Building a Profitable Business with Intention Beyond Work-Life Balance

Welcome to the latest episode of Process to Profitability where I'm delving into the topic of creating a business with intention. As small business owners, we know there are challenges to maintaining work-life balance and personal well-being. In today's episode, I'll explore the significance of choosing why and how you want to run your business so you can prioritize what's most important for you while building sustainable business success.

Timestamps:

[00:00:23] What is UX and why is it important?

[00:01:55] Key UX principles to consider for your website

[00:03:40] How to check your website's UX

[00:05:18] Common UX issues on websites

[00:07:05] Quick steps to improving your website's UX

[00:08:51] Intentionally good UX is part of an intentional business

Key Takeaways:

• The concept of creating a business with intention for sustainable success

• Challenges of maintaining work-life balance and personal well-being as a business owner

• Work-life balance versus work-life harmony

• Goal of reading 200 books this year

• The importance of self-care and personal well-being in building a business with intention

• Considering fulfillment, creativity, and impact on the world

• Being part of a supportive group of entrepreneurs who prioritize their lives while running their businesses

• Deliberately choosing what's important and focusing on those things

• Setting boundaries and communicating expectations

• Outsourcing tasks to save time and reduce workload

[00:00:00] Welcome to the latest episode of Process to Profitability. This next mini series is going to be all about creating a business with intention, and so I wanted to start by delving into the topic of creating that for you as a business owner.

[00:00:20] As small business owners, we know there are challenges to maintaining a work-life balance and personal wellbeing while running a business. So in today's episode, I'm going to explore why it's so important to choose how you want to run your business so that you can prioritize what's most important while building that business with sustainability and success.

The importance of prioriticing your wellbeing

[00:00:46] First, I wanna talk about the importance of prioritizing your personal wellbeing. I think we've all heard of creating a work-life balance, and I heard someone talk about work-life balance can be such a misnomer because we feel like in order to have work-life balance, they have to be even, we have to put as much time into our work as we do into our life. And that's just not the case.

[00:01:12] It's more like work life harmony. We want our work to support our life and our life to allow us to work in a way that we want to and show up for our clients in the way that we want to.

Self-care goes beyond simple tips

[00:01:26] And part of this, of course, is self-care. We hear this all the time, and I'm sure that you have seen all of the videos going around that self-care for moms does not include taking a 10 minute shower by yourself. And I totally feel that, but I think if it goes beyond that.

[00:01:45] When we are trying to build a business with intention, we need to look at our personal wellbeing from a broader standpoint. Are we fulfilled in our business? Do we get to be creative? Do we get to work with the types of clients that we want to work with? Are we providing a service that we love and that we feel has impact on the world? All of that is part of creating a business with intention.

[00:02:13] We are intentionally choosing the types of clients we want to work with, the service we provide, how we deliver that service, as well as what our business allows us to do outside of those business hours.

[00:02:29] Your wellbeing, your time apart from your business, is vital to how you can run a sustainable and successful business. And it is an investment in the business that you are creating.

Choose to run your business outside of the traditional model

[00:02:47] So many of us got into business because we wanted more flexibility. Maybe we became moms, or we started growing our families. Maybe we just wanted to have the freedom to work from home, or work with the types of clients that we want, or get rid of the nine to five hustle culture that exists in a lot of more traditional businesses.

[00:03:11] But what we find when we get into business is that it's so easy to get caught up into those same routines, into that same mindset, and spend even more time on our business than we did when we were an employee.

[00:03:24] And so we have to think through our values and our mission and our purpose like we've talked about prior in this season, and use that to determine how we want to actually live those out in our business in a way that lets us make decisions and balance or harmonize our work and our life.

How to create and maintain work-life harmony

[00:03:47] So when we think about a work life harmony, what can we do to create that and maintain it? It can super challenging, but it's not impossible. First of all, we need to be very aware of how we are using our time and setting boundaries within those times so that it's clear to us, to our families, to our clients, what our boundaries are.

[00:04:15] How we are going to communicate with them so that it's easy for us then to turn off our phone at the end of the day or wait to send that email until tomorrow morning because everybody's expectations are the same?

[00:04:30] We also have to learn how to prioritize the things that are most important. For me, that means prioritizing client work. When I have a VIP Day during a specific week, that entire week is going to be mostly dedicated to doing my client work so that I don't forget that I don't deliver a poor product to my client. And then the weeks that I don't have a VIP Day, I can spend more time on the marketing and networking in other side of my business while still maintaining those strict boundaries I have around my work hours.

[00:05:06] If it's possible, you can outsource things. I have somebody who helps me with my social media scheduling. She goes through and makes sure all of the posts about my podcasts are ready to go out, so that I do not have to think about that. Once the episode is edited and sent over to her. It takes a lot off of my plate because I don't have to be thinking about either scheduling those or going in and checking that they're live. All I have to do is my piece that I am able to do whenever it's convenient for me and then I send it off to her and I trust that she is doing her piece of that and answer any questions that might come up.

[00:05:46] And then we also want to make sure that we are adding in time for us beyond being a business owner, so incorporating activities and hobbies outside of our business that can help us personally. That is so key and it's something that I learned after I had been in business for at least a year.

Creating a business with intention as a parent or caregiver

[00:06:09] When I started my business, I was not a mom. My husband was working long hours at his first year teaching, and so I would sit at my desk all day. I was trying to build a business, so there was a lot of work and a lot of networking to be done, a lot of things to learn. I would sit at my desk all day in the evenings, we would eat dinner, and then I would pull out my laptop and I would sit and I would do Twitter chats when those were a thing every night. And it worked to grow my business, but it was so draining on me and my relationship. I never went outside. I never took a walk. I never took a break. I never turned my business brain off.

[00:06:49] And what I learned, especially when I became a mom, is that I don't have that much time to dedicate to business. And I don't want to dedicate that much time to business. I don't want to be tied to my phone or my laptop all day long. I don't want my kiddo to see me sending emails all the time. I want him to understand that running a business is work. And so I am very open about when it is work time. But when it's not work time, all of that gets pushed to the side.

[00:07:19] And I know that for all of the other mompreneurs out there, we understand that there are challenges that we face that other business owners and other people in a traditional job do not understand. We have family responsibilities, business responsibilities, and it's a juggling act to keep all of those working.

[00:07:39] When I hire a coach or when I work with a business owner, I always consider what do they have going on in their life and are they going to align with the time and the boundaries that I have to put in place? Because I want to use my time effectively, and I want to learn from people who are doing the same, who are going to understand the restrictions that I have on my time because I am a mom and because I am a wife, and because I just want to have a business that allows me to put my life first.

How I am creating a business with intention

[00:08:13] So I wanna share a couple of ways that I am creating a business with intention for me here at Lemon and the Sea, here with Process to Profitability.

Reading 200 books in 2023

[00:08:23] The first thing that I have been really focusing on this year and concentrating on is getting back into my love of reading. I have always been a reader. I have always carried a book with me wherever I go. I once got in trouble in class because I was reading instead of paying attention to the lesson. Reading has always been a huge part of my life. And when I started my business, because I was spending so much time on my computer, I really didn't read very much. And I realized in the past four years as a mom, that I missed that so much that it was an essential part of who I am that I had let go.

[00:09:00] And so this year I set a goal, initially of reading 100 books, but I've since bumped that up to reading 200 books this year. I've been tracking that on Goodreads if you want to follow me. But I have a goal to read 200 books and when you do the math, that comes out to four books a week.

[00:09:17] If you wanna know how I do that, I listen to audio books on at least two times speed. And then I read a book usually on my Kindle because physical books are just harder to carry around. And I very intentionally do not read business books. So I read a lot of thrillers, a lot of romcoms, a lot of fantasy. But I stay away from business books because I want my reading time to be my personal time.

Spending intentional time with my family

[00:09:44] And then with my kiddo. So right now he is in childcare five mornings a week and then some afternoons, but once a week, every week we have dedicated mom and kid time where we go on all sorts of adventures. We go to parks, we try out different hiking spots, we diff go to museums. We do all sorts of things, and we have a goal this year to spend 1000 hours outdoors.

[00:10:14] That is making sure that I'm very intentional with spending time with him. That's not just an afterthought. Of course, there are times that I'm sitting and reading, but I also have very intentional hours that I can spend concentrating on him building that relationship.

Strict business boundaries and office hours

[00:10:32] I also have strict business boundaries. So I have office hours that I communicate to all my clients, and when my office hours are over, they are not gonna get a response. They're gonna have to wait until the next time I have my work back up. And I have had to build up to that. I have had to learn to enforce those very strictly with myself as well as with my clients.

Investing in tools to make my work faster

[00:10:56] And then I am intentionally investing in tools and services that are going to help me perform my work better and faster.

[00:11:05] So I have been learning a lot about AI in the recently and figuring out how I can use those types of tools to make things like outlining a podcast episode or choosing titles for my podcast episode faster without compromising the quality that I can deliver.

[00:11:24] That's really helping me to get everything I need to done in my business so that then I can unplug and turn off and go back to being a wife and a mom.

Spending time with like-minded business owners

[00:11:35] And then the last thing that I'm doing is I have a weekly mastermind with like-minded business owners. They're not all moms, but we all want to build businesses that support our lifestyles, that give us room to be human. And so we spend time together every week, we talk outside of that mastermind call, just encouraging each other, talking about the reality of running a business with intention and creating a business that gives us the ability to be human and to put our life first.

[00:12:11] Creating a business with intention is essential for small business owners by deliberately choosing what's important to you specifically. In focusing on those things, you can set yourself up for sustainable success.

[00:12:24] And I hope that this episode gave you some things to think about, about how you can choose what's important to you, what your values and your goals are, and then figure out ways that you can incorporate both the life and the business side into how you are intentionally designing your business to support both of those things.