How to have a successful online business without burning out
Want to start or grow your online business, but don't have full-time hours or full-time energy?
This approach is for you!
If we haven’t properly met yet, hi 👋, I help low-capacity humans run successful, sustainable Life-First businesses online 🥰
And in this post, I’m sharing how you can build a successful online business with limited time and energy, without burning out by prioritizing yourself!
Watch the video:
Want a lifestyle business but wondering why it feels so hard?
We’ve all seen those amazing, successful businesses that seem to run on basically no time and have people living the laptop lifestyle of their dreams, right?
They’re a wonderful goal for those of us with limited capacity and limited energy to aim for…
But I'm going to be brutally honest with you. All great businesses are built on the back of a whole ton of time and a whole ton of energy.
And this is one of the biggest hurdles I see people who have other considerations - considerations like having young kids, caregiving responsibilities or additional physical, mental or emotional needs that mean they don’t have as much time, energy or resources available to them as the “typical” business owner.
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of wanting to create a business the way everyone else does, and this just ISN’T unsustainable when we don't have endless hours and buckets of energy to work with tons of clients at the same time or build out and pay for elaborate funnels. 1
You need, especially if you have limited time and energy, to build a business that's truly going to fit around and alongside your actual life.
What does a Life-First Business actually look like?
If you’re resonating with what I’ve shared thus far, you’re very likely going to need to build a business that is both sustainable and actually fits around your actual needs, your life, your commitments, your energy and your time.
You’ll need a business that is catered and tailored to YOU. And that’s working towards financially and energetically supporting you so that you don't just burn all down to the ground when it doesn't work within the first few months.
Essentially, what we need to do is build a business around you.
The 3 essential elements of a Life-First Online Business:
1) Sell Sustainable Offers
The most impactful thing you can do to tailor a business that's truly going to support you is to make sure you're actually selling and offering things in a way that fits YOU.
Offers that lean into your own expertise, that really highlight what you do best (usually what comes most easily to you) and prioritizes and protect that time and energy.
Your time and energy are your most precious resources, and you need to make sure that you're not just giving them away unnecessarily within your offers.
Your Life-First offer suite - a range of offers that are really catered to fitting around you, your life and your needs - is not going to look the same as your “typical” online business that’s run on full-time hours with full-time energy.
Personally, my own business is a mix of different types of offers: from one-off strategy sessions to digital products & courses and affiliate marketing. I've created a range of ways for people to work with me, with different levels of access to my time and energy. But even at the highest level, even at the most expensive way people can work with me, I still have really clear boundaries and really clear processes that make sure that my time and energy is protected.
This means that whenever I do show up to deliver my offers, I can put my energy where it will make the most impact and do the things only I can do.
At the most passive end of my offer suite, there’s affiliate marketing which pays me for referring other people’s products or services whenever purchased through my special link at no extra cost to the buyer.
And at the highest-touch end, I have group programs where I can serve multiple people at once inside a group container - thus making the most my time and energy spend on delivering that offer - and in productized done-for-you services.
Productized services have been a huge game changer for me personally because I can still provide highly valuable services but they’re bundled up, streamlined and sold like products directly from my website!
These super streamlined services free up a huge amount of time because I don't have to customize every quote or create the entire process from scratch for every client. They're able to purchase it directly off my website, just like if it was a product and get the deliverables that they saw directly on the sales page. And I get to just show up and deliver the service the best way I know how, the best way I can because I have streamlined and systematized all the rest of that process because it is repeatable and sustainable over time!
Which means I don't have to show up and do all of that sort of manual work each time.
Want to see what a streamlined productized service could do for your business? Borrow this lesson from Sell Without Sales Calls where I break down exactly what goes into an offer like this and what sort of impact it can have on your business!
So in creating your Life-First Business, you’ll need to figure out what kind of offers make sense for YOU to offer and how those are going to get you to your income goals in a way that is sustainable and respectful of your energy.
2) Sustainable marketing activities
The next piece of creating your Life-First Business is figuring out sustainable marketing activities that get your offers out into the world in a way that suits your personality and respects your time and energy.
This could look like making sure that when you do create marketing assets, you can use them multiple times! So that they basically become evergreen assets that you're continuing to accumulate and use over and over again. This means you’re not on the hamster wheel of constantly creating content again in the way that a lot of “typical” business owners often suggest.
A lot of the trendy marketing strategies out there may not fit in this type of business model, however, because we're looking for the most sustainable, most evergreen marketing strategies to promote and sell your offers in a way that’s respectful of your limitations and sustainable over time.
3) Supportive systems and boundaries
And then finally, you’ll need to have supportive systems and boundaries that are designed to protect you from the get-go.
This runs the gammut from admin all the way through to how you set up the systems, tech and backend of your business - so you can show up and serve without spending all of your energy and time doing repetitive, administrative work that can usually be dramatically simplified, streamlined and automated.
The idea here is to take you out of a lot of the day-to-day operation of a business. Because the point of a Life-First Business is to do the work once, and then let those assets work for you over time so you can show up as and when you can to do the meaningful, money-making work in your business.
Want to build your own Life-First Business?
If you would like to go deeper with this and work together to intentionally build a business that's truly going to fit around your life, around your additional needs, around YOU - and help you reach your goals in a sustainable way - I would love to invite you to book in a Strategy Session where we can map out your next steps together!
