4 signs it could be time to hit reset on your business
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Have you ever felt like shutting it all down and burning it all to the ground?
Last week, I shared a post on Instagram declaring I was done.
And as it turns out, if you’re in the online business world, whether you’re selling digital products, working as a virtual assistant, social media manager or trying to make your fortune as a coach, you might be feeling the same way about your own businesses.
You can read the post here, but if you're looking for the TL;DR version, it was basically the carousel version of me with my hands up shouting ‘THE TOWEL IS BEING THROWN IN' to the Metawaves.
Fairly dramatic? Maybe. As a virtual assistant-slash-marketing consultant-slash-productivity coach, declaring you’re done is kinda like physically throwing in the towel and closing the door on business life (in fact, it did - because the post even prompted clients asking me if I'd still be in fact working with them - answer, I will - oopsy daisy). But that's not exactly what I'm done with.
The Instagram Business Hamster Wheel
As an online business owner, you’re likely present on some form of social media. For example, my core channels of promotion are my podcast, this blog, and Instagram.
And if you’re marketing your business on Instagram (or even just lurking quietly in the shadows), there seems to be two schools of thought when it comes to defining the pinnacle of success in your business:
You work really, really, really hard, grind 23 hours a day, hustle till you drop and never see your family - but look! You’ve scaled your business to the moon, ooooor
Your business runs itself from a pool. The pool actually runs the business. You’re basically able to run your business in something equivalent to either an hour a day, or even just by doing nothing. The business seamlessly runs itself and also generates six to seven figures of income a year. And you’ve made it happen in 3 months while cuddling 3 sweet children under 5.
If you’re like me, you might feel like you’re fairly filtered when it comes to what you absorb on social media or online. You might even identify as a skeptic. You might read something and think to yourself: okay, that's what it looks like on Instagram. It's probably not really like that behind the scenes, and how many years have they been working in the background to make this happen, anyway?
The thing is, even if you are viewing the content you see online through a skeptics lens, when you're regularly consuming a certain type of content and the community you are in appears to be filled with people just like you - people who have started their own business by themselves, who are doing these things on their own, making things happen really quickly or in a shorter amount of time than you have possibly made something happen for yourself - it can start to feel really draining.
Business Success = Maximum Pool Involved
It can feel really disheartening when you inevitably end up measuring your own business, or your own level of success against the other businesses or other people you see online. When we do this, we forget about what our own objectives are and what our own reasons are for even having our business in the first place. We forget what we actually want out of our business, and what we even need our business to deliver for us.
You start to measure your own progress or your own success by somebody else's version of what that looks like.
And that is absolutely what I had started to do.
You might have noticed yourself doing this too, or you might be sitting in this head space now (which is kinda why you’re reading this blog post).
Retired husbands, trips to Europe, Gucci handbags, million dollar mansions (okay, it’s 2024 so million dollar apartment) and all on one hour a day of ‘work’ - it looks like the absolute dream.
But:
Is it really like that behind the tiny squares, and even if it is,
Does it look like your dream?
Why did you start your business?
Think back to the early days of starting your own online business, or kicking it as a service provider. You likely had your own goals and objectives around your business and how you wanted these to align with your life.
But then, you dove in. Headfirst in the ole’ Olympic pool of business school.
And very quickly, this whole other rabbit warren opens up. Filled with rabbits. (Let’s go with the mixed allegories here for now). And they all look like you.
When I started my business, I was a virtual assistant working 1:1 for clients. I enjoyed supporting the people behind the local small businesses that I got to work with. I could see I was making a huge difference, and giving business owners their time back. But very, very quickly - seemingly out of nowhere - once I entered the online space, I started to see all these other businesses. Other service providers who were like me, who had stopped supporting clients and moved into this leveraged or passive income space - either creating a course, coaching or offering digital products.
Immediately, I was hooked. Like many other business owners, I saw something that I could really seamlessly fit into my life as a mum. I could help more people than I'm able to help now. And the business owners I was following only really seem to be working maybe an hour or two a day. The idyllic, leveraged lifestyle business. And I thought, “that is what I want”.
I even invested $12,000 - NOT a small amount of money by ANY stretch - into a high-touch program to help me achieve it. And while the program was solid (and still is - I’m still part of the 2.0 version of it, albeit at a much lower investment cost) - the work required to produce the outcomes or deliverables of the program weren’t aligned with the season of life I was in.
I'm not saying that I will not launch a digital course or move into that online space of digital products. But when I immediately pivoted the goalposts and started gunning for this other version of business, this other version that would let me step back from having to be in the business and work hours in the business and serve clients, I ended up completely time-trapping myself in a season of life where my number one goal was the complete opposite.
This came from a place of wanting to try and make this other business happen before my Mum passed away. I wanted to try and make it happen before the girls started school. I wanted to try and make it happen even faster than that, because I was so conscious looking at the girls getting older, and my Mum getting sicker, and I felt so panicked by it. I felt like I had to make this other avenue happen as fast as I could. And putting that kind of pressure on anything - it never good. Pressure is only for pressure cookers. Pressure is not for creativity, it is not for ideas. And it takes up a bloody truckload of your energy.
A slippery slope.
I started my business for immediate time freedom. I wanted time to spend more with my oh-so-little kids and to spend with my Mum, who was battling aggressive terminal cancer at that stage (she lost her life in June this year - and I’m heartbroken).
I also wanted to earn a, once nice to have, now necessary, income. I didn’t want to earn seven figures - hell, it didn’t even need to be six figures. I just wanted to earn enough income to support my family, give my kids the things they needed, pay for holidays (and like, to the Sunshine Coast - because Europe with a 5 and a 3 year old feels aggressive), and ice cream, and give me time.
Time to swim in the ocean. Time to cuddle my kiddos. Time to be with my beautiful Mama, while she still had it.
All I really wanted to do was start a business that fit in with and supported my lifestyle, and give me ample time freedom to spend with the people who mattered to me.
The wealth of opportunity I saw open up is not a bad thing. It is really, really exciting to see the possibilities as an online business owner these days. There are so many opportunities for women, who previously may not have had access to this level of flexibility, to create something and bring it to life without feeling like you are chained to somebody else, or you are chained to someone else's idea of what a working Mum should do in terms of how much you should be in the office and how much you should be with your kids. You can completely create the ideal business for your season and your wants - one that’s completely aligned to you.
The disconnect happens when we start trying to bring someone else’s business to life. When we start aligning our business with someone else’s dream, lifestyle, wants, needs. That’s when find ourselves on the Instagram Business Hamster Wheel. And it’s fucking exhausting.
4 signs it could be time to hit the reset button on your business
1. You find yourself in regular cycles of burst and burnout
What did end up happening was I found myself in these repeated cycles of like burst and burnout where I’d have bursts of energy: “I can do this! I'm creating all the things! I'm making digital products! I'm doing my website! I'm launching podcast episodes! I'm doing all the content!
And then crashing faster than you can say dial-up.
“I just can't do this anymore. I can't sustain it. Maybe I’m not cut out for business.”
Cue another burst of energy, and doing it all again.
I would also feel really frazzled and stressed, like I always had somewhere else to be or something else to do. I had these mega to-do lists that were a thousand items long.
I felt like I was always carrying around this big weight of what I had to do, the things that I was supposed to do to make this change happen in my business. I wanted to quickly get this up and running and anything else I did felt like a distraction, which kind of defeated the purpose of why I wanted to get the thing up and running in the first place.
I wanted to change my business model so that I could have more time with the people I loved. But in trying to bring that to life, the time that I had with the people I love was not quality. I was always distracted. And while yes, I did play with my girls and I was present with my mom, I can't help but think if I hadn't heaped all of this pressure on myself, I would have enjoyed that time a lot more. I would've been a lot more present than I was.
2. Your creativity just ain’t there, no matter what you do.
I'm a creative person. I really like creating content, I like writing, I like podcasting. I really enjoy making stuff to share with people. But I started aligning everything I was creating with this strategy I’d tethered myself and my business to.
Everything I made had to be filtered through a strategy, a plan. Why was I creating this? What does this align with? How is this connecting with people? It went beyond just doing it because I loved it. When I was trying to create content and trying to align everything constantly with a strategy, it was horrendous for my creativity and it totally sucked the joy out of the process.
3. You just ain’t lovin’ in.
Plain and simple, I was not loving it. I was not loving life. And I think my audience, community and the people close to me could probably tell.
Aside from the personal heartache I was experiencing with the process of losing my Mum, I was not enjoying my business - at all. I was enjoying working with my one-on-one clients, but because I often felt like I needed to be bringing this other model to life really quickly, I found that really impacted the joy in everything I was doing. And out of that, I learned that joy is a really big factor for me.
I have to feel happy at my core with what I’m doing. It’s a big reason why I started my business in the first place. If you’re like me, you might have started each and every corporate role you’ve ever had fresh and enthused, ready to go and slowly end up falling into a slump - I'm doing it because it pays the bills. I'm doing it because I work with good people. I'm doing it because it's a solid job. I would change jobs quite a bit. I would move from job to job. It was the same burst and burnout cycle that I didn’t expect to repeat once I had my own business. But ultimately, if you are living or working at something that doesn't line up with how you actually want your days to feel, how you want your days to look, you’re always going to feel stuck.
I started a personal brand business as a productivity strategist alongside my virtual assistant and marketing business. In bringing the productivity side of the business to life, I quickly succumbed to the lure of following every new shiny piece of advice that I saw online. Everything I did filtered into this lens of ‘what does this mean strategically’, ‘how do I write this hook’, ‘how do I write this caption so that everybody's eyes are drawn down to the bottom’ - like honestly, is anyone else sick of this shit?
4. You’re not even sure why you actually want to earn 7 figures
The 7 figure gauntlet.
I think this is where a lot of business owners come unstuck.
So, in my family unit, there is an income figure that I need to earn. This figure means we pay our bills, we can buy our food, we have money that we need to live, but that’s it, we’re done. We’re not going to Hamilton Island anytime soon.
Then there is a level above that - the nice to earn. Consistently earning that amount of income means we can live fairly flexibly. We can give our children the things they need. We can have the things that we need ourselves. We can do the things that we want to do financially. We can make these things happen.
If I earn that level of income as a family, generally, we feel pretty happy.
Now, I completely subscribe to the idea that money cannot buy happiness, but I do believe that earning a certain amount of money that fits with your lifestyle and relieves financial stress can absolutely make you happier. Financial stress is a huge source of unhappiness.
Income and business, especially in the online business space, can become very tied to version of a business where earning seven figures goes hand in hand with not working very much. And I'm not saying that you can never get to that point, because I believe you can - but it is not an achievable reality for everyone. This has nothing to do with who you are as a person, and everything to do with the seasons of life you move through and what you prefer to prioritise. And it is really easy to elevate the idea of a million dollar business as the holy grail.
But instead of blindly chasing a figure (and, in reality, a completely distorted version of how much work it actually takes to deliver that figure), I’ve started really reflecting on what it is that I actually want and need out of my business, myself. Not what somebody else is getting out of their business, not what somebody else says that I should be getting out of my business. What do I actually want? What do I actually need?
I'm hoping by sharing the process that I walk through with other online business owners then, maybe, just maybe, it might help you navigate this as well if any of this is something you are feeling.
If you’d like to follow along, I’ll be sharing everything in my weekly newsletter, girl, productive. You can subscribe here.
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