It’s the new year, which means people are looking to self-improve. It also means people are trying new things. That’s healthy. Sampling is how most of us learned Excel in the first place. You dabble in Power Query or DAΧ. You watch a short video on XLOOKUP and dynamic arrays and think, “Oh, that’s what I’ve been missing.”
The problem is not sampling itself, but when sampling becomes the main event. It’s easy to attend a steady stream of webinars, save posts, download templates, and feel productive without actually changing how your Excel work gets done. Activity starts to look like progress even when nothing about your workflow has really moved.
That observation is mostly for content consumers. The rest of this post, though, is for producers.
This is for people building an Excel authority business
If you are building a business around teaching Excel, sooner or later you will run into a pattern. You will have people who take and take and take and never give anything back.
Not because they are bad people or trying exploit you. This is simply how online audiences behave. Excel training attracts people under real pressure at work. They want relief and something that helps them get through the week.
If you make this a moral issue, you will exhaust yourself quickly. I try to remind myself that there are bands I love that I have never paid to see live, and creators whose content I enjoy but have never supported financially. That doesn’t make their work useless or me a villain. It’s just the reality of how people engage online.
The same dynamic shows up in Excel education.
Where free starts to break down
Free content becomes a problem when the relationship quietly shifts. Instead of people consuming lightly and moving on, some begin to treat free access as ongoing support.
This often looks like repeat attendance at every free session, detailed follow-up questions that assume personalized help, requests for workbooks and source files, and emails that feel like unpaid consulting. If you are conscientious, it is very easy to start responding out of habit and realize later that a lot of your energy is going to people who have never made any commitment.
This is not a personality flaw. It is a systems issue.
You have to engineer boundaries
You cannot rely on goodwill alone. You cannot simply give things away and hope people naturally decide to pay later. It feels like it should work that way, but in practice it rarely does.
You have to decide where the line is and build your offers around it.
In an Excel authority business, that usually means being clear about the difference between showing and handing over. Let people see what clean Excel looks like. Let them watch how a messy dataset becomes structured. Let them observe Power Query automating repeatable cleanup or see how a brittle workbook becomes more reliable.
But finished workbooks, reusable templates, and full replays are not just educational artifacts. They are the product. Those usually belong behind a gate.
Why gating is not greed
Asking for an email address or payment in exchange for meaningful value can feel uncomfortable, especially if you come from a teaching mindset. But an authority business still needs structure.
Memberships, paid workshops, books, and private communities are not just revenue tools. They are boundary tools. Even if they do not generate significant income at first, they create a clear transition from curiosity to commitment. They protect your attention and give serious learners a place to go next.
Without that structure, your business becomes a place where people linger indefinitely. Free becomes the default rather than the introduction.
Protecting your attention
Excel questions are endless and practical, which is part of why I enjoy teaching it. It is also why creators burn out. There is always one more formula, one more edge case, one more “quick question.”
The healthiest shift I have made is routing depth into containers I control. General questions belong in public settings. Specific help belongs in paid formats. Workbooks and replays live behind a door. You do not have to be curt about it. The boundary is enforced by the system, not by your tone.
This is part of the cost of doing business
It can be frustrating to watch people hover around your work for years without committing. It is also not especially good for them. Staying in permanent sampling mode is a way of avoiding the harder work of implementation and change.
Free has a role. It is for orientation, exposure, and deciding whether something matters. It is not meant to be an endless substitute for commitment.
If you are thinking about starting an Excel authority business, this is simply part of the terrain. The internet makes consumption easy. Your responsibility is not to fix human nature, but to build an ecosystem that respects your time and rewards seriousness.
Setting boundaries does not make you salesy. It makes the work sustainable. And sustainability is what allows you to keep showing up and teaching at a high level.