You launch the offer.
You send the emails.
You post the content.
You check the funnel seventeen times because apparently staring at conversion rates long enough is now a legitimate business strategy.
And…nothing.
Or not nothing, exactly. But definitely not what you expected.
For most founders, this is when the troubleshooting Olympics begin.
Maybe the offer is wrong.
Maybe the audience changed.
Maybe your copy sucks.
Maybe Instagram hates you personally.
Maybe you need a new funnel, a new webinar, a new lead magnet, a new pricing strategy, six reels, a Threads personality, and a minor identity crisis.
Or maybe — stay with me here — your strategy isn’t broken.
Your timing might be.
That’s the idea at the center of my conversation with business astrologer and astro strategist Sheri Moise.
And before you decide whether the words “business astrology” make you curious or make you want to slowly back out of the room, there’s something important to understand about Sheri’s approach.
She isn’t asking founders to throw their strategy away and consult the stars instead.
She’s arguing that timing is another piece of data.
And if you’re the CEO, why wouldn’t you want more useful data before making an expensive decision?
What Is Business Astrology?
Sheri calls her approach astrostrategic data.
Her work combines astrological cycles with real-world business planning to help founders think more intentionally about decisions involving launches, sales, messaging, partnerships, pitches, and even their own capacity.
This also isn’t coming from someone who skipped traditional business entirely.
Sheri spent more than 25 years in sales and marketing. At one point, she worked with Amazon while it was still operating from rented space in two buildings, and she grew the account she managed from roughly $100,000 to $13 million.
She knows traditional sales.
She knows marketing.
She knows what metrics look like.
And what she eventually realized was that conventional strategy wasn’t necessarily the whole picture.
She had spent years noticing people, patterns, relationships, and behavior. Business astrology gave her another framework for understanding those patterns.
Her simplest explanation of its value comes down to two questions:
When is the market ready?
And:
When are you ready?
That distinction matters more than most founders realize.
Because a launch can make perfect sense on your project management board and still arrive at a terrible moment for the buyer.
And it can make perfect sense for the buyer while landing in a season when you personally have approximately three functioning brain cells and no desire to run a six-week campaign.
Great strategy has to account for both.
Founders Love Planning With Calendars. Calendars Don’t Tell the Whole Story.
Most of us build businesses around dates.
“Launch in September.”
“Open enrollment in January.”
“Run the webinar Tuesday.”
“Black Friday promo starts here.”
There’s usually a logical reason.
Maybe that’s when the program is ready.
Maybe that’s when your team has capacity.
Maybe you ran something during that month last year and it worked.
Or maybe Tuesday is simply the day you always do webinars because someone told you in 2019 that Tuesdays convert.
We love turning past success into permanent rules.
Unfortunately, buyers did not sign the agreement.
Markets move.
Buying behavior changes.
Attention changes.
Economic conditions change.
Technology changes.
And, as Sheri points out, marketing itself tends to move through broader cycles.
That means the exact approach that crushed it two years ago can suddenly start producing mediocre results even though you’re technically “doing everything right.”
This is where many CEOs make a costly mistake.
Instead of questioning the context, they immediately increase execution.
More emails.
More ads.
More content.
More urgency.
More pressure.
But if the issue is timing or framing, doing more of the wrong thing doesn’t magically make it right.
It just makes you tired.
Your Buyers Aren’t Broken
One of my favorite parts of this conversation was Sheri’s take on the so-called trust recession.
You’ve probably heard some version of it.
“People don’t trust coaches anymore.”
“Consumers have trust issues.”
“The market is skeptical.”
“People aren’t buying because trust is gone.”
Sheri calls BS.
Her argument is that buyers aren’t broken.
They’re smarter.
And that’s an important distinction.
Today’s buyer has access to an absurd amount of information.
They can read your content for six months before ever speaking to you.
They can compare alternatives.
They can listen to your podcast.
They can review your site.
They can ask their network.
They can Google you.
They can use AI to research your offer category.
They can sit with the decision instead of buying because a countdown timer started yelling at them.
That isn’t a problem.
That’s discernment.
Sheri describes the current evolution as buyers learning to trust their own knowing.
As a result, sales cycles may take longer.
A person might need more exposure to you before deciding.
They might ask harder questions.
They may care less about your perfectly polished sales page and more about whether you’re actually the person they want beside them when things get complicated.
And for businesses built around relationships, expertise, or transformation?
That’s potentially very good news.
Longer Sales Cycles Can Create Better Clients
I know nobody throws a party when a sales cycle gets longer.
We would all prefer someone discover us Tuesday, book Wednesday, pay in full Thursday, and send three referrals Friday.
Very efficient.
But longer buying cycles aren’t automatically bad for business.
They can produce better-fit clients.
Think about the difference between someone impulse-buying because your marketing created urgency and someone who spent time deciding:
Do I trust this person?
Do I like their approach?
Do I actually need this?
Will I use this?
Is this the right support for me?
That second client may take longer to convert.
They may also stay longer, implement more seriously, refer better-fit clients, and have stronger lifetime value.
That’s not a trust recession.
That’s a buyer taking ownership of their decision.
And I’m very into that.
Because my goal isn’t convincing everyone with a credit card that they should work with me.
I want the right person.
You probably do too.
The Guru Era Is Losing Its Shine
Sheri describes the next evolution in buyer behavior as the “guide by your side” era.
That phrase stuck with me.
For years, large parts of the online business world were built around pedestal marketing.
Someone had The Answer.
They had The Framework.
They had The Blueprint.
Follow their exact system, take their exact steps, and presumably your business would become successful enough for you to start selling your own blueprint.
It worked for a while.
But buyers are increasingly suspicious of certainty packaged as superiority.
They don’t necessarily want someone standing twenty feet above them shouting instructions.
They want someone experienced enough to walk beside them.
That doesn’t mean expertise stops mattering.
Quite the opposite.
Expertise matters enormously.
But the way we communicate expertise is changing.
A guide can still say:
“I’ve seen this problem before.”
“I know what tends to happen next.”
“I have a framework that will make this easier.”
“I can help you avoid the mistakes I see all the time.”
The difference is that the client isn’t treated like an idiot who couldn’t possibly make a good decision without us.
Smart marketing respects intelligence.
Smart leadership does too.
Your Messaging Needs an External Result
There’s another important implication here for anyone selling services, consulting, coaching, education, or expertise.
The inner transformation isn’t enough.
Sheri explains that messaging increasingly needs to connect the internal experience with the real-world outcome.
For example:
“Trust yourself.”
Lovely.
But then what?
What changes in the business?
What does the client do differently?
What becomes easier?
What improves financially, operationally, strategically, or personally?
Buyers may want alignment, confidence, ease, clarity, or self-trust.
They also want to know what those things produce.
Instead of:
“You’ll feel more confident about your launch.”
Try:
“You’ll have the clarity to decide when to launch, how to position the offer, and where to focus your marketing energy.”
Inner world.
Outer result.
That combination matters.
It’s also a useful gut check for any founder whose messaging has become so conceptual that you need a philosophy degree to understand what they’re selling.
Timing Isn’t Just About Launches
When we started talking about business astrology, launches were the obvious example.
But Sheri works with timing across much bigger decisions.
She shared a story about a tech founder preparing for a major funding conversation.
The meeting happened during a period Sheri typically wouldn’t choose for that kind of high-stakes discussion.
Initially, the investor seemed ready to write the check.
The next day?
They pulled the opportunity.
Now, does that mean one astrological window single-handedly caused the deal to collapse?
Sheri isn’t presenting this work as a substitute for everything else happening inside a negotiation.
The point is that if you’re about to pitch for $10,000, $100,000, or $1 million, why wouldn’t you consider every strategic factor available?
Timing.
Framing.
Audience.
Market conditions.
Your own energy.
The other party’s needs.
Your strategy remains the cake.
In Sheri’s analogy, astrostrategic data is another layer that helps bring everything together.
When Execution Isn’t the Problem
Sheri also shared a launch example that every founder who’s ever yelled at a funnel should hear.
One client had repeatedly run a webinar with fairly predictable conversion metrics.
Then one webinar converted at around 8% — dramatically lower than usual.
The natural reaction would be panic.
Change the offer!
Rewrite everything!
Fire the funnel!
But Sheri looked at the strategy she’d originally recommended and realized the founder had followed someone else’s advice instead.
Before the next webinar, Sheri suggested changing three things and removing two.
The next call converted at 50%.
Again, the bigger lesson isn’t that every disappointing conversion rate can be solved with astrology.
It’s that CEOs need to become better diagnosticians.
When something underperforms, resist immediately declaring the whole strategy dead.
Ask:
Was the offer wrong?
Was the audience wrong?
Was the message wrong?
Was the framing wrong?
Was the timing wrong?
Was the delivery wrong?
Did we have enough runway?
Was this simply one bad data point?
A CEO’s job isn’t to panic faster.
It’s to see more clearly.
Your Capacity Is Part of the Strategy Too
This is where the conversation intersects strongly with how I think about leadership.
Founders are notorious for creating businesses to escape rigid work structures…and then designing companies where they personally work harder than anyone at their old job.
We leave corporate because we want freedom.
Then somehow we’re answering Slack on vacation while pretending this is empowerment.
Sheri’s work doesn’t only look at collective market cycles.
She also talks about understanding your own patterns — including periods of higher output and periods when rest or lower intensity may make more sense.
Regardless of whether you ever look at an astrology chart, there’s a leadership lesson here:
Your capacity belongs in the business plan.
Not after the launch strategy.
Not once you burn out.
Not in the tiny white space left on your calendar after everybody else gets their piece.
Your actual ability to lead, think, decide, sell, create, and recover is part of the operating system.
High-performing founders love building plans around revenue targets.
Mature CEOs also build around capacity.
Before You Blow Up Your Strategy, Check the Timing
If there’s one idea I want you to take from this conversation, it’s this:
Stop assuming every disappointing result means you need a new strategy.
Sometimes you do.
Sometimes the offer genuinely isn’t working.
Sometimes your copy is vague.
Sometimes your audience moved on.
But sometimes the answer isn’t more.
It’s different.
Different timing.
Different framing.
A longer runway.
A quieter period of nurturing.
A clearer outcome.
A more respectful buying experience.
A decision to stop forcing a launch just because six months ago you typed “launch” into a calendar box.
That’s CEO-level thinking.
Not because astrology has to become your new religion.
Sheri would probably be the first person to tell you that’s not the point.
The point is data.
Context.
Patterns.
And making informed decisions rather than treating urgency like strategy.
A Better Question for Your Next Launch
Pull up your calendar.
Find the next major thing.
A launch.
A workshop.
A new offer.
A sales campaign.
A speaking pitch.
A big partnership.
Whatever has enough stakes attached to it that you’d be genuinely annoyed if it flopped.
Now ask yourself:
Why this date?
Not, “Can we technically make this date work?”
Why is this the right date?
What does your audience need beforehand?
How long will they realistically need to make the decision?
What will the market be paying attention to?
What does your own capacity look like?
Does your messaging show both the emotional value and the tangible result?
Are you choosing this timing intentionally?
Or are you obeying a calendar decision made by Past You, who, respectfully, did not possess all the information Present You now has?
That’s the bigger invitation from this episode.
Stop treating your business like a machine that should produce identical results every time you press the same buttons.
Markets have rhythms.
People have rhythms.
You have rhythms.
A sustainable business knows how to respond to them.
And sometimes the next level isn’t hiding inside another strategy.
Sometimes it’s sitting right there in the timing.
SUBSCRIBE ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST PLAYER
