2026 is the year of ecosystems, not funnels

Transcript

Welcome to Meaningful Work, Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach,  trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Camargo people here in Sydney, Australia.  In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do.  

We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.  

It’s summertime here in Sydney right now, which means it is hot. It is hot and it is hard to focus. It is hard to motivate myself. It means that I want to just see my friends. I want to go to the pub. I want to shoot the breeze. I want to swim, go to the beach. I don’t want to do anything in a hurry.  

I kind of walk a bit more slowly. Sometimes I get a bit excitable or even a bit manic in summertime, especially if I’m not sleeping as well as I can do when it’s cold. The world works in seasons, right? We have seasons, we have orbits, we have ecosystems. 

So if you don’t know what an ecosystem is, and I had to kind of remind myself, do a quick Google search.

It’s a community where living organisms interact with each other and their non-living surrounds. So it’s, you know, it’s basically a system made up of pieces where everything is forming a functional unit, otherwise known as a bubble of life, according to Google. 

So if you think about it, families are ecosystems, communities are ecosystems, neighborhoods, streets, businesses are ecosystems, and especially business communities are ecosystems as well.

I also use the term ecosystems as it relates to offerings. So rather than call it an offer suite, I call it an offering ecosystem because all the kind of moving pieces of the puzzle fit together. And when I think about offerings ecosystem, I also think about marketing as part of that. 

So let me explain a little bit further. 

If an offering is something that you could put a dollar figure to, then I want to produce marketing content that I could also put a dollar figure to. I want to put out Instagram carousel posts and Instagram reels and blog posts and podcast episodes and lead magnets, whether they’re a PDF download or a private podcast or a multi-part video sequence.  

I want to put out marketing content that is so good that I would happily, I would feel perfectly fine about putting a price tag against it because it’s valuable and it’s useful and it’s relevant to my people. 

So if the world works in ecosystems and seasons and orbits would changeable, you know, we are changeable creatures. We are animals. We are influenced by hormones, by environment, by temperature, by each other, of course. 

Then why do we still expect things in our business to be linear?

Why do we expect progress to be linear? Why do we expect our moods to be linear, our expectations and our emotions, our attitude towards our business to be linear? Why do we think our desires and our outcomes will be linear and predictable as well? 

So one thing that I have been focusing on a lot in 2025 and into 2026 is teaching offerings ecosystem. 

And I’m teaching this as a standalone thing. I’m running a masterclass on February 11, 2026. I’ll be running a live masterclass on this, a live workshop. 

But I’m also doing this inside of my Momentum mastermind teaching offerings, ecosystems and making sure that the offerings ecosystem, including your marketing pieces, including your lead magnets, particularly all work as kind of pieces of a puzzle where they kind of reinforce each other. 

Now this is quite a different approach to the way that marketing and online business has historically been taught. 

What we have been taught, especially in the last 20 or so years, is to think of an ascension model, where we have something free, we have something cheap, we have something mid ticket, we have something expensive or premium priced, and our clients or customers methodically and predictably ascend this ladder to the top. First with the free then the low priced, et cetera. 

Now this in my experience does not actually reflect reality. 

What reflects reality is that people come in and as people have done with me, they have Googled something. They’ve landed on my website. They’ve the first thing that they’ve ever purchased from me is $9,000. The next thing that they purchased is $147. Then perhaps they’ve gone away for a couple of years and they’ve come back and they purchased something for $2,000 and they’ve gone away for another year and they’ve come back and they purchased a $39 thing and then they’ve gone away again and they purchased a $10,000 thing. 

This is not uncommon in my business. People are not obedient and this is one of the kind of key principles that I’m talking about today. 

So the other thing that has been taught historically with online business and digital marketing is of course the funnel, the old funnel.

Absolutely, there is value in the funnel. And if, if I’m just going to very, very briefly give an overview of this, if you haven’t heard of what I’m talking about, or if you want a bit of a refresher. This has to do with people being cold leads. So they don’t know who you are, but they’ve clicked on an ad and now they’re in your funnel. And then you send them emails typically, but they might see other pieces of marketing content as well. And then they consider working with you and then they keep falling off the funnels getting narrower at the bottom. And then finally we have the hot leads at the bottom. And these are the people that are considering you or your client or your competitor rather. And then they purchase or they don’t purchase, those are the hot leads. 

So they go from cold to warm to hot. And if we think about this funnel through kind of stages of awareness. They go from the top of the funnel being unaware, they don’t really know, they’re kind of ignorantly blissful. They don’t know they have a problem to being problem aware where they realize something isn’t working and they’re starting to feel the friction in their life about this. To solution aware, there are ways to fix this. Product method aware, I know the various options available to me, including your options. So they’re looking at you and they’re comparing you with other alternative to being most aware or buyer ready. And in search engine optimisation, this is called buyer intent. When somebody’s searching for a dentist in Northbridge, then it’s pretty clear that they’re looking, that they’re intending to purchase, right? They’re showing purchase intent. So they’re down to the nitty gritty details at that point. 

And then I want to add another consideration, which is identity aware or self aware.

And this is very much, you know, for a lot of what I help clients do and for a lot of what I do myself, it is the self-aware buyer, the sophisticated buyer, the person who’s been around the traps, probably worked with other business coaches before. They’ve probably been in other masterminds or done other group programs before. And they’re looking for something very specific that reflects their aspirational identity.

So not the ugly parts of themselves that they don’t really like and are perhaps a little embarrassed about. Not their shadow self, unless they were specifically perhaps looking for some kind of program on shadow work, but their aspirational self, how they see themselves. People that kind of  are looking with their values in mind, they’re looking to have their values and their identity affirmed through their purchase to work with you.  

The problem of course with all of this, and again, I’m not going to say funnel’s a dead man, funnel’s a dead man. I’ll leave that to the other wankers. 

There’s value in all of this. All of this does have its place. There are stages of awareness. We don’t really want to spend too much time with unaware people who are completely clueless. I don’t want to manufacture problems for people that aren’t aware that they’ve got them. You know, I want to talk to people and I do talk to people who come to me normally because their husband, their wife, their business partner, their financial advisor, their accountant has given them the hard word and told them, look, you know, you really need to be making more money. You’re not making enough money. You need to make more money. And invariably they’ve been told to raise their prices.  And that’s when they reach out to me. 

They’re the people I want to work with, right? Because they’re kind of easier. I don’t have to do a huge educational piece.  I don’t need to, you know, bang my head against a wall and take them from one end of the political spectrum into the other end of the political spectrum. Yes, that’s possible, but it’s really,  really hard work. And I don’t want to work that hard.

So the difference between thinking about things as like a neat linear ascension model, a neat linear funnel versus the way that I do it, which is an orbit or a season or an ecosystem, is that people are not obedient and we do not make decisions in a rational way. We make emotional decisions and then we justify it to ourselves afterwards with rational facts. 

So people don’t move neatly through a funnel, they bounce. They do not go through your website in a linear, rational kind of a way. They jump into a page having seen no other pages. Hopefully it’s a sales page. Probably, hopefully it’s a sales page because you’ve optimised the sales page and you’ve written lots of blogs and recorded podcasts and perhaps videos and you’ve linked to those sales pages where relevant, so they should be ranking. 

I never delete a sales page even if I have no intention of selling that thing ever again, because they help people find my website. 

So people come in and they consume your content, including your email funnels. They’re not opening every email in that carefully structured, thoughtfully sequenced email funnel. Instead, they ignore some emails, they open others. Others they might read five times. Other emails they might just glance at or scan read. They click or they don’t click. 

They’re not looking for you in one place only. They’re not consuming all of your LinkedIn content. Hopefully, probably, they’re reading the occasional email from you. They are reading your LinkedIn posts on occasion. They’re seeing you on Instagram. They’re seeing you on threads. They’re seeing you on Facebook, maybe they’re subscribed to your podcast or maybe they just glance at the, you know, listen to the occasional podcast. 

So how does this affect you? How is this useful or practical or relevant to you? 

It is still very, very common. I still have conversations with people who say things like I’m thinking of starting an Instagram channel. I’m thinking of opening a LinkedIn. I think I might join this particular networking group or get myself on a particular board. And it’s clear and obvious to me that they’re still thinking of marketing as a very  one-dimensional linear kind of thing. And perhaps in some cases, they’re hoping to just crack the special, you know, extra amazing channel that’s going to bring them all the clients. They’re thinking about it in a real one-dimensional way. 

So it’s really important that we stop worrying about people finding us in a linear fashion, marching predictably through a funnel, consuming content the way that we’ve designed it to be consumed. And instead think about this omni-channel approach. This is what I’ve been teaching for a number of years now. You can download my Minimum Viable Marketing Plan where I talk about this. I’ve got lots of free training on the omni-channel approach to building your influence, to building your professional reputation. 

And what we can do of course, with this omni-channel approach, where we’re not just on one or two places, we’re in as many places as makes sense for us and our capacity. But we can help our capacity immeasurably by reusing and recycling our content. Being aware of course, that each channel will have its own particular nuances.

It’s very easy to cater to those little nuances and to rehome, rehouse, recycle our content. And especially in summertime, right? Especially when we’re, you know, camping and we’re on holidays and we’re by the water and we do not want to be sitting on our laptops. 

This is a great time for you to be going back into your body of content, your body of work and recycling that out.

The other thing to think about is we want to make our website binge worthy. This is a big one. If you want to be found on Chat Chippy Tea, if you want to be found on Google, if you want to be found on Instagram, if you want to be found on Siri, if you want to be found on Google, know, Hey Google, all these places search everything optimisation. 

Then you’ve got to take your website seriously. You got to stop putting all of your efforts into a channel such as LinkedIn or a channel such as Instagram and neglecting your website. Because your website is your home on the internet. And whether somebody finds out about your brand and then goes straight into your website or whether or not they’re flirting with your brand elsewhere and then they come to your website much later, regardless of which way they go, they’re coming there for information.

They’re coming there and you want to have hours and hours and hours and hours of content. You want them to be able to consume content in the way they wish to consume it, whether that’s audio, whether that’s video, whether that’s written. And of course, you know, we’re not going to be wonderful on all those things. We’re definitely going to be, our communication strengths will be, you know, tending towards one place or another. We can’t be amazing in all places and all formats.

But absolutely, definitely we can repurpose stuff. So for example, let’s pretend your focus is video. You can transcribe that video now for free very quickly using AI, using various software. And then you can also get a summary of that. You can also get it turned into an article. You know, so you can take content that starts off as video and turn it into audio and turn it into text.

But the point is if somebody lands on your website, they should be able to binge it. This is your body of work. If you want to be the go-to expert, you need a body of work to go to. And that body of work shouldn’t be in all the other places and your website is last. 

So when I Google your name or when I search for your name, I want your website to be referenced at the top. Yeah. You shouldn’t find your website on the third page of results. You want it to be that very first, you know, first half of the first page, top half of the first page. 

Your website is going to be the one stop shop where people can go and fall in love with you. And when I say fall in love with you, don’t get self-conscious now. I’m talking about falling in love with your ideas. Falling in love with your approach, falling in love with your framework, understanding the particular lens through which you approach your work and what makes that different from everything else that they’ve seen and heard and tried. 

So I hope this has been useful to you. I hope this has been useful to you. 

The way that people consume information is very different in 2025, to how it was in 2012. That is light years away. 2012 to 2025, we are talking about a different century. So we have to evolve and change our approach. We need to kind of, you know, keep up with the way that people purchase and the way that people act and the way that we build rapport online.

The way that we create parasympathetic, sorry, parasocial relationships with thousands of people and the way that we build influence so that people take action with our business. 

Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favour and write me a short review?  Your podcast review means so much to me and it helps other values-based business owners just like you  to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.