Rebuilding a Business in Public: What I'd Do Differently

Bottom line: rebuilding a business in public got me back on my feet, but I made it slower and more expensive than it needed to be by mistaking sympathy for strategy. If I started again tomorrow, I'd post less about my feelings and a lot more about my pipeline, and I'd hire help six months earlier than I did.

The five years that took the business apart

Between roughly 2019 and 2024, three things hit my business at once: the speaking and events income I'd built for a decade dried up almost overnight, a long term business partnership ended in a way that cost me money and clients, and my own health took a hit that kept me off the road for the better part of a year. I'd spent years being described as a top social influencer, on Forbes lists, with followings across LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook well into six figures combined. None of that paid a single invoice during that stretch. Audience size and income are two completely different assets, and I found that out the expensive way.

I didn't have a rescue fund and I didn't have an agency behind me anymore. So I did the thing a lot of people in my position do: I started posting the truth about what was happening, partly because it felt honest and partly because I couldn't afford a PR person to spin it for me. That's the bit people don't say out loud when they talk about "building in public" as some noble transparency movement. For a lot of us it isn't a philosophy. It's what you do when the alternative costs money you don't have.

What rebuilding in public looked like

It wasn't a grand relaunch. It was one LinkedIn post in early 2022 where I wrote plainly that revenue was down more than 60 percent from my peak year and that I was rebuilding the consultancy from scratch with AI and digital marketing work instead of speaking fees. That post got over 400 comments, the biggest response I'd had in years. It also got me exactly two paying clients directly, and both of those came from people who messaged me privately, not from anyone commenting publicly.

That gap between public response and private revenue is the thing I underestimated for the first eighteen months. I kept measuring the wrong thing. I'd check comment counts and reactions like they were a scoreboard, when the only number that mattered was proposals sent and contracts signed. I got better at posting effectively on LinkedIn as a business owner around month ten, once I started treating each post as a conversation starter for DMs rather than a performance for an audience.

The Facebook group I should have closed a year earlier

I'd built a Facebook group years before with close to 15,000 members. During the rebuild I kept pouring time into it because it felt like an asset. It wasn't, not for revenue. Engagement had dropped to a few dozen active people a week, and I was spending four or five hours a week moderating it for almost no commercial return. I finally sat down and worked through the actual math of whether a Facebook group or a Facebook page made more sense for the business I was rebuilding, and the honest answer was neither, not at that size, not with that engagement rate. I archived it in month fourteen. I should have done it in month two.

Where I wasted the first eighteen months

Three specific mistakes cost me the most time.

• I treated vulnerability as a strategy instead of a starting point. Posting about the hard years built trust, but trust alone doesn't close deals. I needed to follow every vulnerable post with a specific, concrete offer within 48 hours, and for most of that first year I didn't.
• I kept every old service on the price list. I was still quoting for social media management and old style influencer campaigns at 2018 rates while the market had moved on to AI strategy and implementation work worth two to three times as much per project. I didn't retire the old offers until month sixteen.
• I did everything myself for far too long. No assistant, no bookkeeper, no one helping with proposals. That meant every hour I spent on admin was an hour I wasn't pitching.

The step by step version of what turned things around, in order, looked like this:

• Month 1 to 3: stopped chasing old clients and old service lines, wrote down the three problems I could solve better than almost anyone (AI adoption for small business, LinkedIn visibility, and content systems), and said no to everything outside those three.
• Month 4 to 6: rebuilt my offer around AI consulting and implementation, because that's where every conversation with prospects was already heading anyway.
• Month 7 to 9: started using ChatGPT and similar tools inside my own workflow, not just talking about them, so I could show clients real before and after numbers instead of theory. I've written up some of the AI workflows that moved real numbers in my own business for anyone who wants the specifics.
• Month 10 to 12: hired a part time assistant for eight hours a week, which freed up roughly six hours a week for me to spend on pitching and proposals instead of scheduling and invoicing.
• Month 13 to 18: closed the Facebook group, raised prices by around 30 percent, and stopped posting daily in favour of three strong posts a week.

What I'd do differently, in plain terms

If I were starting this rebuild again from scratch, here's the order I'd change it in.

• I'd separate the story posts from the sales posts completely. One does trust, the other does revenue, and mixing them made both weaker.
• I'd get help sooner. Not because I couldn't do the work, but because doing everything myself meant I was always twelve months behind where I should have been. If money was the block, I'd have taken on a fractional AI consultant relationship the other way round, as the client, to shortcut a year of trial and error into a few weeks of setup, because that's what it would have saved me.
• I'd audit what my business looked like to AI tools much earlier. By 2024, prospects were asking ChatGPT for recommendations before they ever searched Google, and I hadn't structured my site or my content to be findable that way at all. I only sorted this out once I understood why ChatGPT had never heard of my small business in the first place, which was a wake up call I wish had come in year one, not year three.
• I'd track revenue per hour of visible effort from week one, not comments or shares, because that's the only number that tells you if the public rebuild is working or just feeling like it's working.
• I'd raise prices earlier and more often. I was still pricing like a business in crisis long after I'd stopped being one, out of habit more than necessity.

I've written the fuller timeline of that first eighteen months, including the specific posts and the figures behind them, in a separate piece on what I would do differently rebuilding in public, for anyone who wants the granular version rather than the summary.

What I'd keep exactly the same

I would still post the numbers. Naming the actual drop, the actual months without income, the actual rate I charged for my first AI strategy project back in 2023 (which was less than half what I charge now) built more trust in six months than a decade of polished content had. People don't remember your carefully worded case study. They remember the year you said things were bad and then showed them what you did about it.

I'd also keep experimenting with AI tools in front of an audience rather than behind closed doors. Showing the messy first draft of a ChatGPT prompt that didn't work, then the fixed version that did, got more engagement and more client questions than any polished tutorial I've posted. There's a good overview of what tools like ChatGPT are being used for in business right now if you want to see where most of that value sits in 2026.

The part most people skip

Here's the bit that's uncomfortable to say plainly: rebuilding in public worked for me partly because I already had a recognisable name and a Forbes listing behind me. If you're starting from zero followers and zero reputation, posting your struggles publicly won't get you the same response, and pretending otherwise does a disservice to anyone reading this hoping that vulnerability alone is a growth strategy. It isn't. It's a trust accelerant on top of work you still have to do. The posting didn't rebuild the business. The clients, the delivery, and the referrals did that. The posting just made people willing to take my call.

Frequently asked questions

Does rebuilding a business in public work?

It can work for building trust and getting warm introductions faster than cold outreach, but it rarely converts directly into sales on its own. In my experience the public posts opened DMs and calls, while the actual closing happened in private conversations, proposals, and referrals, not in the comments section.

How long does it take to rebuild a business after a serious setback?

For me it took roughly two years to get back to a stable, full time income, with the first year spent mostly clearing out old service lines and pricing, and the second year spent on the offers and systems that made money. Your timeline will depend on how much of your old client base and reputation you can still call on.

What should I post if I'm rebuilding my business publicly?

Alternate clearly between story posts that build trust (what went wrong, what you learned) and offer posts that state plainly what you sell and who it's for. Posting only one or the other either builds sympathy with no sales, or sales pitches with no trust behind them.

Is it a mistake to be this open about business struggles online?

Only if you never follow the openness with a concrete next step. Being open about numbers and setbacks built more credibility for me than years of polished marketing did, but only because I paired every honest post with a clear offer or a clear ask within a day or two.