I spent most of my life hustling. I knew how to work hard, generate money, and grow businesses at rapid rates. I’ve grown businesses since I was seven years old selling eggs from my family’s homestead, and I did it over and over again in different sectors. The problem? My businesses weren’t facilitating the life I wanted to live with my wife and the family we wanted to build. So I changed everything.
Most online business owners (especially service-based business owners) are told that they need to hustle constantly, getting four hours of sleep if they’re lucky. You’re expected to jump on long calls and zoom meetings, be in constant creation cycles with new offers releasing, and run on the organic promotion hamster wheel, just to build a six-figure business.
That wasn’t the life I wanted. I didn’t want to miss my son’s first steps. I didn’t want to be stressed out over long to-do lists. And I definitely didn’t want to be working 18 hours into the night when my wife was pregnant. Plus, the idea of sacrificing the time I needed to become a better version of myself just so I could generate more revenue didn’t sit well with me (especially once I hit the fatherhood countdown).
It was time for restructuring. I stopped taking phone calls, I put together a lean team of three people, and I started investing in other businesses. It was time for my money to work for me, not the other way around. Creating more time freedom was a non-negotiable so I could be with my wife and son.
Business can and should facilitate the life you want
Alignment is everything. If you build a business that takes you out of alignment with your vision or your core values, it’s akin to building a cage for yourself. If you want freedom, choice, and mobility in your life to do what you want, when you want, then you need to have a business that facilitates that. Likewise, if you want to build a huge national conglomerate, creating a laptop lifestyle business won’t fulfill you.
The first question you need to ask yourself is what do you want your life to look and feel like. It’s not enough to simply list the goals you have and go after them. You must know how you want life to feel, if you want to experience fulfillment. Otherwise, you end up chasing data inputs and dollars instead of being in alignment. The power in knowing what you want life to feel like is that it’s easier to notice when you’ve gotten out of alignment compared to when you’re simply chasing goals. This can also feel like listening to your intuition or your gut response.
The key business practices I stopped and restructured
Sometimes business owners think they have to sacrifice their time, their health, even their joy to build their businesses. And I will be the first person to say, that there are seasons where this may happen. But when a season turns into your life, that’s taking you out of alignment and can have severe consequences. The good news is you can live in alignment while still increasing revenue. The key is knowing when the action you’re taking is in alignment or not.
There can be both aligned temporary hustle and aligned expansiveness. All alignment is ultimately expansive, but sometimes there are periods of time where drive, tenacity, and taking multiple cold showers a day to keep going are necessary. But only if you’re making progress toward the life you actually want.
Me, I knew I wanted more space and time for my family and myself. I didn’t want to be bogged down with all of the shoulds of a service-based business. The first thing I stopped doing was taking calls. Most conversations can happen within a span of 15 minutes or less, so stacking my calendar with 45-minute calls didn’t make sense. Instead of taking calls, I moved everyone to asynchronous Telegram mentorship. When someone wants to jump on a call to sell me a service, I stick to text. It streamlines my process, cuts out wasted time, and keeps me in aligned action.
I also realized I didn’t need a big team. The idea of spending my time training and managing team members sounded terrible, and I had no interest in hating my business. Instead, I whittled my team down to three key people who filled the exact roles I needed to be filled to be able to stay in my visionary, mentor role and create more space to actually live my life.
Give yourself time to implement change
It took me to about a year (or a little longer) to make these changes and optimize the new systems that were necessary to support this new way of operating my business. It also required me to see myself, my team, and the business differently. If I was going to operate the business in a different way, then I couldn’t approach it from the same mindset. Digging in and doing the identity and alignment work was vital to cementing these changes for the long haul.
While I took action once I was clear on what I needed to do, I didn’t expect the entire business to be perfectly overhauled within a month. I gave the business the time it needed to shift and I shifted with it. Joe Vitale’s quote, “Money loves speed,” has evolved over time into, “Success loves speed.” Even though that’s true, it means you don’t wait to take action, not that you have to be on the other side of it as fast as possible.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
