The Deep Dig Podcast Episode: The One Where Tracy Stanger Talks Doing Business Your Way Guest: Tracy Stanger (she/her) Host: Bridget Baker (@bridgetbakerbranding) Find Tracy: Instagram @tracy.stanger | tracystanger.com Episode Overview Tracy Stanger — business coach, questioner, and future author — joins Bridget for a wide-ranging conversation about rejecting the "right way" to run a business, building your offers and marketing around your actual personality, and why the most radical business move might be simply doing things your way. What We Cover The Current Mood Tracy opens by admitting she's pissed off — and that anger is fuel. She's been deep-diving into off-grid living (voltage, amperage, food storage), questioning every system in business, religion, and government, and channeling all of it into her upcoming book, The Most You Business Book. The Business Guru Cycle The conversation digs into a frustrating pattern: big-name coaches selling you "the secret to business" — then years later telling you everything they taught you is now dead, and selling you the new secret. Sound familiar? Bridget and Tracy compare it to fashion trends: everything cycles. Knowing that frees you from chasing it. Personality Typologies as a Tool (Not a Box) Tracy uses frameworks like Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies, DISC, Clifton Strengths, and the Enneagram in her work — but not as rigid labels. She's a Questioner (Four Tendencies) and an Enneagram 1, and she's clear that these tools shift over time based on stress, life circumstances, and growth. The point is to use them to find your way, not to lock yourself in. The Work Tracy Does Her offer, The Space You Want, includes: Most You Biz Space — her entry-level community, built around the Sort, Purge, and Organize course The Junk Drawer — a small cohort format for working through it together 1:1 Coaching via Voxer — async, on your schedule, because she's never wanted to do 10 Zoom calls a day (or any, really) The Voxer model wasn't just a workaround — it was a deliberate choice made when she had a one-year-old and couldn't reliably be anywhere at a specific time. And it turns out her clients love it for the same reason: when you're in the middle of a crisis, you don't want to wait until Thursday's call. Why "Sort, Purge, and Organize"? Think of it like a home organizer coming to your kitchen. You pull everything out, look at what's actually in there, and figure out what you've been hiding in the garage that you wish you had space for. In business terms: what are you actually doing, what do you actually want, and what revenue do you actually need to support the life you want — not the life a coach told you to want. The 10K/Month Trap Both Bridget and Tracy push back on the default metric of "make 10K a month" (or 7 figures, or now apparently 8 figures). Tracy's work helps people figure out their number — which might be $3K, might be $15K — and then reverse-engineer an offer and a marketing approach that actually fits. One client realized she only needs to sell 7 of her premium offers per year. That's her scaling strategy, and it energizes her. What AI Can't Do Tracy is openly not into AI. The conversation gets into why: AI can handle the checklist-style coaching that's already too formulaic to be valuable. What it can't do is hear the change in a client's voice when they're in their luteal phase, or notice that the panic spiral at 11pm is cyclical, not a sign to burn the business down. On Writing the Book Tracy has always known she'd write a book. The motivation: she got pissed off that the business book she needed didn't exist. The Most You Business Book is meant to be the antidote to generic business advice — a guide to building offers, marketing, and daily work around who you actually are, not who the gurus say you should be. Living Like You're Already Retired Tracy's been saying since college that she wants to live like she's retired — not waiting until 65 to enjoy her days. The conversation unpacks what that actually means: not quitting work, but building work that fits your life, not the other way around. Quotes to Remember "F**k you to the way business is done — building your offers, your marketing and sales, and literally what you do each day, around you." — Tracy "Or just don't do that shit to begin with. We don't have to pay someone else to do it if it's a thing that doesn't need doing." — Tracy, on the VA-and-AI trend "When you do the thing that is you, it calls in the right people." — Tracy "Life is too short." — Tracy's friend, at 29 Resources & References Mentioned Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies framework (Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, Rebel) DISC personality profiles Clifton Strengths (StrengthsFinder) Enneagram The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss (and why Tracy has feelings about it) The Devil Wears Prada (the cerulean sweater scene, specifically) Tracy's Sort, Purge, and Organize course inside of the Space You Want Tracy's upcoming Dream Days exercise This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedeepdig.substack.com
