Ep: 23 Behind the Scenes of Scaling a Service Business Without a Team (My 2025 Breakdown)
“The quantity of low-ticket will always feel sexy, but the impact on your revenue is not the same.”
Emylee
If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like to grow a service-based business in real time, this episode is basically me opening the books, pulling out the receipts, and walking you through the messy middle of it all. I am a big believer in radical transparency. The data, the decisions, the pivots, the wins, the “what the hell was I thinking” moments. All of it matters, especially if you’re building a business rooted in done-for-you, done-with-you, advisory, productized services, and the entire offer ecosystem that goes along with it.
This year stretched me in all the best (and most annoying) ways. I evolved my containers, finally dialed in the structure of Sold Out Services, split my business into two intentionally aligned brands, pulled visibility levers that actually worked, and looked at so much damn data I might start dreaming in Airtable formulas.
If you’re building a sustainable, scalable, freedom-based service business, this breakdown is going to hit home.
What You’ll Hear in This Episode
How I stopped saying yes to every project and started making strategic, data-driven decisions
What I learned from working with 70 clients this year
How my advisory container evolved into its current productized structure
Why I finally split my business into two brands and how I keep them from cannibalizing each other
The visibility moves that actually paid off (Threads, networking communities, features)
The real data: revenue spikes, dips, average client value, and what I’m doing with that information
What my low-priced offers taught me and how they’re impacting my ecosystem
The mindset and operational shifts that made 2025 feel solid, grounded, and aligned
The Season of Saying Yes (and What It Taught Me)
When I left my previous company in spring 2023, I didn’t have the luxury of sitting down to beautifully map out what I wanted my “next era” to be. I was pushed into it. My husband and I both found ourselves jobless, and I had to replace my six-figure salary fast.
So in late 2023 and all through 2024, my strategy was simple: say yes, learn fast, stay solvent. I was someone’s EA, someone’s OBM, someone’s project manager, someone’s tech support, and for a hot second I even took a sales job.
But here’s the nuance I want service providers to understand. Saying yes isn’t the problem. Saying yes without paying attention is.
Every project taught me something about:
my ideal client
my ideal scope
what I love doing
what I will never touch again
where my genius zone actually lives
what should cost way more than I used to charge
Those lessons became the foundation for how I rebuilt 2025.
When the Container Starts Forming Itself
By spring of 2025, I started seeing patterns. The same client problems. The same roadblocks. The same questions. I was repeating myself constantly. That’s how I knew an offer was emerging.
What began as a one-on-one advisory container (previously priced at 5k–9k) turned into the early version of Sold Out Services. I tested it as a hybrid model, priced it around $4,500, ran a launch, and brought in nine clients.
And immediately I saw what wasn’t working:
They didn’t want group calls
They still needed (and expected) a lot of one-on-one
The done-for-you pieces were too heavy
It wasn’t scalable past nine people without me burning out
That launch was a giant gift. It showed me exactly what needed to evolve.
The Summer of the Great Rebuild
I spent the entire summer and fall tearing SOS down to the studs and rebuilding it with intention.
I looked at every deliverable and every module through one lens:
What is the 10% of this process that moves the needle the most?
If my clients want to scale simply, without adding team or burning themselves out, then every touchpoint in the program had to actually support that outcome.
So I:
refined the methodology
rebuilt the playbook
added frameworks, scripts, templates
identified the checkpoints where my feedback matters most
removed anything that caused unnecessary back-and-forth
extended the container to a full year so clients can marinate, implement, and iterate
Then I relaunched in November and welcomed 13 clients. It felt aligned, doable, sustainable, and scalable. Finally.
The Great Brand Split: Creatives Catalyst vs Sold Out Services
Halfway through the year, I realized I was accidentally running two brands under one roof.
My high-level consulting clients (TEDx speakers, NYT best-selling authors, high-level consultants) needed one thing: deep, behind-the-scenes digital ecosystem building.
My SOS clients (service providers and agency owners) needed something entirely different: productization, positioning, neuro-backed messaging, and a more structured pathway to scale.
So I separated everything:
Creatives Catalyst → consulting, referral-based, high-ticket, system-heavy, retainer-friendly
Sold Out Services → productized, structured, built for service providers scaling sustainably
Different identities, different problems, different content, different capacity planning.
The separation brought clarity instead of chaos.
Visibility Actually Paid Off (Finally)
This was the year I reintroduced myself to the internet. Not the co-founder identity, not the past brand, but me.
My visibility strategy was simple:
join two high-caliber communities (Entrepreneista and Dreamers & Doers)
show up on Threads consistently
apply for features
say yes to interviews
share my work publicly
That work led to:
Forbes features
writing for Business Insider
winning Best Consultant from Entrepreneista
paid speaking opportunities
clients directly from Threads
podcast interview swaps that turned into revenue
Visibility paid off mid-year because visibility always pays off months later.
Let’s Talk Data (The Part You Came For)
Here’s the 2025 breakdown:
Total Clients: 70
Three were $11 generator purchases, so 67 real hands-on clients. That number still shocks me.
Average Client Value: $2,988.91
Just under 3k per client on average.
ACV has been huge in planning 2026 because I now know exactly how many clients I actually want to take on.
Quarterly Trends:
Q1: Huge spike (over $45k)
Q2 & Q3: Dips
Q4: Shot back up
The Q3 dip also happened in 2024, so now I know it’s a pattern, not a problem.
Revenue by Offer Type:
By count, the top three were:
Clarity Lab
Consulting
Sold Out Services
But by revenue:
71% consulting
20% SOS
3.5% low-ticket digital
under 1% audits
This is the perfect example of why low-ticket is not a business model. It’s a side dish.
Year-over-Year Revenue Growth: 11%
That’s solid, sustainable service-based growth.
Chapters
00:00 what I’m covering in this recap
02:25 how I track my numbers with my sales hub
05:10 the throw-spaghetti season and what it taught me
08:45 how the early version of SOS took shape
11:55 the rebuild that changed everything
16:40 the marination era and client pace
20:12 relaunching SOS and bringing in 13 clients
22:05 visibility that worked
27:00 threads, podcast guests, and unexpected conversions
29:15 the brand split between consulting and SOS
33:57 the referral ecosystem behind consulting
35:52 capacity planning for 2026
38:18 the low-ticket offers and what I’m paying attention to
40:44 total client count and ACV
43:02 quarterly sales patterns
47:55 monthly revenue trends
51:36 product-type revenue breakdown
56:31 year-over-year growth
59:00 final thoughts and looking ahead to 2026
Resources & Mentions
Interested in Being on the Show or Working with Emylee?
Are you a service provider with a bold perspective to share? Apply to be a guest.
Ready to transform your service into a productized, scalable offer? Apply for Sold Out Services.
If you’d like to see a library of all published episodes in a gallery with easy-to-find links to all listening platforms be sure to check out the Sell The Damn Service Episode Library.
