The Quarter I Killed a Channel That Was Working
Most business advice about cutting things assumes the thing failed. That's the easy version. You try something, it produces nothing, you stop.
The harder call is the one I made earlier this year, when I shut down a channel that was actively working. Real money had come in. The deals were good. The people we landed were exactly the right fit.
I killed it anyway, and I'd do it again. Here's what happened and how I made the call, because this is the decision I see creators get wrong most often.
What we were going after
At the start of this year, HobbyScool went after two adjacent markets. Corporate wellness programs, where a company pays for creative sessions as an employee benefit. And corporate sponsorships, where a brand pays to be in front of our audience at a summit.
Both made sense on paper. We run twelve free three-day summits a year with thousands of registrations each. That's a real audience, and brands who sell to crafters want access to it. Corporate wellness was the same logic pointed at a different buyer.
Neither one comes to you, though. Both require going out and finding the buyer, which meant building an outbound operation: LinkedIn outreach, LinkedIn posting, Sales Navigator, and cold email where we'd research a brand's site and reach out directly. One person on my team ran it as his main job.
We did that for about four months.
The wellness side never got off the ground
Corporate wellness turned out to be a different sport than anything else we do.
The first problem was reaching the person who could actually say yes. You can find a lot of names at a company. Finding the specific human who owns an employee wellness budget, and getting that human to reply, is a different exercise entirely, and we burned a lot of hours on it.
The second problem was time. When we did get interest, it came with a calendar attached that wasn't ours. People would say yes, this sounds great, follow up with me in October. That's a genuine yes and it's also six months of nothing, and there's no version of that where you push it faster.
A long sales cycle isn't just slow. It's slow in a way you can't act on. When a lead says come back in six months, there's no follow-up that changes the answer, no offer that speeds it up. You just wait, while the hours you already spent sit there earning nothing.
The sponsorship side actually worked
This is the part that made the decision hard.
Sponsorships landed. We closed a few genuinely good ones, and the best example was a brand that sponsored our Art of Expression Summit for $3,500. That deal came from cold outreach, from finding their website and emailing them directly.
And it was a good deal for everyone. They brought five of their own speakers into the summit, and those speakers taught real workshops, watercolor sessions where they demonstrated the brushes the company sells. Attendees got a discount code to buy, and we drove opt-ins to a free gift the brand was offering.
Nobody was cynical about it. The audience got five extra workshops from people who knew what they were doing. The sponsor got demos in front of exactly the right buyers, plus a list. We got paid.
By any normal standard, that's a win. So why did I stop?
Because "it works" isn't the question
Here's the mistake I think most creators make. They evaluate a channel by asking whether it produced anything. If yes, they keep going, because stopping something that works feels irrational.
But that's the wrong question when you have one person to point at things. The right question is what the same hours would produce somewhere else.
Four months of one person's full attention got us a handful of sponsors and a wellness pipeline that hadn't closed anything. Meanwhile, the thing HobbyScool is genuinely good at, the thing the entire business is built on, was getting whatever attention was left over.
"A channel that works isn't automatically worth keeping. It's only worth keeping if nothing better could use the same hours."
Dr. Destini CoppThat's opportunity cost, and in a business with a few contractors it hits harder than it does anywhere else. A big company can run an experiment in a corner and barely feel it. When one person is a meaningful share of your total capacity, every project they're on is a project they're not on.
What I moved him to instead
I didn't cut the role. I pointed it at something else.
Same person, same skill set. Cold outreach, research, finding people who don't know us yet and getting them to reply. That's exactly what speaker recruiting is, so I moved him onto finding speakers for HobbyScool summits and Creator's MBA events.
Since then he's filled every event with 30 or more speakers.
Compare the two uses of the same person. Four months of corporate outreach produced a few sponsors and a stalled pipeline. The same effort pointed at speakers fills a summit lineup every single month, and every one of those speakers brings their own audience to a free event we then monetize through our own offers.
One of those feeds the machine we already have. The other was trying to build a second machine next to it.
The rule I use now
When I'm deciding what stays in a quarter, I stopped asking whether something is working and started asking two questions instead.
Whose hours is this eating?
Not what it costs in dollars. What it costs in the attention of a specific person, named. If a project owns most of someone's week, it needs to earn most of someone's week, and a few wins spread over four months usually doesn't.
What would those hours do at the core?
Take the same person and point them at the thing your business is already good at. If that produces obviously more, the working channel is still costing you, and the fact that it works is exactly what makes it hard to see.
Almost every quarterly plan I see only adds. New channel, new offer, new platform. The useful part of planning is subtraction, because time is the constraint, not ideas. You always have more ideas than people.
Where it stands now
Corporate wellness is done. Not paused with a plan to return, just done for now.
Corporate sponsorships are a different story. We still offer them, and if a brand finds us and we can put together something that genuinely works for both sides, we'll do it. What ended was the chase. There's no one spending their week hunting sponsors anymore, and the deals that come in now arrive on their own.
That distinction matters. I didn't decide sponsorships were a bad product. I decided that cold outreach was an expensive way to sell them for a business our size, at a moment when the same person could be doing something with a much faster return.
If the economics change, the decision can change. That's the whole point of running a business in ninety-day chunks instead of committing to a plan for a year and then defending it out of pride.
What to take from this
If you're sitting on something that's technically working but quietly eating a person's whole week, look at it honestly. Not "did this produce results," because that answer will keep you in it for another two quarters. Ask what that person would produce doing the thing you're already good at.
Sometimes the answer is that the new channel wins and you should double down. Often it's obvious in the other direction the second you compare the two, and the only reason you hadn't seen it is that nothing was visibly broken.
Nothing being broken is not the same as nothing being wasted.
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When the same time spent somewhere else would produce more. A channel that works is not automatically worth keeping. The real question is not whether it produces results, it is whether it produces the best results available for the hours it consumes. If a cheaper channel would do more with the same person, the working channel is still costing you.
They can pay well and they are slow. The deals are real money and the sales cycle runs on the sponsor's calendar, not yours, which means months of cold outreach before anything closes. For a very small team, that lead time is usually the deciding factor rather than the deal size.
It is what you gave up to do the thing you chose. In a business with one or two people, every hour spent on one project is an hour not spent on another, so the true cost of any activity is the best thing that person could have been doing instead. Small teams feel this far more sharply than large ones because there is no slack anywhere.
Look at where a person's hours are going, not at whether a project produced anything. Ask what the same hours would produce if pointed at the thing your business is already good at. Most quarterly plans only add. The useful ones subtract first, because time is the constraint, not ideas.
Yes, but they are not actively pursued. Sponsorships are available when a brand finds HobbyScool and both sides can reach a deal that genuinely works. What ended was the cold outreach operation used to chase them, not the sponsorships themselves.
