"Consistency" is bad advice
Consistency in business has less to do with how often you show up and more to do with how clearly you describe what you do. Plus a PS for the messy days.
Post every day. Show up every week. Never break the streak. It’s some of the most repeated advice about consistency in business, and I’ve started to wonder who it was written for.
The week it assumes you have
“Be consistent” assumes a calendar you control. It assumes the school run doesn’t clash with a client call, nobody needs you at short notice, and this Tuesday looks roughly like last Tuesday.
For plenty of people running a business, that perfect, predictable week doesn’t exist. If you care for children, or parents, or anyone else, or your own brain works in bursts rather than a steady line, you can’t promise what you’ll have the capacity for on any given day.
The advice never changes though, so when it doesn’t work for us we blame ourselves. We decide we lack discipline, when the rule was designed for someone with a very different life.
BTW if the concept of non-existant 'perfect weeks' strikes a chord, pop over to read my child and my client teamed up against me.
What consistency in business should actually mean
I don’t think the daily post or the weekly email is what makes a business feel steady. What does is people being able to say, in one sentence, what you do and who you do it for.
The clients I’ve seen get steadier are the ones who stop reinventing how they talk about their work every few weeks, with a new offer, a new angle and a new way of packaging it, and start saying the same clear thing in the places they already show up. (Like Nina who simplified her business offers and was booked months ahead within three months.)
That kind of repetition survives a bad week: the message you’ve said 50 times keeps working while you’re away from your laptop.
Say the same thing about your business until people can say it for you.
A different question
Instead of asking how you can post more consistently, try asking what you can say so clearly, and so often, that other people start saying it for you. It’s a smaller job than the advice tells you to do, and it fits into a life you can’t predict.
PS. If you’re in one of those weeks, you don’t have to hide it. Some days there’s so much unpredictable chaos around you that even opening your laptop feels like too much, and it’s fine for your LinkedIn or Instagram community to know that. They’re running businesses around real lives too, and the right ones won’t think any less of you for it.
