If you’ve been paying attention to what’s happening at the top of the online business world, you’ve noticed something shift. 

Some of the biggest names in the online space, names that basically built the industry as we know it – the Amy Porterfields and Marie Forleos of the world are quietly, steadily shifting how they operate. 

Amy has talked openly about evolving her business model (to more consultant type work) and the emotional weight of running large-scale launches. Marie has become notably more selective about where and how she shows up. This is evidence that the volume and approach of some of the biggest names in the online space are evolving, and fast!

So, what does this mean for you?

The most important thing you can do in witnessing these changes is to read these shifts as data! Because what’s happening at the top is always a signal about what’s coming for everyone else.

What it Signals When Legacy Brands Change Course (hint: the Market is Speaking)

Here’s the thing about Amy and Marie that you have to understand before we go any further: these women built their businesses in an era when the internet was still new enough to reward consistent presence alone. 

This is when we heard the advice of: just show up, create value, nurture your audience for months and they’ll eventually buy. That playbook worked brilliantly for many years. So well in fact, it became the template that the rest of the industry copied, packaged, sold and taught everyone else to do. 

Now, the market has evolved because ^ that just isn’t cutting it anymore.

But Amy has been publicly reckoning with the fact that the model she helped pioneer is under real pressure. She’s talked candidly about what it actually costs – emotionally and operationally to run a business that lives and dies by massive launches fueled by months of audience warm-up. 

And while Marie’s B-School remains a well-respected program, her public presence has pulled back in a way that’s hard to miss if you’ve followed her for any length of time.

Neither of these women are failing. Actually farrrr from it and I want to be very clear about that. 

What they’re doing is evolving, and they have the luxury of doing so on reputation alone. 

When you have a decade+ brand and hundreds of thousands of warm followers who trust you deeply, and have heard you/your name hundreds of times… you can rely on that goodwill while you recalibrate. 

Your name carries the weight, so your content isn’t doing all of the heavy lifting.

But here’s the question you need to sit with… Do you have that?

*If you’re still reading…my, guess is no.*

Can You Still Build A Legacy For Your Business In 2026?

If you built your audience before 2020, you likely remember what it felt like when organic reach was generous, when an email list grew predictably with a freebie PDF, when a webinar (evergreen or live) could fill a launch by itself. 

The post-and-nurture model made sense in that environment. You could create content for six months, warm a cold audience slowly, and convert them in a big launch window.

But the thing is…organic reach has been shrinking for years across every major platform. Buyer behavior has shifted, people are moving faster or not at all, skipping the long warm-up period that used to be standard. The attention economy has fragmented to the point where your most loyal followers might not even see your content the day you post it and Instagram’s constant algorithm changes don’t help either. 

And in an AI-saturated market where everyone can produce polished content at scale, content quality alone is no longer a differentiator.

What always made brands stand out – the vulnerability, authenticity, thought leadership… it’s getting lost in the masses of AI avatar video content, b-roll reels and AI’s high performing hooks. 

These big name brands that built legacy before all of this happened have a buffer. They can afford to slow down, shift models, and figure out what’s next because their reputation precedes every piece of content they create. Their audience already trusts them before the content even loads, which almost guarantees better engagement.

But, even those big names see far less engagement than before. At the end of the day, the market changes have impacted all of us.

The fact is, we don’t have 15 years of brand equity to fall back on, which means if we keep playing by the same old rules – creating stunning, educational and high value content three times a week, tweaking our messaging again and again, hoping a launch will hit if we just get in enough DMs… we’re going to keep running harder to stay in the exact same place.

What to Do if You Don’t Have Brand Legacy Yet…

Here’s what I know from my own business and from the clients I work with closely: the shift isn’t about working harder or creating more. It’s about installing a smarter system. One that’s built for how buyers actually behave right now.

What changed for us by utilizing this system wasn’t the quality of our content. It wasn’t our offer. It wasn’t even our audience size. What changed was the lead system. 

We stopped treating social media like a slow-burn nurture machine and started treating it like the top of an intentional pipeline. We stopped nurturing unqualified strangers and started speaking directly to targeted buyers. We added a step that almost everyone in this space is skipping and it’s the step where attention turns into real conversion.

This change took our ‘new leads to sale’ timeline from roughly three months down to three days. All while we saw consistent applications come in every single week and not just during launch season. We were also able to generated 3,000 new qualified leads after a four-month stretch where the algorithm felt like it had personally decided to ignore us.

None of that happened because we went viral. It happened because we changed the system.

What This Means for You Right Now

The lesson from Amy and Marie isn’t that the industry is dying. It’s that the old way of converting followers into buyers is no longer reliable – even for the people with these large legacy businesses. The lesson for those of us who don’t have a pre-2020 legacy brand is even more urgent: we can’t afford to wait for a model evolution. We need a system that works now, for where the market actually is.

The good news is that this system exists, and it’s working. It’s not more content and it’s not more launches. It’s a specific pipeline that moves people from new follower to buyer in days, not months – and it’s exactly what I’m breaking down live in my free training, Followers to Buyers.

If your sales cycle still feels like a slow drag, if your launches feel like pulling teeth even though your offer is good and if you know something needs to change but you’re not sure what… This is the training for you!

I reverse engineered what worked for us and for my clients AND I’m hosting this training twice, so you can work it into your schedule ➡️ Tuesday, May 5th @ 10am PT or Thursday, May 7th @ 2pm PT.

This will be one of the most worthwhile 60 minutes set aside for yourself and your business this month, so you won’t want to miss it!

Because the people who are thriving right now aren’t the ones who have the biggest audiences. They’re the ones who have figured out the buyer system and I have that system ready for you to implement right now!

Save your free seat below!