George Blackman

A business that worked. George couldn’t see it.

From the outside, George had built something unambiguously successful. His Scriptwriting Playbook was selling, the Pro community had members renewing, and his free email course kept bringing new subscribers in. Revenue was real. Customers were getting value. He had every right to feel good about it.

What he couldn’t do was answer the questions that started to matter as the business got more complex. How were people actually finding him? What path were they taking from the email course to the flagship to the community? Were the right buyers ending up in the right tier? And the big one. What had he quietly overbuilt that he was now paying for?

“I’ve just kind of lost track of what my business looks like, what my funnels look like, where the holes are. I just couldn’t picture it from a macro.”

This is the version of stuck that doesn’t look like stuck. The business is moving, the products are working, and something still feels off.

The fear underneath the success

Two weeks of quiet sales had George convinced his payment processor was broken.

“I was genuinely convinced that Zapier was broken or Lemon Squeezy was down or something. I was like, why is no one buying it?”

His second instinct was darker.

“What if the course gradually just dips in revenue, and what are the things I could be doing, and how do I stop it from dipping?”

When you can’t see why something is working, you can’t protect it. You can’t repeat it on purpose, and every good month just feels like luck. That fear sits underneath a lot of education businesses that look fine from the outside.

George needed someone who could look at the whole machine from the outside and tell him what he couldn’t see from the inside.

Replace guessing with real customer insight

Before we touched a single offer, I asked George how often he sat down with his existing customers to understand them. Not support requests. Not community office hours. Structured conversations about why they bought what they did and what almost stopped them from moving forward.

His answer was honest. Almost never.

So I wrote him a customer interview script built specifically around the Scriptwriting Playbook audience. It covered how buyers first found him, what was happening in their lives when they decided to get serious about scripting, and what new problems showed up after they implemented his work.

He ran the calls, got the transcripts, and together we analyzed them for patterns. The result wasn’t a single big revelation. It was a vocabulary. The words his buyers actually used. The triggers that brought them in. The specific modules they kept pointing to as turning points.

“Multiple people had mentioned taking [competitor’s courses], and either preferring mine or at most refunding the other one but sticking with my thing. Which felt really good, because I think I have a lot of imposter syndrome around this stuff.”

He had been operating under the assumption that he was the alternative to the bigger names in the space. His customers told him the opposite. They had tried the bigger names. Some had refunded them. They had kept George’s.

That kind of data doesn’t show up in your analytics dashboard. You have to ask for it. And you have to know which questions to ask.

Map the offer, not just the course

With real signal from customers, we zoomed out and laid every one of George’s offers on the table. The course. The Pro tiers. The free email course. The newsletter. The small products. Every entry point. Every path.

I walked him through what I call the Offer Map, my way of looking at a business across ten parts. Most of my clients have never seen their own business laid out that way. George hadn’t, and it immediately showed him what he was missing.

The picture that emerged was revealing. He had a strong core (the course and the Pro community) with very little structure around it. No order bumps. No post-purchase upsells. No structured downsell for buyers who weren’t ready for Pro. No deliberate surprise moments designed into the experience. The product was good, but the architecture around it was barely there.

We weren’t trying to overwhelm him with what was missing. I wanted him to have a clear list of opportunities he could either ignore for now or design against. The biggest one stood out immediately. Go from no bumps and upsells at all to a clear way to earn more from the customers he already had.

Turn the funnel into something you can see

The map gave us a picture. The next job was making it a living document, not a one-time exercise.

We built a simple revenue model in a spreadsheet. Not projections. Just the actual numbers. Units sold at each tier. Average order value. What changed if a small bump went in at checkout. Then we made a visual funnel map. Nothing fancy. A clear diagram showing where people came from, how they entered George’s world, what they saw next, where the community was presented, where the small products sat in relation to the main offer.

By the time we were done, George had a single place he could look to answer a question that used to take him an hour of digging across five tools. How does someone go from stranger to Pro member in my world?

“I feel like now I can picture it from a macro, and that’s really relaxing because that was a major stress for a long time, feeling like I just lost control, lost my grasp on everything.”

Build paths between what you already have

The reflex when growth slows is to ship something new. We did the opposite. We looked at what George already had and built deliberate paths between the pieces.

A path from the free email course to the Scriptwriting Playbook, so the on-ramp actually led somewhere. A path from Playbook to the Pro community, so buying the course felt like the start of the relationship instead of the end of it. A path from a 6-month Pro membership to the 12-month tier, with a plan for when and how the upgrade conversation happened.

We also took a hard look at what kind of high-touch work George actually wanted to do. After modeling a few options, he realized that live one-off calls to stare at scripts on Zoom drained him. Asynchronous feedback, where he could sit with someone’s draft and respond on his own time, felt sustainable. That insight shaped how any future premium offer would be designed. He could build around what he could deliver confidently for years, not what he could grind out for a quarter.

From dead ends to a real roadmap

At the start, George’s checkout was simple. You bought the course. You got the course. That was it.

By the time we finished, he had a clear roadmap for earning more per customer and keeping them around longer. We also moved the first upsell much earlier in the journey.

The work wasn’t picking what to build. It was putting what already existed in the right order, at the right moment in the buyer’s journey, at the right price. Boring and mechanical? Yep. But it was the most valuable work we could have done.

Treat partnerships as a channel, not a bonus

George already had real relationships with prominent creators in his niche. His name was getting mentioned in the right rooms. What he didn’t have was a system for what happened when their audiences crossed paths with his work.

We designed one. We figured out:

• How his course could sit inside someone else’s funnel
• What a guest session needed to do to bridge naturally back to Scriptwriting Playbook
• What a partner landing page should say so someone arriving from outside felt immediately seen

George was already the script guy inside other people’s worlds. His business just needed to be ready to catch and serve those students. With that in place, we built a predictable flow of leads instead of the occasional pleasant surprise.

The result

There’s a moment near the end of our engagement that I keep coming back to. George was talking to me from a busy garden cafe in England. In the middle of all the action, he said this:

“I feel like now I can picture my business, and that’s really relaxing because that was a major stress for a long time, feeling like I just lost control, lost my grasp on everything.”

Now George knows where his customers are coming from, how to engage them, and how to reliably create offers that sustain his business long-term.