Dead end or part of the road.

The fourth cohort.

The fourth cohort was the strongest one I ever ran. Close to a record on the numbers I was tracking, a good group in the room, a few people in it I had wanted to work with for a long time. Somewhere in the middle of it I decided there would not be a fifth one, and that I was finished with group programmes.

Nothing had gone wrong. The system I had bought worked, it did what the person I bought it from said it would do, and I ran that cohort through to the end the way I had promised.

I just did not want to keep feeding the machine that filled it.

Copying someone who was doing well.

I started career consulting in 2022, on the side, after years as a hiring manager reading CVs from people who were very good at their jobs and could not get that onto a page. Towards the end of that year it occurred to me that this was worth saying to more people than the ones in my contacts. The Telegram channel went up in February 2023.

I had no idea how to build any of this, so I did the obvious thing. There was a woman whose work I had been following, doing well at the time, and she was the reason I believed this was something a person could actually do. She never taught me anything directly. I watched what she did and I copied it.

It worked. One-to-one clients came, first from my own network, then from the channel. After roughly a year I doubled my prices and nobody walked away. By the third year, people I had helped into a role were coming back to say they wanted the next step up, which told me more about whether the work held than any testimonial ever did.

Then I looked sideways. Everyone I was watching had moved into cohorts and group programmes, and my reason for wanting one was not noble. I wanted to teach the same thing once to a room instead of repeating it one client at a time, and to earn more money for every hour I put into it. I bought the scaling process from someone who had it running properly.

Designing the programme was the easy half. The material, the sequence, the structure were all sitting there from three years of doing it one person at a time. The other half was new to me. Advertising, a lead magnet, a webinar or a call, an offer, a close, then the whole thing again from the top. I worked off free resources at first and found a genuinely good programme on the sales side roughly six months in.

The first cohort launched at the end of 2024 and it felt light. All of that machinery was unfamiliar, so I could not tell whether I liked the work or just liked that it was new.

As far as I know, nobody from that first group had an offer inside the first nine to twelve months. Later cohorts went differently. Offers, a couple of people who moved to another country, others who took a new role inside their current company or moved somewhere else in their own market. Those messages were the whole reason I was doing any of it.

For a while I thought I had been selling something that does not work. I had cases of people following the material exactly and getting exactly what it promised, so when that did not happen the word I reached for was fraud. What I actually got wrong was smaller and less dramatic than that. I had underestimated how differently people take on a new skill, how much work it is on top of a full-time job, and how much of the outcome sits with someone being in it with you rather than being handed the tools and sent off. I was doing the same thing to myself at the time, running someone else's process and assuming that following the steps was the whole of the job.

By the fourth cohort, the funnel was the job. I was writing posts while counting how many people they needed to bring in and what the advertising was costing that week, and there was a slot in the calendar for a fifth cohort I had not built yet. Some people run this for years, some with a team behind them. With the setup I had, on my own, it was not sustainable, and I will not pretend it made no money. The delivery was still the best part of the week. Everything wrapped around the delivery had stopped giving me anything back.

January.

Because the decision landed mid-cohort, I finished the cohort properly and kept paying for advertising I no longer needed. I cancelled a contractor. I let my assistant go after about eighteen months of working together, and that was the part I hated.

By January this year I had nothing in the diary. No cohort, no one-to-ones, nothing lined up, because group programmes had taken almost the entire previous year and there was no quiet pipeline running underneath them. I had also moved markets and switched everything into English, so most of the people who knew my work could no longer read it.

From the outside, that is what a dead end looks like. A closed business, people let go, an empty diary, starting again in a language I had never sold in.

It was not one, and I know that from what I still had in my hands. Four cohorts of running my own advertising, writing my own funnel, making my own offers, sitting on my own calls. Three years before that of doing the work one person at a time. If I build something like it again, and I expect I will, I would run most of the same steps, with a far more grown-up understanding of why each one is there.

I do not file it as a mistake. It is a stretch of road that told me something about myself I could not have learned by reading about it, and I am glad I walked it.

The only part of the road you learn nothing from is the part you never walk. That is the one option with a guaranteed result. Everything else, including the things you close down yourself, puts something in your hands on the way out.

This week.

Seth Godin wrote a book called The Dip, and the useful part is the distinction in it. Some hard stretches are a dip, where the difficulty is exactly what keeps everyone else out and the only way past it is through. Others are a cul-de-sac, where you can push as hard as you like and the road does not go anywhere. He does not hand you a test for telling them apart. Neither can I, because I do not think a reliable one exists.

What I have instead are two signs, and both come from the inside rather than from the numbers. The first is that it is genuinely hard and you still get something back from what you produce. Hard is not the signal, hard is the price of anything worth having. The second is that seeing the result gives you energy instead of taking it. My fourth cohort had the best numbers I ever posted and looking at them did nothing for me.

So, this week. Take whatever you are calling stuck and ask whether the road has ended or whether it has turned back through ground you have already covered. If it has turned, write down one thing you are carrying now that you were not carrying the first time you came through here. That is the part that decides how fast this stretch goes.

Until next Saturday, Vitalii

Find me on LinkedIn. You're reading The Next Move — a weekly newsletter by Vitalii Lavelin.
​