putting together our recent workshop, “Make It Make Sense,” and it’s a keeper.
It takes about 30 minutes, and it will tell you volumes about the state of your business.
Here’s how it works:
Pull up your full list of services, offers, or content types — whatever you’re actively doing or selling right now. Then sort everything into three columns:
KEEP — This is generating revenue, energy, or both. It fits who you’re becoming, not just who you were. You’d be annoyed if someone asked you to stop doing it.
KILL — This is draining you, underpriced, or attracting the wrong people. You keep it out of habit or guilt, not because it’s working. You know, deep down, it needs to go.
COMBINE — These are two things that are basically the same thing, or two things that only work when they’re together. Stop selling them separately.
The rule: be brutal. “Fine” goes in Kill. “It’s not that bad” goes in Kill. “Somebody might want it someday” goes in Kill.
When we did this in the Bat Cave, we killed seventeen service offerings, combined a bunch of others, and immediately felt the kind of clarity that makes you wonder why you waited so long.
The things that stayed? They’re the things the new site is built around.
Try it. Then hit reply and tell me what went in the Kill column. I’m genuinely curious — and I promise not to judge. We killed a bunch of stuff that were genuinely great business offerings….for someone else. Nobody is innocent here.
More soon.
Pull up a log,
Cari
