I’ll be on sabbatical for at least the rest of this year, giving myself a chance to experiment, play, rest, and explore who I am outside of the business I’ve poured so much of myself into for so long.

That’s the short and sweet of it.

Here’s the slightly longer version:

If you’ve seen the behind-the-scenes of my business in the last couple of years, you’ll know that I’ve been working on A LOT all in preparation for this year. I had a plan. I knew exactly what I was working toward. And truthfully, I was—and still am—really proud of everything I was doing and had done to get here.

But then we rang in 2026, and a series of—truly small, in the grand scheme of things—moments happened that, internally, were big enough to knock me off that carefully planned path.

I didn’t know exactly what I needed, but I knew it wasn’t what I had planned (at all). So I started making small adjustments. I pushed back the EXPAND cohort launch because I knew it wasn’t the right step at that moment. But I still didn’t know what was.

Until sometime in all of this a friend said the word “sabbatical” and something in me immediately settled. Like, oh, yes, that.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’m stepping away with the trust that everything I’ve built will still be here when I return (even if it needs a little warming back up), and that this space will give me the opportunity to rest, to play, and to engage with my creativity and myself in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever fully allowed myself to before (as an adult, anyway).

Now, the practical pieces:

• There will no longer be a cohort of EXPAND beginning in May of this year. When I have details about a future cohort, I’ll share them—especially with those of you I know were planning to join this one.
• I’ve already reached out to current clients, but to reaffirm: all existing projects will continue as planned, with no changes to our agreements.
• You’ll maintain access to any courses or materials you currently have throughout this time.
• I’ll check this inbox about once per month in case of any tech issues. It’ll just be me doing so, so I appreciate your patience with response times.
• I’m leaving the door open to occasionally share something here if I feel pulled to, but there won’t be a regular schedule. At a minimum, I’ll be back in touch when I return from this sabbatical with what’s next.

The work here at WholeCo has always been about building sustainably. It’s easy to think sustainability only ever means moving steadily forward, step by step, staying the course. And often, yes, it does mean exactly that.

But it also means sprinting sometimes, stopping other times, and doing all of it in a way that’s both aligned with…

1. Your actual capacity (not the capacity you might wish you had), and
2. Your long-term goals.

I’m looking at my capacity—and at the life and work I want long-term—and choosing to pause right now because it’s the next right step to support both.

I’m genuinely so excited about what this time will open up…creatively, personally, and in ways I know I can’t anticipate yet. And I look forward to reconnecting when the time is right with fresh energy, perspective, and (hopefully) a few stories to share.

Thank you for being here, truly. I’m always honored to be part of your journey, and honored that you’ve chosen to be part of mine.

Sending so much love

The post I’m taking a sabbatical. appeared first on WholeCo.

Every new bit of revenue seems to require more and more personal output. More hours. More visibility. More complexity. More pressure. Not to mention, nothing ever really feels solid enough to reuse. Even when something works once, it doesn’t seem to work that same way again, so they pivot to something new. A new launch strategy. A new marketing platform. A new offer. Just to keep clients coming in and money flowing.

In other words: they’re exhausted. (And they don’t really know how to change it, other than waiting for ‘one day’ where it all magically gets better.)

For some, this eventually leads to burnout, breakdown, or burning everything down. 

For others, it leads to a kind of success that looks impressive on the outside but feels fragile on the inside—like one wrong move or lackluster launch could cause everything to crumble. So they keep pushing, holding, managing, and performing at a near-unsustainable level, hoping that stability will eventually find its way to them.

The reason so many business owners find themselves in these scenarios isn’t a lack of know-how or strategy, and it certainly isn’t a lack of effort. It’s that the foundational decisions about how their time, energy, and attention convert into revenue were made haphazardly. That foundational structure was never chosen, let alone designed.

The good news? If you recognize yourself in this pattern, you don’t have to stay there. It’s not permanent. You can stop the cycle by choosing the rules within which your business operates—the parameters that govern how your resources turn into revenue and income.

That’s where your business model comes in.

What a Business Model Actually Is (and What It Isn’t)

But first, what is a business model? “Business model” is one of those terms that’s thrown around a lot in the online business world, but is only rarely clearly defined.

I’ve previously gone in-depth on the types of business models online service providers and creators can have—you can read that here.

For our purposes in this article, we need to at least clarify that a business model is not your offers and pricing. You could say it’s “how you make money,” but even that is a bit too simplistic. 

A business model is the central framework for how you turn the resources you pour into your business—e.g. time, energy, money, attention, etc.—into the resources you receive from your business—e.g. revenue, income, fulfillment, joy, etc.

How Goals Become Reality Through Structure

As the central framework for how effort turns into outcomes, your business model is the mechanism through which your goals move from theory to reality. Setting your goals is you determining the results you want from your business, and your business model is then where you decide: this is what I’m willing (and not willing) to give in order to receive those results.

For example, maybe you want to create $100k in annual revenue (a financial goal). Your business model is where you begin to determine how that revenue is generated: e.g. what kinds of work you will (and won’t) do, how often you will (and won’t) do it, how much time and energy it will (and won’t) require, and what tradeoffs you’re willing (and not) to make in service of achieving that number.

In other words: your business model is what translates goals into lived reality.

The Accidental Business Model Problem

Most small business owners set goals and then—rather than first designing the central framework of the business (the business model)—begin making a series of individual decisions about how to accomplish their goals. Over time, those decisions solidify into an accidental business model: one that determines how much effort the business requires to survive, often without the business owner ever intentionally choosing that. And often, they’ve found themselves in a business that requires a lot more from them than they ever wanted to give, while giving them a lot less than they intended to receive.

What Happens When Individual Decisions Rewrite the Rules of Your Business

For example, let’s say your financial goal is to create $100k in annual revenue. You’re currently ‘stuck’ around $40k/year doing 1:1 services, and are already feeling stretched thin time- and energy-wise just to deliver those services and do the other work to run a business. Therefore, you decide that in order to reach that bigger revenue goal, you need a way to make more money, more consistently, without trading more time for it. A “scalable offer” like a course seems like the obvious solution.

This decision is usually driven by a very reasonable assumption: adding a course will require less time from you while being a channel to increase your income. 

Pause right here. You haven’t even started making that course yet, but you’ve just accidentally—and often without even realizing it—changed your business model. 

Before, your resources (time, energy, money, attention) were allocated to selling and delivering 1:1 services in exchange for about $40k per year. Now those same finite resources are being asked to support both 1:1 work and the creation, marketing, selling, and support of a course.

In theory, you’re giving more to your business with the expectation of receiving more. In practice, those resources were already near their limit—which is part of what motivated the course idea in the first place. Now you’re asking them to stretch even further.

This could work if you had abundant unused capacity. In most cases, you don’t.

What usually happens next looks something like this:

You’re doing everything you were already doing, plus everything required to design, build, market, sell, and support a course. It works for a short time…until it doesn’t.

As fatigue increases, the activities that previously kept your 1:1 work stable start slipping. Because more of your attention is going toward the course, 1:1 clients stop coming in as consistently. Revenue dips. Pressure rises.

Now you’re in a pickle: do you double down on selling a lower-ticket, theoretically scalable offer that isn’t yet a reliable revenue source? Or do you refocus on selling 1:1 work to stabilize cash flow, even though that requires more of your time and energy?

From here, decisions tend to accelerate (and often become reactive). Flash promotions. Underpricing 1:1 work. Creating another new offer. Posting more content. Tweaking funnels. Each choice made under increasing pressure as resources become scarcer and outcomes less predictable.

What felt like “just adding a course” was actually a foundational shift in how effort turns into revenue. Without realizing it, you decided that growth in this business requires doing more things. And that becomes your accidental—but very real—business model.

Example: Chaos Monopoly

Let’s step outside of business for a moment to make this easier to see.

Think about a board game like Monopoly. Now imagine you’ve never played before, and instead of learning or agreeing on the rules, you decide you’ll just figure them out as you go.

You start by agreeing on the goal: to own the most property by the end of the game. That part is clear—and it’s correct to the original game.

But you never decide how property is acquired.

Early on, someone suggests: “Let’s say every time you want to buy a property, you have to complete a small task.” It seems harmless. The task is easy, especially at first.

Without realizing it, you’ve just defined how effort turns into progress.

As the game continues, the task takes longer than expected. So you add a rule to manage pacing. Then another to clarify edge cases. Then another to resolve disputes. None of these rules are inherently wrong, but together, they dramatically increase the effort required just to keep playing.

Eventually, the game isn’t really about strategy or property ownership anymore. It’s about maintaining the increasingly complex system of rules you accidentally built.

You’re exhausted. Not because the goal was unrealistic, and not because you’re “bad” at Monopoly, but because the rules governing how effort turns into results were never intentionally chosen.

You could keep playing this way. But every new decision now has to work around the structure you’ve already locked in. What started as something fun becomes frustrating and unsustainable.

Wouldn’t it have been simpler (and more sustainable) to decide the rules first?

This is what happens when you build a business without intentionally choosing a business model. You don’t avoid structure, you inherit one by default. And over time, that inherited structure starts demanding more from you than you ever planned to give.

Why So Many Business Owners End Up With Unsustainable Business Models

I’ve worked individually with over 100 business owners since 2018, and have taught thousands more. That gives me the confidence to say this with some certainty: most online business micro-business owners end up with an accidental business model. 

Part of that reason is simple: they don’t know what they don’t know. They’re excellent at the actual work they do, but they haven’t yet had reason to think about how the structure of their business determines what that work costs them, or what it returns to them. Very few voices in this online business industry tell you that before you start marketing your services, setting prices, or delivering client work, there’s a deeper structural decision to be made. One that guides and sets the parameters for all of those other decisions.

But the larger reason is cultural. Over the last decade+, much of the online business industry has actively encouraged piecemealed, tactic-first decision-making.

The Online Business Industry’s Obsession with “One More Thing”

Look at the loudest, most viral messages: so much of it posits that if you just do this one thing—build a $5k group program, host a summit, run ads, use a specific manifestation technique—you’ll achieve some specific desirable result (think: $10k cash month, new subscribers, passive income). 

Those strategies are positioned as independent decisions. As if you can simply layer them into your business one by one, without changing anything fundamental underneath.

But here’s the part that rarely gets acknowledged: most of the people who invest in learning how to do that “one thing” don’t yet have the foundational structure required to sustain whatever success that tactic might create.

And that’s not a personal failing. It’s by design.

Many of the strategies being sold are intentionally marketed to business owners who are already stretched thin—who don’t have spare time, energy, or attention available precisely because they’re seeking relief. The promise isn’t sustainability; it’s immediate payoff. The system works because it convinces people that the next tactic will finally be the turning point, regardless of whether their business is actually set up to support it.

So they try. They stretch. They juggle.

And when it doesn’t work—or when it works briefly and then collapses—they assume the problem is them. Or they move on to the next strategy, and the next, and the next, slowly accumulating a business that requires more and more input just to stay afloat.

This is often the moment business owners start looking for a fundamentally different approach. They realize they can’t keep giving more in order to receive more. They know something needs to change, even if they don’t yet know what.

And that’s okay. That moment of not-knowing isn’t a failure; it’s the beginning of structural awareness. (It’s also where our work at WholeCo begins.)

The Belief About Limits That Keeps This Pattern Going

There’s another piece to all of this though, that must also be addressed. Because even if you did know you need to consciously choose your business model, and even if the voices in the online business industry didn’t encourage this piecemealed approach to business, there’d still be this:

The—often subconscious—belief that limits are inherently bad.

If you have grown up in and/or lived within a highly capitalistic and colonial society (hello, U.S.!), your very being has been steeped in the idea that “more” is always better. More growth, more revenue, more output, more opportunity. (Or, if you’re a rich white man from the height of English colonialism: more and more and more land.)

“Less” is framed as failure, while “enough” isn’t even a concept we’re taught to consider.

You can see this clearly at the corporate level. Public companies are expected to show ever-increasing profits quarter after quarter. When they don’t, executives are replaced and workforces are reduced, requiring more output from fewer people in order to artificially inflate results.

While that’s a much larger scale than most micro-businesses, the underlying mindset trickles down. It shows up as fear around limiting the audiences you work with, what you offer, or when you’re available. It shows up as the belief that saying no—to an audience, an offer type, a schedule—is the same as shrinking what’s possible and available for you.

But a business without limits isn’t expansive, it’s incoherent.

Limits Are Inevitable, the Question is Whether You Choose Them

Limits exist whether you choose them or not. Trees don’t grow beyond the tree line. A blackberry bush can only produce so many berries in a season. You can only go so many days without water (though I know my neurodivergent friends often like to test this one lol).

And as a solopreneur or micro-business owner, the most immovable limit you have is this: you are just one person, which means you have a finite physiological capacity.

A business model, at its core, is a decision about which limits you will honor on purpose—before your body, energy, or circumstances enforce them for you.

If you don’t consciously choose the parameters within which your business operates, those parameters will still exist. They’ll just show up as exhaustion, chronic urgency, or the constant need to give more in order to receive the same—or less—in return.

You can resent that limit. You can try to push past it (I have—0/10, do not recommend). Or you can design your business to work with it.

You can decide intentionally what you are—and are not—willing and able to give to your business in order to receive what you want from it. That decision is structural: it determines how your resources are allowed to flow, combine, and compound. And while it’s “restrictive” in the literal meaning of the word, the outcomes it creates are anything but. This is exactly what an intentionally chosen business model is meant to support.

Business Model as Protective Boundaries

A consciously chosen business model protects what matters most: you. It defines what won’t be done (freeing you up to focus on what needs to be done), and it creates enough stability (the “container”) to hold whatever level of growth you desire.

In that sense, a business model is inherently selective. You are making decisions about what you are and are not willing to give to your business, and, by extension, what kinds of outcomes become possible in return. The difference is that these limits are chosen intentionally, in service of results you genuinely want to achieve (inclusive of how you want to experience them).

For example, you might decide that you’re only willing to give ten hours per week to client work. That choice may place a ceiling on certain types of revenue—but notice what it also creates. If your offers are priced appropriately, you can still generate meaningful income and receive spacious time, energy, and attention back. What you do with those reclaimed resources is entirely up to you. Only you can decide whether that exchange is worth it.

Importantly, these decisions are not forever. As your goals or definition of success change, your business model can change too. What matters is that the structure of your business is designed in relationship to what you want your life and work to feel like, not inherited by default.

A business model isn’t meant to give you everything that’s available in the online business world, all at once. Nothing can do that. It’s meant to protect—and keep you focused on—what you’ve decided matters most to you.

From Accidental to Intentional: the Pruning Phase

Of course, choosing a business model isn’t the end of the process. Once the structure is clear, the rest of your business has to be brought into alignment with it.

For many people, this means letting go of a surprising amount of what they’ve been doing. Not because it was inherently ‘wrong,’ it simply no longer fits the way they want their business to work.

This pruning phase is often the hardest part. It can feel like a “kill your darlings” moment: offers, strategies, or projects you’ve poured real time and heart into may need to be set aside. Sometimes temporarily, sometimes indefinitely. It’s common for business owners to take this personally and think they “should have known better.” (They couldn’t have. Learning to make these decisions—and to give yourself grace when you got it “wrong”—are necessary parts of the CEO skillset.)

And then, almost without exception, comes relief.

From this point forward, you’re no longer asking yourself to be a superhuman. To do everything, all the time, at the highest possible level. You’re working from a structure that respects your actual capacity, priorities, and goals. Many people even find this stage unexpectedly enjoyable: once the parameters are clear, they get to be creative about how they’ll work within them to achieve their goals. Boundaries, after all, are what make strategy effective.

This is where sustainable success actually begins.

Designing a Business That Can Actually Sustain You (& that you can sustain)

Want to determine your business model? We have a $25 workshop available—Business Model Reset—which will guide you to do just that. Over this 2-hour on-demand recording, you will gain clarity on the right business model for you so you can focus your time and energy on what matters most, simplify your workload, and create a more profitable, sustainable business.

Already know your business model, and want assistance with adapting your entire business to create truly sustainable—long lasting, compounding, joy-filled—success? That’s precisely the work we do inside of our signature program, EXPAND.

Before you add more to your business—an additional marketing platform, a new offer, a different strategy—I invite you to pause and ask yourself a question:

Does this fit within the structure I’ve chosen for my business? Does it align with what I’ve decided I’m willing to give, in order to receive what I want?

From here, doing more to make more is no longer your default M.O.. Sustainable success becomes the natural outcome, instead.

The post These Behind-the-Scenes Rules Decide Whether Your Business Can Sustain Success appeared first on WholeCo.

In practice, this often looks like building ahead of your actual financial—and personal/energetic—capacity. You create a “scalable” offer like a membership or group program, only to discover that it requires consistent marketing, ongoing delivery, and months (or years) to mature—and you don’t have that kind of time or energy. You hire support because you’re overwhelmed, even though your revenue isn’t yet repeatable enough to sustain it—and now you’re stuck in the cycle of constantly having to find new ways to make pretty much the same amount of revenue, with momentary spikes being the momentum boost that keeps you going. You layer on more and more demand generation strategies—first launching, then blogging, then podcasting, then ads, then…—without letting any one of them actually mature, because despite doing a lot, you never quite have enough clients or leads to feel stable, financially.

What you end up with isn’t freedom or scalability—as had seemed to be “guaranteed” when you began each new thing—but rather a business that requires more of you than it gives back. One that, instead of delivering your desired results faster, now takes longer for results to catch up. Where maintaining momentum demands a level of energy, consistency, and bandwidth you don’t yet have reliable access to. You could eventually grow into this version of your business, but right now, you don’t have the financial or operational margin to carry it long enough for that to happen.

For many founders—particularly solopreneurs and micro-business owners—this approach doesn’t create sustained momentum or compounding results (the key result in a sustainable business). It creates instability and exhaustion, often causing capable business owners to tap out early, assuming that they must be the problem.

This happens because conventional goal setting collapses two very different needs into one number. It asks a single stretchy-and-sexy revenue goal to both stabilize your present reality and fund future expansion. As we’ll discuss below, this undermines long-term sustainability—and thus, success—at every turn.

The Two Revenue Goals Every Business Owner Needs

There are two revenue goals that every solopreneur or micro-business owner needs to name: their baseline and their expansion revenue goal.

The baseline revenue goal is the amount of revenue you need in order to sustain your life and business exactly as they are right now. If you currently live with roommates, this goal does not include living by yourself. If you currently aren’t working with a coach, this goal does not include hiring one. The baseline revenue goal is the amount of revenue that supports your current life and business without requiring any changes. 

Then there’s the expansion revenue goal. The expansion revenue goal is the amount of revenue you’d like to expand into in order to experience more in your life and business. If you’re setting your expansion revenue goal before reliably achieving your baseline revenue goal, I recommend choosing a number that, in your best guesses, is one you could almost certainly achieve—repeatedly, month after month, year after year—within 2-3 years from now. You can expand this expansion revenue goal later, once you’re reliably settled in at the baseline revenue goal, if you still desire to. (You might not.)

The Core Mistake: Asking One Goal to do Two Jobs

In very simplified terms, most revenue goal-setting practices invite you to look at what you need to cover your expenses and then add an additional amount on top for whatever else you want. In doing so, you are technically identifying two numbers: what you need (your baseline revenue goal) and what you want (your expansion revenue goal).

But as soon as the second number is named, the first fades into the background. All planning, strategy, and effort becomes oriented around achieving the larger, more expansive goal, with the implicit expectation that, once you hit it, the baseline will naturally be taken care of too.

Of course, this expectation isn’t wrong; if you sustainably achieve your expansion revenue goal, you will also achieve your baseline revenue goal.

The problem is what happens before that expansion revenue goal is reliably met.

When your baseline revenue is not yet stable and repeatable, pursuing expansion changes the conditions under which every business decision is made. You are no longer choosing strategies based on fit, sustainability, or long-term payoff—you are choosing them based on urgency.

The baseline revenue goal does more than cover expenses. It changes the decision-making environment you’re operating inside of.

When your baseline revenue is not yet reliably met, every business decision carries implicit pressure. Offers need to work quickly. Strategies need to pay off now. Experiments feel risky because failure doesn’t just mean “this didn’t work”—it means continued instability. Even good ideas become heavy, and often unsustainable, when they’re asked to perform on a survival timeline.

When your baseline revenue is not yet reliably met, every business decision carries implicit pressure. Offers need to work quickly. Strategies need to pay off now. Experiments feel risky because failure doesn’t just mean “this didn’t work”—it means continued instability. Even good ideas become heavy, and often unsustainable, when they’re asked to perform on a survival timeline.

From this place, expansion isn’t actually expansion—it’s an attempt to solve for stability through growth.

Once your baseline revenue goal is reliably met, that pressure eases. You are no longer asking every decision to solve for immediate sustainability. This creates the physiological safety to move with intention rather than urgency. Intention is what allows strategy to mature.

Only from this place can you:

• Choose strategies based on legitimate fit rather than speed of result
• Allow systems time to compound, so growth requires the same amount of work for exponentially more reward
• Notice when an expansion revenue goal—or the strategy for achieving it—requires refinement
• Adjust as needed without panic or sunk-cost attachment

Your baseline revenue goal provides the foundation for your expansion revenue goal because it stabilizes the conditions required for effective growth.

The Three Hidden Costs of Skipping Stability for Expansion

When you pursue expansion before your baseline revenue goal is reliably met, the cost isn’t just stress or slower growth. It’s that that stress and slower growth unhelpfully reshape how you think, decide, and build. Over time, this creates three compounding problems, each reinforcing the next, and each making it more difficult to actually achieve—and sustain—the expansion revenue goal

#1 – It Undermines Physiological Safety

As I mentioned above, when you pursue expansion before your baseline revenue goal is reliably met, you don’t just add pressure to your business, you change the conditions under which your brain and body are making decisions. When income isn’t stable, your nervous system interprets uncertainty as threat. Time horizons shrink. Perception narrows. Attention collapses into a single question: What do I need to do next to make this work?

It’d be easy to think you just need more discipline, but the reality is: you’re now experiencing a survival response.

Financial instability is one of the most physiologically activating experiences us humans can have. When your baseline revenue isn’t reliable, every business decision carries higher stakes—not just cognitively, but physiologically. Your entire system is no longer optimized for discernment, patience, or long-term thinking. It’s optimized for immediacy.

Financial instability is one of the most physiologically activating experiences us humans can have. When your baseline revenue isn’t reliable, every business decision carries higher stakes—not just cognitively, but physiologically. Your entire system is no longer optimized for discernment, patience, or long-term thinking. It’s optimized for immediacy.

From this place, several predictable shifts begin to occur.

First, urgency replaces intention. Strategies are chosen not because they are the best fit for your business, but because they promise the fastest possible relief. Experiments feel dangerous. Long-term systems feel indulgent. Anything that doesn’t show quick returns starts to feel like a liability rather than an investment.

Second, your relationship to goals changes. Expansion revenue goals set under these conditions are often either too big to feel reachable in the present moment, or disconnected from personal meaning altogether. They’re often borrowed from externally set benchmarks of what you “should” want rather than rooted in what you actually want to build. When a goal lacks personal alignment and feels threatening, the only available fuel source is survival. You push not because you care deeply, but because you feel you have to. (I talked about this further in our article: You don’t actually want freedom in your business. Here’s why →)

Third, strategy failures begin to contaminate identity. Because survival thinking distorts our relationship with time, results are expected quickly. When they don’t arrive on the expected—albeit unrealistic—timeline, the story often turns inward: Maybe I’m not cut out for this. Maybe this will never work. Maybe no one actually wants what I offer. What is actually a structural problem—attempting to grow without stability—gets misinterpreted as a personal flaw.

At the strategy level, this often produces chaotic behavior: constant switching, adding more and more tactics without letting any of them mature, or overcommitting in an attempt to force results. In some cases, it can even lead to ethical misalignment, such as small overpromises or inflated claims made not out of malice, but out of pressure to make a buck. Survival physiology doesn’t ask: Is this true or aligned? It asks: Will this work right now?

All of this leads to some familiar—yet avoidable—outcomes.

You burn out from oscillating between strategies meant for the business you want and tactics required to survive today—never giving either one what they need to fully succeed.

You break down, as prolonged instability of efforts and results begins translating into self-doubt and an identity-level loss of confidence.

You might even burn it all down, because even if success finally arrives, it ends up feeling hollow or misaligned, and requires either a massive rework or entirely abandoning the very things you depleted yourself and your resources to create.

The experiences of burnout, breakdown, or burning everything down are often labeled as inconsistency, lack of follow-through, or even self-sabotage. They’re diagnosed as a mindset or a motivation issue. Yet what they actually reflect is a business being asked to grow without a floor.

The experiences of burnout, breakdown, or burning everything down are often labeled as inconsistency, lack of follow-through, or even self-sabotage. Yet what they actually reflect is a business being asked to grow without a floor—and no amount of mindset work or motivation can resolve this.

No amount of mindset work or motivational effort can resolve this. What’s needed here isn’t more drive or discipline, it’s physiological safety. In business, that safety is created—in part—by reliably meeting your baseline revenue goal before asking expansion to do the work of stability.

#2 – It Destroys Strategic Clarity

Once physiological safety is compromised, strategic clarity is typically the next to go.

Stability-building strategies and expansion-building strategies are not the same, and they certainly aren’t interchangeable. One is designed to create reliable, repeatable revenue. The other is designed to compound effort, extend reach, or increase leverage over time. When expansion strategies are used to try to create stability, the result is confusion (not growth).

The first problem is a mismatch of function. What works to generate consistent revenue in the near term is often different from what works to scale or expand long-term results. Stability is built through strategies that are direct and quickly responsive—things that give you fast feedback and repeatable outcomes. Expansion, by contrast, relies on strategies that take longer to mature: audience-building, systematization, leverage, and compounding effects.

When you attempt to use long-term expansion strategies to solve short-term stability problems, you create a strategic gap. The strategy itself isn’t “bad,” but it’s being asked to do a job it wasn’t designed to do, and often on a timeline it can’t realistically meet.

When you attempt to use long-term expansion strategies to solve short-term stability problems, you create a strategic gap. The strategy itself isn’t “bad,” but it’s being asked to do a job it wasn’t designed to do, and often on a timeline it can’t realistically meet.

The second problem is that instability removes your ability to evaluate strategy accurately. Without a reliably met baseline revenue goal, it becomes nearly impossible to tell whether something isn’t working because it’s the wrong strategy, the wrong execution, the wrong timing, or simply because it hasn’t had enough time to mature. Everything feels inconclusive, data gets noisy, and your decisions understandably become reactive.

Only when your baseline revenue goal is being consistently met do you gain the clarity required to make informed expansion decisions. From stability, you can actually ask useful strategic questions: What is already working? Where are results coming from? What feels aligned enough to sustain over time? What constraints am I truly working within? Without that stability, strategy selection becomes guesswork under pressure.

The third problem is forgoing any amount of timeline discipline. Achieving your baseline revenue goal once often requires shorter-term strategies—approaches you may not use forever, but that create immediate traction. Sustaining your baseline revenue goal requires a shift toward medium-term strategies: systems that work repeatedly, with fewer novel or moving parts, and less volatility. This phase is where you learn one of the most critical CEO skillsets: designing a strategy, sticking with it, and making measured adjustments rather than constantly starting over.

Expansion requires an even longer time horizon. The path from sustained baseline to first achievement of an expansion revenue goal is often the longest stretch of the journey. But when that path is walked intentionally, something surprising happens: the time between first expansion success and repeatable expansion success is often the shortest phase of all—because the strategic muscles and operational structures required have already been built in previous stages.

When stability is skipped, this entire journey collapses. Strategy gets optimized for short-term relief rather than long-term viability.

• Instead of simplifying, you overcommit—e.g. by adding a podcast, a YouTube channel, a blog, and a new platform because “marketing isn’t working,” rather than identifying which part of your demand generation system actually needs adjustment.
• Instead of letting a strategy mature, you switch models entirely—e.g. turning a group program into a course after one launch, abandoning the momentum and signal you were just beginning to create.
• Instead of designing from your actual constraints, you copy business models that assume existing stability—e.g. making a low-ticket membership your signature offer—without the time, runway, or audience required for them to sustain you.

What results is molasses-like growth—when you want speed—and spaghetti-at-the-wall strategy—when you want coherence and repeatability. Nothing runs long enough to compound. Nothing stays simple long enough to become reliable. And because the strategy keeps changing, it’s never clear what’s actually working or why.

When strategy is selected under pressure, it will almost always prioritize speed, certainty, and (seeming) external proof over fit, coherence, and sustainability. Strategic clarity can’t be fixed by trying harder or doing more, as many unconsciously believe. It comes from having a stable foundation that allows strategy to be chosen, evaluated, and refined over time.

#3 – It Undermines Long-Term Success (Even When You “Succeed”)

Over time, the first two costs—physiological instability and strategic distortion—compound.

Meaning: the real damage of skipping stability for expansion doesn’t always show up immediately. It shows up over time.

Expansion goals typically take a good amount of time to reach once, and even longer to sustain repeatedly. When you pursue them without a reliably met baseline underneath you, success tends to arrive in spikes rather than being repeatable. Revenue jumps happen, but then you start the very next month back at zero, having to figure out how to make the spike happen once again. Wins feel exciting, but fragile—like the other shoe could drop at any moment (because it does). Momentum exists in spurts, but it’s exhausting to maintain when there are no systems designed to carry it forward without constant personal output.

Without the stability provided by reliably achieving your baseline revenue goal, burnout often sets in before your success has a chance to compound. Success becomes something you have to keep proving, recreating, or defending rather than something that your business is designed and prepared to hold.

This is also where the subtler cost emerges: when you’re operating under pressure, you’re rarely paying attention to whether you actually want the thing you’re building toward. You’re focused on achieving the goal, not questioning it. On getting there, not on whether “there” still fits.

By prioritizing expansion before your baseline is reliably met, you often commit to goals based on abstraction rather than experience. You commit to a goal because it sounded good, looked impressive, or was positioned by people outside of you as the next logical step. You didn’t yet know—let alone understand—what it would require of you, or whether you even wanted to live inside the business it would create.

In contrast, building toward and then stabilizing your baseline goal gives you something incredibly valuable, perhaps even more valuable than money: time. Time to experiment. Time to notice what feels sustainable as opposed to what drains you. The time to learn what kinds of work, rhythms, and responsibilities actually support your life rather than consume it.

This matters because direction chosen under urgency is rarely values-aligned. When goals are set from “escape” energy or survival pressure, they tend to reflect external definitions of success rather than internal ones. And when you build from that place, even “success” can lead to disengagement, resentment, or a desire to burn everything down and start over.

This is how capable, thoughtful business owners end up with businesses that technically work, but don’t work for them.

Once again: what looks like inconsistency, lack of follow-through, or self-sabotage is often a business being asked to grow without a floor. The issue isn’t that you didn’t want it badly enough or that you had too many limiting beliefs. It’s that the conditions required for long-term success were never built, let alone stabilized.

The issue isn’t that you didn’t want it badly enough or that you had too many limiting beliefs. It’s that the conditions required for long-term success were never built, let alone stabilized.

Sustainable growth isn’t created by pushing harder or chasing faster results. It’s created by building in the right order. That way, when success arrives, it’s something your business, your body, and your life can actually hold.

The Reframe: Stability First, Then Expansion

The “cool” thing to do in the online business world has long been to chase big, expansive revenue numbers, and to broadcast them loudly as a way of signaling authority. To be fair, this culture does seem to be shifting as more business owners burn out, scale back, or disappear. But the pressure to expand fast, and to prove success through ever-growing numbers, still seems to run deep—at least as an unconscious driver for many a micro-business owner.

My invitation to you, therefore, as you think about revenue goals, is simple: consider what you actually want, as well as what kind of business you want to live inside of while you build it.

This framing is, of course, a simplification. You can pursue expansion first. And for some people, in some seasons, it even appears to work. But something “working” in the short term doesn’t necessarily mean it works in the long term. Instead, those things that seem to work quickly often come at a cost to you as well as your business and the life you’re trying to build alongside it.

If what you want is a genuinely sustainable business—one that compounds rather than consumes—you have to allow yourself to start where you are, with what you have. That means stabilizing your business at your baseline revenue goal first, and then pursuing expansion from a place of safety and stability rather than urgency and, dare I say it, chaos.

When baseline stability comes first, everything downstream changes for the better.

Strategy selection becomes deliberate instead of reactive, because long-term thinking becomes physiologically accessible. You can actually perceive the tradeoffs of your decisions, which means you’re actively choosing them rather than being unconsciously cornered into them. Expansion becomes something you opt into because it’s meaningful, not something you chase because you need relief. And when you reach your version of “enough,” you arrive somewhere that actually fits with the vision you have for yourself, your work, and your life.

Throughout the time this step-by-step journey takes, you’re also building the capacity to hold the success you’re working toward. Increased revenue, clients, visibility, and responsibility stop being activating—not because they’re small, but because they weren’t rushed into. Your business grows more complex, perhaps, but paradoxically easier to maintain. This is what regenerative success looks like.

And this is where it’s important to name something explicitly: your goals don’t exist in a vacuum. They inform everything else.

Your goals shape your business model. Your business model determines your offers, pricing, and delivery. Those, in turn, dictate how your demand generation and sales systems actually need to function.

When goals are structurally sound, the rest of the business can align around them. When they aren’t, everything else becomes fragile, convoluted, or performative, often without you realizing why. (Which is when the “maybe I’m just not cut out for entrepreneurship” voice often starts showing up.)

If you take anything from this essay, may it be this: 

Expansion without stability is almost always survival-driven (not visionary). Sustainable ambition builds the capacity required so that you can scale—doing so in a way that’s aligned with your true values, desires, and priorities for yourself, your life, and your business.

Pushing harder toward your goals might be how you were taught to operate. That was definitely my M.O. for quite a while in both my life and my business. It can work, but it makes everything much harder than it actually needs to be—and more exhausting—while typically leading to short term positive results at best.

Building with intention, and going step-by-step, however? That’s the method of sustainable—and, eventually, regenerative—success. Understanding your goals and working toward them in order is the first step. As to what this looks like practically? Well, for many business owners, this starts by clearly naming their baseline revenue goal and then designing the simplest possible strategy to meet it consistently, if they aren’t already.

For our clients who join our signature program, EXPAND, we spend our very first retreat determining both their baseline and expansion revenue goals, and designing the right strategy for where they are currently at. Then we use the rest of the program to get every single part of their business—from their offer suite and messaging to their entire demand generation system—set up to not just achieve, but sustain their business at those revenue levels. In short, we support our clients to shift from chasing short-term revenue wins to building for long-term, regenerative success.

The post Why Sustainable Financial Growth Requires Two Revenue Goals appeared first on WholeCo.

In fact, that specific promise might be the most overused one of business coaches and consultants everywhere. And even if the figures change—7-figures instead of 6-figures, 4 hours a day instead of 20 hours a week, and some people add a time period, such as “in 5 months or less”—the assumption is the same: you are building your business to have time, money, and energy freedom.

In theory, this all sounds well and good. Who wouldn’t want total control over their time, energy, and money? Who wouldn’t want to be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, in whatever way they want? Especially if they’re coming from a personal history or current reality wherein they feel they have none or very little of that power, control, or freedom of choice.

In practice, however…

Building your business with a desire for freedom as your ‘fuel’ will almost certainly create burnout, not sustainability. This is because of the underlying source of your motivation—and the actions it drives—is, itself, unsustainable. It’s not the freedom itself that’s the problem, it’s building for freedom that is.

And if you really want to have your business ‘go the distance’—and do so in an aligned and sustainable way—you need to stop chasing freedom and find new fuel for your entrepreneurial endeavors. 

This article will show you how. But first…

_{This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you purchase through them at no extra cost to you. I only recommend things I genuinely believe in.}

The Truth Behind the “Freedom Business” Dream

I started my business searching for freedom. I was living in Australia on a Working Holiday Visa, and feeling the itch to not be “tied down” to one specific location; I wanted to travel! This was back in 2018, mind you, AKA the peak of the “laptop lifestyle” trend.

Plus, having lived most of my early childhood with plenty of money, and then losing pretty much everything that money could buy in the 2008 recession and my family never quite recovering, I had—let’s just say—a complicated relationship with money. I always wanted more of it, never felt I had enough of it, and also intimately felt the loss of ‘status’ that came with somewhat suddenly not having a lot of it.

Knowing that personal context, it should come as no surprise that when founders incessantly shared their beautiful trips to Bali and jet setting in daily posts all over Instagram, I pretty quickly—and fully—bought into the “freedom business” mindset.

(I’m also a Sagittarius sun, so there’s that.)

Even if you didn’t start your business at the peak of the laptop lifestyle movement like I did, you’re almost certainly still feeling the ripple effects of it. Because despite a global pandemic, US-funded genocide, and abundantly apparent fascism, we still have plenty of promises floating around the internet on the simple 8 step plan to make 6 million bucks in approximately 47 seconds.

And here’s the thing: creating time, energy, and money freedom makes sense as a reason to start your business. You’re probably in a job you dislike or are drained by. You’re living under late-stage capitalism, where—especially in the States—there are numerous systems in place to keep you poor or, at the very least, financially vulnerable. (Recommended reading: Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond) Of course you might start considering alternative pathways of earning money that theoretically will grant you a better, more fulfilling experience of your life. Of course. 

Not to mention: having the desire for more resource flexibility and freedom as one of your biggest motivations for getting started on your entrepreneurial journey is often highly effective because of how highly motivating it is. You’re the metaphorical frog who suddenly woke up and realized the water is boiling, and you know you need to make that leap before—as the kids say—you’re cooked.

The problem here then isn’t then that you want more freedom. It’s that this motivation has a time limit. It won’t last, because it was never intended to and our bodies quite literally can’t keep up with it. Which means that if you don’t intentionally replace it with a sustainable—or, even better, regenerative—‘fuel’ source, neither will your business.

The problem here then isn’t then that you want more freedom. It’s that this motivation has a time limit.

Why Survival-Based Motivation Works—Until it Doesn’t

The intense drive for time, energy, and money “freedom” that is regularly the primary motivation when someone starts a business is often—not always—indicative of physiologically being in a survival (“activated”) state. If you’ve ever heard someone use the words “fight, flight, freeze, fawn,” those are all activated states. Your body can and will move into one (or several) of these activated states in response to something “triggering.” (Note that what moves one person into an activated state may not move a different person into an activated state. The fact that different people have different “triggers” does not mean anything about the validity of their experience of those things.)

Author’s Note: I am not a trauma-informed educator or coach. I am at most willing to claim that I am trauma-aware. Additionally, while I am continually studying our physiological processes out of pure personal fascination with the subject, I owe much of my foundational understanding of trauma and its effect on our being to Parijat Deshpande—the inimitable trauma educator and founder of the high-risk pregnancy resource, Ruvelle. 

Think about the word “freedom” with me for a moment. This word is inherently in relationship to something limiting. Meaning: when you want freedom, you want freedom from something. This means that when freedom becomes your fuel, you are motivated to escape something that is in some way limiting you or causing harm to you.

When you want freedom, you want freedom from something. This means that when freedom becomes your fuel, you are motivated to escape something that is in some way limiting you or causing harm to you.

It’s not wrong or unhealthy to want to escape something that is limiting you or causing/going to cause harm. In fact, this is a very useful physiological response. For example: if a bear is chasing you in the woods, you of course want to escape it—perhaps by getting into your car and driving away.

However, physiological activation—the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response that is ‘triggered’ by a threat of some sort—is not a state we as humans are meant to sustain. This physiological response works really effectively—but only for just long enough to get us out of a bad thing. We do not want to live our entire lives in a physiologically activated state. Not only is that ultimately limiting what we see as being available to us—e.g. it’s nearly impossible to imagine what you really want in your life and begin taking steps to make that happen when you’re metaphorically or literally running from a bear—it is exhausting. It thus leads to burnout and/or many longer-term health consequences, which compound the difficulty of the whole experience. This is especially true for micro-business owners, whose bodies and brains are in many ways their business infrastructure.

(Unfortunately, many of our systems across society are built to persistently keep us in this survival state. Addressing that fact would require a totally different piece of writing.)

Relating all of this back to business: if a large motivation for starting or growing your business is to create freedom for yourself, that can work really well in the early stages of growth! You’re tapping into that escape energy, and therefore accessing a well of superhuman strength: the kind that enables everyday people to lift cars off of loved ones, or keep walking when they’ve barely eaten for weeks in an effort to leave some form of a genuinely dangerous situation. Your focus is heightened, your sense of urgency is immense, you become resourceful, and your vision narrows exclusively onto solving the ‘problem’ of business success. But this superhuman strength is not meant to be sustained, and what you really need is to tap into a motivation that’s indicative of—and only reliably accessible to—a non-activated physiological state.

Instead of building your business out of a motivation to escape, you need to figure out why you’re motivated to expand and what you’re motivated to expand into. Only when you find and utilize that expansive motivation will you be able to genuinely sustain your business over the long-term—as you’ll now be able to do so without relying on those survival states to keep you going, and therefore without constantly experiencing founder burnout.

When “Freedom” Finally Arrives (and Still Feels Empty)

Many founders reach a point where the very freedom they built for no longer fuels them. This can be extra disorienting precisely because many of us have been sold “freedom” as the dream.

If your entrepreneurial experience has been anything like mine, you’re probably reading this having already spent years relying on physiologically activated states and reactive forms of motivation to keep your business going. You may have already experienced entrepreneurial burnout. In fact, you might have found your way to us here at WholeCo because our focus on sustainable business finally resonated after years of building, efforting, trying, and not experiencing the stability or expansion you were effectively ‘guaranteed.’

Some of you may have already created some level of ‘success,’ too! Which, from personal experience, can then make the burnout, breakdown, or urge to burn everything down even more bewildering. Because what do you mean I’ve just reached a milestone I’ve wanted for years…and I kind of hate it?

What do you mean I’ve just reached a milestone I’ve wanted for years…and I kind of hate it?

When freedom is your fuel, achieving it means you suddenly have none left.

I often look to my own ‘mountaintop moment’ as the turning point in my founder journey. It was January after a comfortable 6-figure year, and I made $80k (sales) in something like 20 days. I went on that year to have my first multiple-6-figure year—just under $250k in WholeCo—while also building a second 6-figure business at the same time.

For all intents and purposes, I had achieved the “success” I set out to create back in 2018. I had time freedom, financial freedom, energy freedom. I had scalable offers, a highly engaged audience, money that paid for a nice apartment on the beach. The only problem was…once I got there, I couldn’t help but ask, “Is this it?” I didn’t realize I had made freedom my fuel, but it quickly became clear that, at best, it had offered me an escape from parts of my old life. What it could never offer was a compelling, aligned direction I actually wanted to build toward and stay devoted to—for the long-haul.

What freedom could never offer was a compelling, aligned direction I actually wanted to build toward and stay devoted to—for the long-haul.

Thus began my years-long exploration into what I truly wanted—for myself and my business.

Why You Aren’t Satisfied by Your Success

Remember earlier when I shared that operating from a survival or activated state makes it physiologically impossible to access what you truly want? Reaching a “mountaintop moment” in business—or life—is often the direct outcome of having built primarily from that state. You pour massive effort into creating ‘freedom’ as an escape from something limiting or harmful, and in all that effort, you never really pause to ask what you actually want to expand into. On the rare chance that you do officially “escape”—that is, you attain some version of freedom and no longer have anything to run from, fight, people please, etc.—you can finally see what you’ve built with clearer eyes. And often…

What you’ve built doesn’t align with what you actually want. Instead, it matches what you were taught to want. It’s a cruel irony: the world congratulates you for achieving “success” (assuming they aren’t also tearing you down in a bout of tall poppy syndrome), while inside you’re thinking: “Shouldn’t I feel thrilled right now?” Yet, you don’t.

“But wait, Carly. I reached this ‘mountaintop moment’ even though I wasn’t primarily motivated by time, energy, or money freedom. So what explains the mismatch between what I built, how proud I expected to feel, and how drained I actually felt once I got there?”

In all likelihood: the mismatch comes from a different survival-based desire or belief that’s been quietly powering your business. Notice whether any of these might show up in your decisions or patterns:

• “More is always better.” — Your survival instinct says, “I don’t have enough, I need more.” The goalposts keep moving no matter how much you collect. 
• “Faster is always better.” — Your survival instinct says, “There’s no time to let this unfold.” You default to whatever is guaranteed to work—or rely on someone else’s certainty that it will—so you end up with short-term wins instead of strategies that compound your success over time.
• “Nothing matters unless it’s perfect.” — Your survival instinct is terrified of inadequacy. You delay starting until you “know everything,” or you quit early because the results aren’t immediately exceptional.
• “Your worth is your productivity.” — Your survival instinct says it must keep going at all times or else you will literally become “useless” or “worthless.” And so you keep going, and going, and going—probably until something forces you to stop (e.g. sickness), and even then, you might take a beat but then start right back up again.
• Hierarchical thinking — Your survival instinct says that you’re only safe when you’re “higher on the ladder” than other people. This pushes you to chase metrics you don’t actually care about—be it wealth, fame, possessions, milestones—and fuels self-judgment or comparison when you’re not at a perceived level.

Author’s Note: Deep thanks to Joanna Lindenbaum of Applied Depth Institute for teaching about how these socially accepted beliefs activate our survival instincts while undermining authentic fulfillment and sustainable success.

When any of these beliefs—each widely taught, accepted, and celebrated throughout most of capitalistic and/or Western society—become the unconscious fuel behind your business, burnout becomes almost inevitable. Even if you reach your “mountaintop moment”—perhaps you finally feel ahead, or flawlessly productive, or incredibly accomplished in a short burst—you’ll experience the same emptiness that comes from using freedom as fuel. You’ll reach the top, look around, and think, “Is this all there is?”

What You Really Want Instead of Freedom

I’ve always been fascinated by the people who claim—and genuinely seem to practice—“I don’t need to love my work.” Mostly because that couldn’t be me. Part of that is likely neurodivergence: I have reduced capacity and limited executive function, and even tasks I enjoy can be hard to initiate or sustain. The tasks I don’t enjoy? Those almost never happen unless an external force pushes them forward (looking at you, taxes).

If I built a business around work I didn’t enjoy, I simply wouldn’t show up for it. And then I’d feel guilty for not doing what I said I’d do, the guilt would make completing the task infinitely more impossible, and the entire cycle would compound. I’m going to guess that, if you’re still here reading this article, this is at least somewhat true of you, too; neurodivergence is overrepresented in entrepreneurship, after all.

If I built a business around work I didn’t enjoy, I simply wouldn’t show up for it.

This is why I’m a big believer that—whether you’re just starting out in business or you’ve already achieved a “mountaintop moment” (or two) and are wondering what’s next—your business needs a regenerative “fuel” source. Assuming you want it to last, of course. You need to find something that keeps you showing up, keeps you building, and keeps you engaged in a way that feels genuinely fulfilling each step of the journey.

At its most basic level, this sustainable fuel is innate enjoyment: the sense of, “I genuinely like what I do in my business.” But to be truly effective, it must go deeper. It needs to tap into something inherent to you, something that fuels you organically rather than something you have to manufacture. And yes, that comes with nuance: no business is made of 100% enjoyable tasks, and even enjoyable work can still be challenging (again, hello neurodivergence!).

In our signature program, EXPAND, we spend an entire multi-day retreat exploring this, and continue to revisit and refine our ‘fuel source’ for the duration of the program. It’s deep work, and therefore not something I can fully walk you through here.

What I can offer, though, is a starting point—a way to identify the most powerful and effective motivations you can access with the least friction or effort. The more clearly you understand your natural sources of energy, the more consistently you’ll show up for your business, the more enjoyment you’ll experience along the way, and the more aligned your business will become with the life you want and the community you’re creating.

How to Identify Your Business’ Sustainable Fuel Source

Below, I’ve shared some prompts to help you find new insights and clarity within yourself about your motivations and ‘fuel sources.’ Before diving in, I invite you to choose a way to capture your reflections: paper, a notes app, a voice memo, or really anything that lets you revisit what you uncover.

As you move through the prompts, hold in mind that you don’t need life-defining accomplishments to make the answer ‘count.’ Small moments of satisfaction or ease can offer just as much insight into what motivates you intrinsically, and sometimes is even better to work with because those small moments aren’t often celebrated by people and systems external to you. 

If you notice similar answers arising across multiple prompts, that’s a signal of importance rather than a problem. I invite you to acknowledge the overlap, and then gently see whether there’s an additional answer so that you can get a fuller picture of your natural motivators.

A final note: your answers don’t need to be business-related. In fact, pulling from multiple domains of your life will help you identify the deeper patterns in what fuels you—patterns that will remain true regardless of the work you’re doing.

• What is a period of time where you were really intrinsically motivated to complete something, and did complete it? In this question, “intrinsically motivated” means that receiving some external reward was not the primary reason you were doing said thing. Why was I motivated to complete that thing?
• What’s something I have achieved or  completed in my life that I feel really proud of?
• What’s something I have achieved or completed in my life that felt really easy and/or natural to do, which others might not have felt was easy and/or natural? 
• What’s something I have achieved or completed in my life that felt really satisfying to do?

Once you’ve answered the above questions, it’s time to begin drawing some connections or even potentially creating conclusions.

• Review your answers above. What patterns are you seeing? And/or what stands out to you?
• How might you be able to apply what you’re seeing from this exercise about your motivations and/or the things that ‘fuel’ you to your business?

Reminder that these answers will not give you the full picture of your regenerative fuel source—that takes deeper, longer work—but they will give you a powerful starting point. From here, you can begin designing a business that’s sustained by who you are, not by what you’re running from.

A Real Example: turning My Core Motivation into Sustainable Action

One of the phrases I’ve probably said more than anything else in my life—which is embarrassing to admit, but true—is: “I need to work out more.” I’ve had periods of consistency with exercise, but if I’m honest, those stretches always overlapped with my deepest periods of self-loathing. Of course, that self-loathing was heavily shaped by external conditioning telling me that my value as a femme-presenting person depended on being “skinny.”

That shame-driven motivation technically “worked,” until it didn’t. I’d push hard for weeks or months, burn out, stop completely, feel terrible about myself, and then start the cycle again. As I did more inner work and built real self-love—a feat I’m genuinely proud of!—I suddenly found myself with no ‘fuel’ to exercise. I still wanted to move my body, but I couldn’t make anything stick.

When I did the exercise I offered above, the core motivator that emerged for me was: the experience of authentic expression. I am deeply motivated by being who I truly am and being seen in and for that.

Applying that to movement: I want to move my body because my body is part of how I express myself. It’s the vessel that carries my identity, expresses my energy, and showcases my aesthetic.

That led me to clarify what my authentic ‘aesthetic’ actually is: warm. Loving. Squishy/comfy/cozy. Radiant. Human. Bright. Creative. Expressive. Stylish. Different.

And what’s not aligned with that: hard. Angular. Stoic. Stone-like. Chiseled. Cold. Small. Tight. Compressed.

Once I saw that clearly, my start-stop pattern in exercise began to make more sense. The moment I stopped hating myself, my old motivation evaporated—because it was survival driven rather than being aligned with who I authentically am. All the exercise styles I’d forced myself into had been chosen to create an aesthetic I, myself, never actually wanted to express (smallness, hardness, coldness, compression).

Today, I move my body regularly—not perfectly, and certainly not without neurodivergent-induced lapses. I also now choose forms of movement that amplify my authentic expression: yoga, long walks, dancing, slow and measured strength work. Movement that expands who I am rather than is me trying to escape the parts of me that many of the voices and structure in society say I should hate.

That’s the difference a regenerative fuel source makes. You stop fighting yourself. You stop needing force. You naturally gravitate toward both actions and outcomes that align with who you are—whether that’s in movement, or in the way you structure, run, and sustain your business.

That’s the difference a regenerative fuel source makes. You stop fighting yourself. You stop needing force. You naturally gravitate toward both actions and outcomes that align with who you are.

Of course, finding this regenerative fuel source doesn’t negate the very real systems at play which are working overtime to keep us in an activated physiological state. It also won’t remove any need for a healthy financial foundation, because—hello capitalism—this is the world we live in. Nor will finding that regenerative fuel source ‘heal your nervous system’ or any of those now Instagram-popular promises. But it will give you something you can intentionally and persistently tap back into while giving yourself grace for the periods where you stopped—or momentarily weren’t able to, due to physiological activation—relying on it, instead relying on a survival-instinct motivation.

Sustainable Success in Business Begins with a Defined & Aligned Direction

Without a regenerative fuel source—one that doesn’t require metaphorical fracking to access—it’s incredibly difficult to consistently show up for, maintain, and grow your business. You can absolutely start a business on survival-driven motivation (and you’ll probably tap into that state again at times), but that fuel burns fast. Physiologically, your system isn’t designed to live in fight/flight/freeze/fawn without eventually paying a serious cost.

Even with access to your own regenerative fuel source, you’ll still have harder days or seasons. That’s just being human. But those dips will never erase the underlying energy you’re working from—and you can always return to it when you’re ready.

For me, naming and connecting with my natural motivation didn’t just clarify my next steps; it required rethinking almost everything about my business. My “mountaintop moment” of that $80k (sales) month forced me into deeper self-inquiry and eventually into rebuilding my offer suite, messaging, and demand generation system from the inside out. It wasn’t fast, and it definitely hasn’t been easy. But it was the first time I was building for the long-term instead of chasing the next spike of external validation.

This is the same shift I walk our EXPAND clients through: moving from building their business for short-term, rooted-in-physiological-activation rewards to building their business for long-term, sustainable success. The longer you wait to make this shift, the more deeply rooted the (ultimately unhelpful) processes and patterns become. Yet the good news is that it’s never too late. The first step in making this shift is always the same: establishing your Defined & Aligned Direction. That starts with identifying the internal fuel that’s truly regenerative for you, and then translating it into very practical elements of your business: your Goals, Business Model, and Niche.

I’ll go more in depth on each of these elements in future articles, or you can join us inside of EXPAND to be personally guided through the entire process. For now, I encourage you to complete the exercise above and begin honestly exploring: What might need to shift in your business so that it runs on a regenerative fuel source, instead of a survival-based one?

You’ve got this.

The post You don’t actually want freedom in your business. Here’s why ➡️ appeared first on WholeCo.

Ok, maybe not totally useless. But on their own? They do practically nothing for your business.

And if you’re working to find your target audience, what you really need to know is who your Right Fit client is. Yes, there’s a difference—and I’ll tell you what it is.

But first, let’s talk ideal clients.

What is an Ideal Client Avatar?

Ideal client avatars, personas, or profiles are often touted as the end-all, be-all of finding your ‘target audience’ as an online service provider, coach, practitioner, or creator. Take any course and you’re guided to list out demographics—age, location, family status, job title—and psychographics—what they care about, what motivates them, what they fear, what they dream of. Some courses and programs even guide you to figure out who your target audience is and then complete some market research calls to fill in the details. (I also don’t believe in online business owners using market research calls to determine their target audience, but more on that another moment.)

Why Ideal Client Avatars Don’t Work (Alone)

The problem, however, with ideal client avatars is that they focus on all the wrong things.

You’ve probably heard the refrain that, “If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one.” While this is, indeed, true, you want to be mindful of where you’re “getting specific.”

For example, a website designer could say that they work with people who are AFAB, in their 40’s, are married with kid/s, and who run their own business. They’d then go on to create content about being a “working mom” and try to make references in their content to TV shows that are popular with 40+ year old AFAB humans.

But what this website designer has just—unknowingly—done is started talking to a very specific group of humans…many of whom are NOT their Right Fit client.

Is every AFAB human looking for a website?

What about every 40 year old?

What about every mom?

The only thing that actually matters from this ‘persona’ is that they are a business owner. And, to be even more specific, they are a business owner who is actively looking for a website. (Because not all business owners want or need a website—at all, or right now.)

When you use an ideal client persona as your target audience, you’re “getting specific” in ways that unnecessarily limit your business—while not being specific enough about things that will actually attract Right Fit folks to you.

I once had a new client tell me about a sales call they had, expressing that they felt ‘guilty’ almost because, while they knew their work would help this person…

The prospective client wasn’t [insert specific demographics of their ideal client persona]. And while they did end up taking the client on, they felt like they were betraying their business by doing so because they had taken on a NOT “ideal client.”

My invitation to this business owner—and to you—was to expand their perspective on who their target audience is. And instead of going for—for example—40+ year old AFAB mothers who own a business, drop the unnecessary details and get specific about what will actually make your clients best-positioned to succeed in your work.

How to Use an Ideal Client Avatar in Your Online Business

Don’t fully do away with ideal client avatars, though. There is one thing that ideal client personas do well:

Humanize your audience to you.

What an ideal client persona is really good for is giving you a general concept that there is a human on the other side of the screen. A real, flesh-and-blood, living and breathing person reading your emails, watching your Reels, listening to your podcast episodes, etc.

Especially for people who are newer in business, this is important. Otherwise we can easily go into patterns like: 

• Worrying that “my audience isn’t big enough,” when, if you had 100 or 1,000 or whatever number of people in a room watching you speak, you’d be floored by the number of people who chose to listen to what you have to say.
• Creating content just to have content to publish, rather than because you know your Right Fit person wants or needs to hear this.
• Saying things off-hand without considering the actual lived impact of what you’re saying and, more importantly, how you’re saying it.
• …and more.

So yes, humanize your audience to yourself by creating a “persona” of your most aligned client. You can use literally any ideal customer avatar template to do so, by the way. It really doesn’t matter so long as it helps you see the human on the other side of the screen.

Then when you go to create social media content, or write a newsletter, or film a YouTube video, imagine you’re talking directly to a real human—because you are.

Ideal Clients vs. Right Fit Clients: There’s a MASSIVE Difference

But if you want to actually know who your target audience is—and be able to build a sustainable business serving those people—start with an ideal client persona. Don’t stop there.

What makes someone a Right Fit client for your work isn’t their age, gender identity, marriage status, or really even their hopes and dreams or fears and challenges. What makes someone a Right Fit client for your work is:

1. Are they someone you actually want to work with?
2. Are they set up for success in your specific approach to your work?
3. Are they problem-aware and actively searching for a solution? (And, as an added layer of nuance here: how problem-aware are they, and how much do they already know about the type of solution they want or need?)
4. Are they physiologically ready-to-transform? (You don’t want “looking for a savior” clients!!)

By answering these four questions, you’re able to get specific about the things that actually matter in your target audience. And you now have your four foundations of a Right Fit client:

• Ideal Client
• Best-Positioned to Succeed
• Purchase-Ready
• Physiologically Ready-to-Transform

When you know who your true target audience is—AKA who is a Right Fit client for your work—things become a heck of a lot more simple and sustainable in your business.

• Instead of having to convince people that they need your work and/or that it’s “worth it,” your clients show up to you already aware that they need not just the work that you do but, specifically, your work.
• Instead of bringing on clients who seemed super great in the sales process but end up being a nightmare to work with, you’re able to spot the red and yellow flags before you even invite them to sign on the dotted line.
• Instead of being met with objection after objection—“That’s too expensive” “I don’t have time” “How quickly will I see results?”—your messaging preemptively filters these prospects out and filters in the people who are pre-sold on working with you.

Example Ideal Client Persona (and why it doesn’t work!)

Just for funsies, let’s do a little breakdown of a traditional ideal client persona, so you can see exactly why they ultimately end up being so dang useless. (For anything other than humanizing your audience to you, that is.) Below, I made a sample buyer avatar for a fictional web design business.

(You can also make a copy of a document that contains this same information for easier reading purposes.)

Let’s start by first noticing which information flat out isn’t relevant to our example website design business:

Ok, so none of the demographics really matter. What about the psychographics? Well, these sort of matter, but only if they’ve been reworked to focus on what really matters. (And this is what most ideal client personas, including our sample one, get wrong.)

CORE VALUES

Core values can be helpful, but mostly because they often highlight what your core values in your business are. And you get to make choices about how you operate, from there.

But also: what are you going to do with these core values for your ideal client persona? Create content about “you want a website that shows your authenticity”? Great, now you sound like every other website designer.

In order to make these core values meaningful, you’d need to rework them within the context of a Right Fit Client. Specifically, you’d ask: What do these core values tell me about who would be best-positioned to succeed in my work? What experiences, priorities, foundations, etc. would they need to really thrive in my way of doing things?

Your answers to those questions would tell you a lot more about who a true Right Fit client is for your work than a simple list of core values.

In sum: You don’t need to know their core values, you need to know what makes this person Best-Positioned to Succeed in your work.

GOALS

Of course, goals are important. But some of these goals aren’t actually relevant to the work that the web designer does—and therefore focusing on them could lead to accidentally over-promising—and others are relevant, but need to be evolved to speak to a true problem-aware and solution-seeking client.

For example, the goal: “Attract her first wave of aligned clients through her online presence.” Yeah, that’s probably a goal that a Right Fit client for a web designer has—but they have it independent of their search for a website designer. Meaning: a Right Fit client for a web designer is not expecting the new website to attract new clients for them.

Think about it: A website designer cannot help a business owner “attract their first clients.” They create the website, and then the business owner has to go and do the things to attract traffic to the website and then turn them into clients from there.

If the website designer in this example sees this as a central goal of their prospective client, they might be inclined to use messaging for their services such as, “I’ll build you a website that attracts your dream clients.” This is what I call a “micro-over-promise,” because the website will not—on its own—attract dream clients. SOOOOO much more goes into that than just a website.

Another “iffy” goal on this list? “Build credibility and visibility without having to do everything herself.” 

Yes, a Right Fit client for our sample web designer wants to build credibility and visibility. And yes, a website can help with both of those things. It’s the “without having to do everything herself” part I’m worried about.

Why? Because if a primary reason that someone is hiring a web design project out is “I don’t want to do everything myself,” that person very well might be looking for a savior. Meaning: they’re looking at a website designer to save them from something miserable (in this case, DIYing), rather than looking at a website designer as someone who can help them expand into something desired (e.g. “I want my website to really stand out and represent the high-caliber of work I’m doing with my clients”). I know it’s a nuanced shift, but it’s this type of stuff that makes a difference in the readiness of the clients you attract.

Additionally, I’ve found that—for service providers especially—if a prospective client comes in with a primary motivation of not wanting to DIY, that client will almost always be draining to work with. Why? Because they typically don’t actually want to do any of the work in this project—despite the fact that there are things they need to do in order to allow the service provider to complete the project.

I invite you to look at the list of goals again. 
Which are not directly relevant to the work the web designer does, and therefore could lead to micro-over-promises?
Which are indicating that the prospective client might be looking for a savior and/or not be ready to do their part of the work in seeing the project through to completion?

In sum: What really matters about their goals is that they indicate that someone is Best-Positioned to Succeed in your work, Purchase-Ready, and Physiologically Ready-to-Transform.

MOTIVATIONS FOR SEEKING A WEB DESIGNER

We’re getting closer with this one!!!

The primary shift I’d recommend to our example website designer here is to think about which of these motivations are required for someone to be their Right Fit client, and which are optional or “nice to haves.”

For example, let’s say this website designer really focuses on the user experience (UX) in their designs. This would mean that they aren’t just building something “pretty,” they’re building something that brings data and psychology into their decision-making. 

If that’s something this website designer specifically brings to their designs, then a client who knows they want a “workhorse” website just as much as, if not more than, a “pretty” website is going to be important. For many reasons, one of which is: this prospective client will likely be willing to pay more for this level of expertise. And if the website designer didn’t include that as a characteristic of their Right Fit client, then it’s likely they’d end up attracting people who think the UX work is a “nice to have” rather than a “need to have,” and expect to pay accordingly.

On the other hand, let’s look at this motivation: “She’s overwhelmed by all the tech pieces and wants a partner she can trust.” Does someone actually need to be overwhelmed by the tech pieces in order to succeed in our website designers work?

Absolutely not. And in fact, specifically speaking to prospects who are overwhelmed by the tech pieces could potentially make them really difficult to work with simply for the fact that they’re going to need to use various tech pieces both to complete the project and to maintain their website after the project wraps up.

In sum: While it can be helpful to know what’s motivating someone to buy, we only want to really pay attention to motivations that indicate that someone is, indeed, Best-Positioned to Succeed in your work.

PERSONAL OR PROFESSIONAL CHALLENGES

So many of these ‘challenges’ are not at all directly related to the work that the website designer is going to do. Thus, they become unnecessary details for the website designer to know, and only end up confusing them or bogging them down when they go to try and create content or copy.

(Not to mention: it’s exhausting working with someone who is “pulled in a million directions.” Two people could have an equal amount of roles and responsibilities. One of them could feel “pulled in a million directions,” the other could have already figured out how to manage it. Which would be more of a Right Fit client for our web designer, whose role has absolutely nothing to do with helping their clients not be pulled in a million directions?)

WHERE THEY SPEND THEIR TIME

Here’s the deal with this one: your Right Fit clients are everywhere. You’ll have some people who prefer listening to podcasts, and others who prefer watching Reels. You’ll have some who prefer Facebook, and others who prefer LinkedIn. You’ll have some who attend in-person business conferences, and others who would find that an absolute nightmare to deal with.

It’s a losing game to try and be everywhere that your person could potentially be, particularly if you’re a solopreneur or even if you have a small team. But it’s also a losing game to make decisions about where you will and won’t market your business because you think that’s the “only” place your ideal client is. 

Ultimately, you need to make decisions about where you market your business based on where it is sustainable for you to continuously do so. Your Right Fit client is everywhere—you simply need to learn how to talk to them, specifically, and how to maximize whatever platform/s you’ve chosen to market on.

COMMUNICATION PREFERENCES

Similar to my notes for “motivations,” consider which of these communication preferences actually matter to whether or not someone is or isn’t a Right Fit client?

Frankly, I’d classify all of these as “nice to haves” at best, completely unnecessary at worst.

From Ideal to Right Fit: a More Useful Target Audience Strategy

Now, again, the sample ideal customer avatar I created above is just one sample of an ideal customer avatar. Search “how to create a customer avatar” or type it into your favorite generative AI model, and you’ll see a variety of demographics and psychographics listed out. 

Regardless, as we’ve seen above, a lot of the characteristics business owners tend to include in their ideal client profiles…

1. Aren’t necessary or even helpful pieces of information
2. Aren’t actually indicative of a Right Fit client
3. Are really just pointing to aspects of what makes someone Best-Positioned to Succeed in your work, which is only one of our four foundations of a Right Fit client.

Which is why, again, to really understand who your Right Fit client is, you have to go beyond a traditional “profile” of your ideal audience, and even beyond who is Best-Positioned to Succeed in your work, and also intentionally define who your Purchase-Ready Client is and who is Physiologically Ready-to-Transform.

Want to learn exactly how to create your Right Fit client? I’ve done a much deeper dive into the four questions to find your Right Fit client in this blog post.

FAQ’s About Ideal Clients for Online Business Owners

Do I need an ideal client avatar?

Yes, if you need help humanizing your audience to yourself. Other than that, an ideal client avatar is pretty useless, and what you really need is the four foundations of a Right Fit client.

What’s the difference between an ideal client and a target audience?

Your target audience is who you’re intending to attract into your services. There are four foundations of your target audience, and an ideal client—or, the person you most want to work with—is only one of them.

How do I attract aligned clients online?

It starts by knowing who your true Right Fit client is, which goes well beyond ideal clients and requires that you also know who is Best-Positioned to Succeed in your work, who is Purchase-Ready, and who is Physiologically Ready-to-Transform.

Once you know these four foundations of your Right Fit client—AKA you’ll know your target audience—now you can create the messaging and Demand Generation System to attract them.

Why aren’t people buying from me, even when I know I’m speaking to my ideal client?

As I’ve shown in the above post, an ideal client persona is often filled with a lot of unnecessary and even unhelpful information that distracts business owners from talking to their true target audience. Not only that, but the way that most ideal client avatars are designed, you’ll often end up with demographics and psychographics that are indicative of a wrong fit client—not a Right Fit one. 

If you’re finding it difficult to sell your services, packages, or offers, start by checking in one: am I talking to an ideal client, or am I talking to a Right Fit client? Oftentimes, making this shift to speak to Right Fit clients, instead, is enough on its own to help you make more sales from the audience you already have.

How do I differentiate my business if I don’t know my ideal client?

While finding your ideal client—on its own—is pretty useless for online business owners, you do still need to know who your target audience is. Your target audience includes your ideal client, but primarily focuses on the other characteristics of a Right Fit Client: being best-positioned to succeed, purchase-ready, and physiologically ready-to-transform.Once you know these aspects of your true Right Fit client, you can begin speaking directly to them. (Which is much easier to do than trying to talk to an ideal client alone!) From there, there are 5 layers of differentiation you’ll want to build into your offers. I teach those 5 layers inside our program, The Aligned Niche.

The post Why Your Ideal Client Avatar Isn’t Helping You Attract Clients appeared first on WholeCo.

You’ve poured time, energy, and expertise into crafting your offer—so why isn’t it selling the way you’d hoped? Or maybe it is selling, but it’s not delivering results as effectively as you’d like. Or it’s working for your clients…but at the cost of your own sustainability.

Creating an offer that is irresistible to your audience, effective at delivering results, and sustainable for you to run is a balancing act. If you optimize for just one or two, the third often suffers. If your offer is falling short in one of these three areas, you’ll start seeing signs like these:

• Your offer isn’t irresistible. Potential clients hesitate, ghost, or say, “This sounds amazing, but…” You might feel pressure to lower your price, throw in bonuses, or use heavy urgency tactics just to close sales.
• Your offer isn’t effective. Clients sign up, but they struggle to complete the process, don’t see the promised results, or need more hand-holding than expected. You’re constantly tweaking the delivery to try and “fix” it.
• Your offer isn’t sustainable. You’re stretched too thin, over-delivering to ensure clients succeed, or constantly launching to keep revenue flowing. Even if it’s profitable, it doesn’t feel manageable long-term.

In an attempt to fix these problems, most business owners make small (or major) changes to their offers. But often, those changes improve one area at the expense of another—leaving them stuck in a frustrating cycle that feels a lot more like whack-a-mole than real, lasting Sustainable Success.

Common Mistakes Business Owners Make When Trying to “Optimize” Their Offers

When something isn’t working in an offer, the natural response is to tweak it. Yet a tweak to fix one issue, without taking the larger context into consideration, might solve that problem, but will inevitably create others.

Here’s what this can look like:

Trying to make an offer more irresistible → comes at the cost of effectiveness and/or sustainability.

• You lower the price to remove objections → but then attract misaligned clients or aren’t paid a sustainable amount for the work you’re doing.
• You add more bonuses or extra content → but now you’re overwhelming clients with too much information that either slows them down or leads to them giving up.
• You use aggressive urgency tactics → but any conversions in the short-term come at the cost of long-term trust amidst your community.

Trying to make an offer more effective → comes at the cost of irresistibility and/or sustainability. 

• You extend the delivery timeline → but now prospects don’t seem to want to commit for “that long” and clients who were already moving “slowly” keep going at the same snail’s pace.
• You increase access to you with more 1:1 calls, extra Q&As, or unlimited access between sessions → but now you’re feeling depleted and ‘used’ by your clients (even though you were the one who agreed to or even proposed this).
• You add more accountability like progress tracking, milestone check-ins, or other incentives for taking action → but now you feel like you’re parenting your clients and resenting their growing dependency on you.

Trying to make an offer more sustainable → comes at the cost of efficacy and/or irresistibility.

• You raise prices → but now you have even fewer people booking sales calls or making purchases.
• You shift from 1:1 to group or self-paced work and/or hire team members to deliver for you → but now prospects see the offer as less valuable (and you have to relearn how to position its value in this new format).
• You remove personal access and/or automate some of your delivery → but now when your clients hit a roadblock, they feel stuck and disengage rather than navigating through it (leading to lower completion rates and less or weaker testimonials).

“So, wait, can offers actually be irresistible, effective, and sustainable all at the same time?!”

Yes! But not simply by adjusting the price point, adding more support, or tweaking the structure. These are quick fixes that, while they might momentarily make things better, don’t lead to lasting positive effects in your business.

What actually makes an offer work—and be irresistible, effective, and sustainable, all at the same time—is not tweaking it to be one of those things, but designing it (from the start!) to be all of them. To do that, you need to know and build your five offer foundations. Let’s explore those now.

The Foundations of Irresistible, Effective, and Sustainable Offers

Offer Foundation #1: Proprietary Process

Your Proprietary Process is an outline of the exact steps that your Right Fit client needs to take to go from where they are, to where they want to be, thus achieving the intended transformation or result of your offer. 

We have to start here, before even deciding how to format the offer (“Is it a VIP day? A membership? A hybrid group program?” etc.) because the structure you choose needs to support the process—not the other way around. You have to determine what the client needs to do, practically, so as to achieve their intended outcome or result before you can determine what delivery structure is going to best support them to do those things.

Note that a Proprietary Process is not the same as an overarching brand “framework.” A framework is a visual aid to explain the overarching philosophy of your work as a whole, while a Proprietary Process is the steps required to achieve the intended outcome of a specific offer. Which means while you might eventually choose to create your “signature framework,” you need to have a Proprietary Process for every single individual offer you create (free and paid). 

For a step-by-step process to create your Proprietary Process, check out this blog post.

Offer Foundation #2: Delivery Structure

Once you’ve mapped out your Proprietary Process, the next step is choosing the best structure to help your Right Fit Client reliably complete the steps of your Proprietary Process. This is your Delivery Structure, or the “container” of your offer.

Your Delivery Structure could be a group program, done-for-you service, consulting package, coaching container, membership, or a course (prerecorded or cohort-based), among other formats. You don’t need to decide every detail or inclusion just yet—that comes next!—but at this stage, you do need to define the core structure that will best facilitate the transformation.

Notice how different Delivery Structures work best for different types of Proprietary Processes:

• Memberships are best for Proprietary Processes that need ongoing repetition to achieve a specific result (e.g. supporting habit-building, completion of a recurring task or project, or some other form of continuous skill development).
• Courses are ideal when a client needs to follow a specific, relatively straightforward set of steps to achieve a specific outcome. This Delivery Structure works well when taking the steps of the Proprietary Process can be done without frequent customization or feedback.
• 1:1 packages and done-for-you services are best for complex or highly specialized journeys where a client would need months—or years—of knowledge before implementing the steps of the Proprietary Process themselves. This is also ideal for deep transformation work.
• Group programs work best when you’ve systematized and refined your Proprietary Process (often through prior 1:1 work) into a repeatable journey that delivers consistent results for every client.

Choosing the right Delivery Structure for the relevant Proprietary Process is absolutely critical to making the offer irresistible, effective, and sustainable.

Offer Foundation #3: Delivery Inclusions

Now you can get into the details and “flesh out” the offer by deciding the Delivery Inclusions. In this foundation, you’re asking: what do I need to include in the offer to support my clients in taking the steps of my Proprietary Process with relative ease and simplicity?

This is where you’re exploring questions like number of sessions, Voxer access, specific deliverables or project phases, curriculum, accountability supports, and more. A lot of business owners accidentally have too many inclusions or not enough—both of which limit the irresistibility, efficacy, and sustainability of the offer. 

To learn the “art of enough” in offer-building, check out this in-depth blog post.

Offer Foundation #4: Price Point

Ahhh the most-feared offer foundation. There are a lot of different strategies for pricing your services, packages, courses, templates, and the like, but all of them need to take into account one foundational question: What price point is equitable and sustainable for both you and your Right Fit (for this offer) client? 

We want your price points for each offer to be equitable, meaning that they create a sort of “win-win” situation for you and your clients, where your client receives the transformation, support, or results they need, and you are fairly compensated for your expertise, time, and effort. 

We also want your price points to be sustainable, meaning that you are paid what you need in order to deliver the offer well, and your client is not overextending themselves in order to make payments. (We don’t want clients overextending themselves in order to make payments because it’s physiologically impossible to do what’s required to achieve a lasting transformation or result when your very basic financial needs aren’t met.)

All of this together means that your pricing needs to reflect:

• The true value of the outcome, not just the time spent delivering it.
• Your level of expertise and the depth of transformation your offer provides.
• The financial realities of your Right Fit Client, what they can—on average—invest without compromising their basic needs. In some cases, a “stretch” can be ok, but a “strain” never is.

On the strategy-level, you also want your price points to “make sense” within the context of your overall Offer Suite. That’s a much deeper conversation that we’ll have to save for a live workshop or something in the future.

Offer Foundation #5: Offer Alignment

Finally, Offer Alignment, or: do you actually want to sell and deliver this offer?

You now know the steps your client needs to take to achieve their intended outcome, you’ve designed the offer to facilitate them in taking those steps, you’ve named your price point for the offer, ensuring it’s both equitable and sustainable—so is this an offer you actually want to start sharing with the world and welcoming clients into?

A sort of rite of passage as an online business owner is selling an offer that, when you go to deliver it, you realize that you really do NOT want to be selling or delivering. And so when it comes to trying to market that offer, sell it, talk about it, invite people into it, you’re met with so much internal resistance. This can often take the form of:

• Avoiding marketing, procrastinating on content creation, or feeling uninspired when talking about your offer.
• Constantly “tweaking” or reworking the offer instead of actually selling it.
• Feeling a sense of dread or resistance when a new inquiry comes in.
• Over-delivering or over-complicating the offer in an attempt to justify its existence.
• Secretly hoping no one buys so you don’t have to deliver it.

We end here, with this final offer foundation, because you have to actually want to sell and deliver an offer in order for it to be:

• irresistible to your clients (who can feel your lack of enthusiasm)
• effective at facilitating results (since you aren’t going to do your best work if you dread delivering that work)
• sustainable for you to deliver (need I say more?)

Of course, there’s a difference between momentarily not wanting to sell and deliver an offer and the offer actually being entirely misaligned. Whenever a client shares with me that they’re dreading selling and/or delivering an offer, I’ll typically encourage them to run it through their foundations first before deciding to entirely throw the offer out. Often what they’ll find is that there’s something off in their foundations causing them to dread the offer as much as they do. Alternatively, it can also be a mindset issue or a fear, such as a fear of being seen in their true expertise. Yes, there are absolutely times to let go of an offer! But we want to do so with intention, rather than accidentally throwing the baby out with the bathwater in a heated moment of frustration.

How 5 Offer Foundations Make Your Packages, Containers, and Programs Successful

By building out each of these foundations of each of your offers, you are setting the offer up to be a “success” in every sense of the word.

They’re sustainable because you’ve actually designed an offer you want and are ready to sell and deliver. They’re effective because you literally began the process by exploring exactly what your Right Fit client would need to do in order to achieve their intended outcome, and designed the offer to facilitate those steps being taken. And they’re irresistible because you’re excited to sell and deliver them and they’re set up to reliably deliver the results your people are ready for.

Now there’s one final piece that makes your offer truly sustainable, effective, and irresistible, which is that you’ve designed this offer within the context of AOM Alignment. AOM Alignment is the process of bringing Right Fit clients into right-for-them offers using messaging which accurately conveys the expected result, transformation, or outcome. Learn how to build AOM Alignment in this blog post.

Offer-building—and all that’s included with that!—is a significant portion of our most popular course, The Aligned Niche. If you’re ready to clearly express who you help, what you do, and why it’s valuable so that you can confidently showcase what makes you and your work unique everywhere that you’re marketing and selling your stuff—I invite you to join us for our upcoming 6-week live cohort. Starting in April, you can save $100 on the program through March 31, 2025!

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The post Irresistible, Effective, and Sustainable Offers: The 5 Foundations Every Consultant, Coach, or Service Provider Needs to Know appeared first on WholeCo.