These Behind-the-Scenes Rules Decide Whether Your Business Can Sustain Success

Many business owners are doing all of the “right” things—building offers, marketing consistently, saying ‘yes’ to opportunities that arise—yet still feel like their business requires more and more from them just to keep it going.

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.