There comes a point in many online businesses where what used to work no longer feels quite right.
You are still good at what you do. You still have experience. You still know your industry. But the way you have been positioning yourself, marketing your offers, or even thinking about your business starts to feel outdated, misaligned or too broad for where you are now.
For a lot of business owners, that moment can feel unsettling. It is easy to wonder whether you need a full pivot, a complete rebrand, a whole new niche, or whether you are simply in a temporary wobble. But often, what is really needed is something more nuanced. Not a total reinvention, but a clearer repositioning. A return to what you do best, expressed in a way that better reflects the market you are in now and the stage of business you are in now.
That is why this conversation with Meg Laner felt so important.
Meg is a content and messaging strategist for coaches and service providers, and like so many established business owners, she has been through multiple iterations of her business over the years. From social media management, to coaching, to broader business mentoring, to the sharper and more specific positioning she holds today, her journey is such a powerful example of what it looks like to evolve with intention instead of panic.
And layered into all of that is motherhood.
Because building a business before becoming a parent is one thing. Building a business during motherhood is another entirely.
Why so many established business owners are rethinking their positioning
One of the most interesting parts of this conversation was how clearly it reflected what so many established online business owners are experiencing right now.
A few years ago, especially during the height of the pandemic, it was much easier to gain traction with broader positioning. The online space was growing quickly, audiences were highly engaged, and many people could build successful businesses being known as a business coach, a social media expert, or an online mentor without needing to get too much more specific than that.
The market feels different now.
There are more business owners. More service providers. More coaches. More specialists. Buyers are more discerning. They have seen more, bought more and experienced more. They are not just looking for someone good. They are looking for someone who feels precise.
That means many business owners who grew quickly in earlier seasons are now reaching a stage where they need to refine how they are seen. Not because they are no longer talented, but because the market now rewards clarity, specificity and strong positioning far more than it used to.
Meg spoke so well to this shift. She talked about how easy it once was to be more general, and how much harder it has become to stand out that way now. She also spoke honestly about her own experience of realising that while she still offered many things within her work, she needed to become known for one thing in particular if she wanted demand and momentum to build again.
That shift changed everything.
Repositioning is often less about changing everything and more about owning one thing properly
There is a big difference between a pivot and a reposition.
Sometimes businesses do need a true pivot. A full change in audience, offer, niche or model. But sometimes what is needed is much smaller and much more strategic.
A reposition often means saying, out of everything I do, what is the thing I want to be known for?
That was Meg’s turning point.
Rather than continuing to speak broadly about all the different things she could help clients with, she sharpened her message around one core result. Being in demand. Being in demand through your content, messaging and positioning.
That did not mean she suddenly stopped being able to help with anything else. It meant she gave the market a clearer hook. A clearer identity. A clearer way to remember her.
And the speed with which things shifted after that is a reminder of how powerful clarity can be.
People who had followed her for years started reaching out. Conversations picked up. Enquiries increased. Her one to one work filled. Her group program sold out. But most importantly, she felt aligned again.
That part matters.
Because good positioning is not just about better marketing. It is often about feeling reconnected to your own business.
Momentum rarely comes back instantly, but that does not mean it is not working
One of the most useful things Meg shared was how tempting it was to question the whole decision in the early weeks.
This is where so many people go wrong.
They make a change to their messaging. They shift their positioning. They start repeating a new idea. Then they look for instant proof. If it does not land immediately, they assume they have got it wrong.
But the reality is that good messaging often needs time to compound.
Your audience needs time to hear it. To recognise themselves in it. To connect it to the problems they already have. To repeat it back to you. To trust it.
Meg described that first month as feeling slow and uncomfortable. She was showing up, posting consistently, talking about the new direction and still not seeing immediate fireworks. It would have been very easy to interpret that as failure.
Instead, she stayed with it.
That is such an important lesson for anyone building demand.
Most people quit in the dip. They start something new, hit the uncomfortable middle where it does not yet feel validated, then abandon it before momentum has had a chance to build. They go back to the drawing board, change direction again, and end up stuck in a cycle of almost.
What actually creates momentum is repetition. Consistency. Letting people absorb what you are saying long enough for it to become associated with you.
The first response. The first DM. The first moment someone repeats your own language back to you. That is often the sign that things are starting to land.
But you have to stay in it long enough to get there.
Messaging is not a task to complete. It is a process of refinement
This was another brilliant point from the conversation.
So many people treat messaging like a one off exercise. They sit down, write some positioning statements, tweak a bio, maybe update a website, and think the job is done.
It rarely works like that.
Messaging is fluid. It evolves as your audience evolves, as the market shifts, and as you get more evidence of what resonates. The goal is not to get it perfect in one go. The goal is to get it clear enough to test, then refine from real responses.
Meg gave such a strong example of this. She started putting her new message out into the world, paid attention to what came back, noticed how people reflected it back to her, and then used that real language to strengthen the message even further.
That is how good messaging is built.
Not in a vacuum. Not in endless overthinking. But in action.
You decide. You share it. You listen. You refine.
That is very different from staying in the endless “working on my messaging” phase, where everything feels unfinished and nothing ever gets tested properly.
Motherhood changes your business because it changes you
Alongside the conversation about positioning and pivots was another layer that I know will resonate deeply with many business owners.
Motherhood.
There is something profound about building a business before children and then returning to that same business after becoming a parent. Even if the business itself has not changed, you have.
Your capacity is different.
Your tolerance is different.
Your boundaries are different.
Your ambition may still be huge, but the way you want to pursue it often changes.
Meg spoke very honestly about this transition. She talked about going into maternity leave already feeling disconnected from the direction her business was taking. Then, because pregnancy and postpartum did not go as planned, she found herself returning to work without the infrastructure or preparation she had hoped to have in place.
That is a reality many parents will recognise. There is often an imagined version of how maternity leave or parental leave will go, and then there is the actual version. The version shaped by health, exhaustion, babies, disrupted plans and real life.
Returning to business in that context can feel confronting.
But it can also create clarity.
For Meg, motherhood made it impossible to keep tolerating things that were no longer working. She did not have the time or energy to keep faffing with offers, weak positioning, or work that felt misaligned. It forced her to simplify. To prioritise. To stop adding more and start focusing on what actually moved the business forward.
That shift is worth paying attention to.
Simplifying is often more powerful than adding more
When business feels hard, many people respond by adding.
A new offer.
A new platform.
A new strategy.
A new funnel.
A new idea.
But very often, especially in seasons of limited capacity, what actually helps is simplifying.
That was one of the clearest lessons from this conversation.
Meg focused on one offer. One message. One direction. She stopped trying to market everything at once. She stopped spreading her attention across multiple priorities. She built the one to one side of the business back up first, got that working strongly again, then added the next layer.
That sequence matters.
There is a huge difference between scaling from strength and adding complexity before the foundations are stable.
Simplifying did not make her less ambitious. It made her more effective.
Ambition and motherhood do not cancel each other out
One of the most refreshing parts of this conversation was the honesty around ambition.
There is often a strange pressure on mothers in business to perform either relentless hustle or total softness, as if those are the only two options. But the truth is much more nuanced than that.
You can be deeply ambitious and still want a life first business.
You can care fiercely about your work and still care more fiercely about your family.
You can want scale, revenue and momentum without wanting burnout, a huge team or a business model that pulls you away from your life.
Meg spoke beautifully about this. About wanting her daughter to come first, but also wanting to work. About loving business. About wanting efficiency, not chaos. About wanting a business that supports her family without requiring her to become someone she does not want to be.
That is such an important reframe.
Ambition does not have to mean sacrifice in the way people often assume. It does not have to mean overworking, overcomplicating or endlessly expanding. It can mean precision. It can mean discernment. It can mean building a business that works for your actual life.
And for many business owners, especially mothers, that is the kind of ambition that feels the most powerful now.
What this conversation really comes down to
If there is one thread running through all of this, it is this.
Growth in business often comes less from dramatic reinvention and more from honest refinement.
Refining your message.
Refining your positioning.
Refining what you are known for.
Refining how you work.
Refining what matters enough to keep and what needs to go.
Sometimes that refinement happens because the market changes. Sometimes because you change. Often because both happen at once.
What matters is not whether your journey looks perfectly linear. It probably will not. What matters is whether you are willing to listen closely enough to notice what the next season is asking of you.
For Meg, that meant claiming a clearer message, sticking with it long enough for momentum to build, and rebuilding her business in a way that actually fits the life she is living now.
That is not just a business lesson. That is a leadership lesson too.
If you want to hear the full conversation with Meg Laner on pivots, positioning, momentum and motherhood in business, listen to the full episode of the Volume podcast.
