Ep. 376 Business redesign: when optimisation isn’t enough

If you’ve been optimising for months but the day-to-day still feels heavy, this episode will help you spot when you need business redesign – not more effort. Anna unpacks optimisation vs redesign and shares how to step back and rethink the architecture of your business, with an invitation to her Solopreneur OS workshop on Tuesday 13thJanuary 2026.

Key moments:

[00:00] The core problem – When tweaking isn’t changing how your business feels

[00:21] Optimisation vs redesign – Why the issue may be architectural, not effort-based

[01:03] Workshop invitation – Build your Solopreneur OS (13 Jan 2026)

[02:05] The “always optimise” pattern – Why it feels productive (and why it stalls)

[03:02] Success scripts – How resourcefulness can keep you stuck in constant tweaking

[05:49] Common optimisation moves – Messaging, pricing, offers, visibility, calendars

[07:22] The house metaphor – Rearranging furniture vs rebuilding the foundation

[08:52] Signs you’ve hit the ceiling – Marginal gains and repeating the same problems

[09:25] The operating system analogy – When your business needs an OS upgrade

[12:19] Redesign questions – The deeper prompts that shift the whole model

[13:13] Recalibration, not destruction – Redesign without burning everything down

[14:30] The real barrier – You can’t redesign while delivering at full capacity

[15:40] Step back and see the system – Why January creates the space to rethink

Resources mentioned:

• Register for the 13th January workshop introducing the Solopreneur Operating System – intentionalexpert.com

• Email your questions and feedback – podcast@onestepoutside.com

Business Redesign

This episode is for you if you have spent the last year optimising. So you’ve been adjusting prices, refining offers, improving processes, and yet the fundamental experience of running your business just hasn’t changed.

If you’re sensing a ceiling that you can’t break through by tweaking, you may be facing an architectural issue rather than an effort one. And today we’ll explore the distinction between optimisation and redesign.

Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert, one that works for you and your lifestyle. I’m your host, Anna Lundberg, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach, and mum of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility, and the fulfilment you’re looking for. Ready to redefine success and build a business that you love? Let’s get started.

So before we get into the meat, as it were, of today’s session, today’s episode, I wanted to remind you that tomorrow, if you’re listening to this live, tomorrow, Tuesday, the 13th of January 2026, I’m running the new workshop, which is all to help you build your solopreneur OS, your solopreneur operating system. So if you head over to intentionalexpert.com, you can sign up for that.

It’s a 90 minute session, so a big chunky one. But if you can make it, it’s a really good opportunity. If the episodes have been resonating for you, if this feels like the moment when you do want to take that bigger picture of your operating system, how you’re running your business, and to get a different kind of results and a different feeling of running your business this year. So intentionalexpert.com to build your solopreneur operating system.

Now, okay, so coming to today’s topic, perhaps a familiar pattern for you. A lot of us having worked for a few years in our business, many years maybe, reach a point where the business sort of works, but never quite in the way that it should have. And we think, okay, we’ve got to optimise. And this is an ongoing thing for us. Always trying to learn, always trying to grow, always trying to make it better. We’re refining, we’re improving, we’re adjusting.

And we’re not doing anything wrong, but it just feels like, oh, this must be the best way and I’ve just got to do this and then that and then it’ll be better. You know, it just feels quite safe and it feels responsible to, of course, keep learning and keep adapting what we’re doing. To some extent, I think it gives us the illusion of momentum. It’s sort of, oh, if I tweak this, then it’s going to get easier. You know, if I just do that. If I only sign up to this thing, then that’s going to solve everything.

But the problem isn’t the effort. It’s how we’re framing things. It feels productive to keep optimising. But that only helps when the underlying architecture, when the scaffolding is sound.

So I think thinking about where this is coming from, it comes back to all these success scripts that I talk about a lot. I’ve talked about my good girl, good boy conditioning. And the truth is, this idea of what got you here won’t get you there. We have got here. We have succeeded by being resourceful. Most solopreneurs build our early success by learning quickly and adjusting constantly. We’re really resilient. We’re really adaptable.

And that’s a huge strength. It’s the most important strength, I think, in today’s world, along with curiosity. And that is why we have been rewarded for being resourceful. We’ve been rewarded for over-delivering even, okay, because it’s what made our work excellent. When we started in particular, we didn’t have that many clients. So we could fill our time by over delivering and delighting our customers and clients and optimising and optimising and making things better and better.

The other thing for those of us who are especially independent practitioners, by definition, is that we’re really independent. We really value our autonomy. And so we’re used to solving problems for ourselves. And we can solve problems ourselves. We’re problem solvers. That’s literally the definition of an entrepreneur. We’re super smart. And of course, we can look inwards and we can think and we can reflect and we can coach ourselves. What can I tweak? What can I update? Right? We’re used to solving problems ourselves. And we can do that really, really well.

Possibly also, there’s a bit of a message that we’ve internalised that growth comes from improving the parts, you know, you go over here and you tinker with this bit and you go over there and fix that bit. But the truth is that only works when the parts belong to the right whole. You know, the individual pieces might be right pieces, it might be correct or functional business advice that someone’s given you, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. And if it’s the wrong puzzle, it’s the right piece, you know, the piece is working, but it’s not fitting in your particular puzzle, then it’s pretty worthless, really, or it kind of works, but not as well as it could.

So I think we’re conditioned for these various reasons to just refine those pieces rather than question if the puzzle picture that we’re building is actually the one that matches the box, right? If the box is the one that matches what we’re wanting to build.

I saw, in fact, a guy who builds Legos, and he turned every Lego packet, whatever it was, Disney Princess or Stitch or whatever, into the Millennium Falcon. So he basically took any pieces, pink, yellow, green, white, that were designed to make a particular thing. And he took them and he built the thing that he wanted to build, which came to mind as a little picture there to illustrate that example.

So, okay, again, unfortunately, perhaps these tendencies might seem quite familiar to you. And again, I always hold my hand up here, and I’ve done this over the years too.

You sign up to a workshop on messaging, or on lead generation, or some big, you know, very successful entrepreneur tells you, these are the 12 rules that you have to follow, this is my blueprint to get XYZ results. And we kind of hope that that’s going to fix the sense of inconsistency we have.

You try a new visibility strategy. Okay, I’m going to post more often on LinkedIn, or I’m going to go onto this new channel. And we’re hoping that’s going to fix the fatigue or the lack of resonance.

Maybe you adjust your pricing because, oh, it’s too high. That’s why they’re saying no, or more likely it’s too low. And now if I just increase the pricing, it’s going to feel more sustainable.

Maybe you create a new offer and hope that’s going to solve things, possibly even retire an offer. That’s often a better decision, better move.

Refresh your positioning. You know, we’re updating our LinkedIn headline every day and we revisit the vision board and understanding, okay, what exactly is my point and what is my positioning and who is my client and hope that that’s going to bring clarity and alignment.

And we keep just reorganising the calendar. I’ve had many a client have various colour coded calendars and Notion boards and Asana projects, whatever. And we hope that that kind of structure is going to create the ease within the business.

And each individual action is totally reasonable. However, the actions all sit inside the old architecture. So stretching that metaphor again, we’re rearranging the furniture, maybe putting on a new lick of paint. We haven’t rebuilt the house, we haven’t removed the old wiring, updated the piping, redone the plastering. We haven’t done any of that. We’re just making little tweaks.

And so it feels really seductive, again, because it’s got that illusion of momentum. It feels like we’re making progress, but it rarely actually shifts anything because the foundation is the same. And so you hit a kind of ceiling. There is, you know, of course you get some results from tweaking and improving and optimising, but maybe you’re noticing that each improvement just makes things slightly better. But it’s not fundamentally different. It’s just that incremental tweak.

Progress is becoming marginal. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been the person to talk about being in it for the long haul and incremental gains, but sometimes you don’t want incremental, you want really exponential or at least a big leap up.

Maybe you’ve hit that plateau and you want to break through that and you want more meaningful progress. Often if you find yourself circling the same challenges in different forms, we keep coming back to positioning, what is the messaging, I keep struggling with B2B versus B2C, or I keep struggling with is it this or is it that, whatever. That’s really a sign, right, that that optimisation isn’t getting you as far as you want. And no matter how much you adjust, it just doesn’t work.

So these are some of the signals, I’d say, that the model you’re trying to improve is simply outdated.

Again, another metaphor that keeps coming to mind, of course, naturally with the operating system, is that you might be restarting, when in fact you leave your computer on the whole time, let’s say that, and you have all the tabs open, you’re making tweaks over here, maybe close a tab over here, maybe open that over there, maybe do a little update or something.

But your whole Mac operating system is really old. And that needs updating before you can actually install the correct updates for the other programmes and their apps and things, right? Some apps on an old iPad can’t even be installed. And then you even need new hardware, a new laptop, a new iPad, a new computer.

So there are levels of optimisation you can do. You can just do a little mini update on an app or close and restart and whatever. You can, of course, restart the computer. You can update things. But sometimes you need a whole upgrade of the foundational software, sometimes even the hardware itself.

So we talked about this last week, but when the architecture doesn’t fit anymore, there are a few reasons for that, right? You’ve evolved, your model hasn’t. Your identity has evolved, it’s deepened, but you’re still, your message at least, is still speaking to that earlier version of your expertise.

Your life has changed, but your capacity planning hasn’t changed. Your ambitions have shifted. And that requires a different kind of model to get different kinds of results. But if your delivery structure stays fixed, that’s not going to be possible.

Again, your thinking has matured, right? I’ve written books, and the first one, I believe, was in 2018, maybe the next one was 2022. They’re really far too spread out. I always wanted to write them more often. But even, you know, Outside the 9 to 5, which I have people saying, oh, it’s so good, it’s so valuable, it really is a handbook, almost, for people starting out. But even there, as much as I still stand by the five pillars in that book and the material, of course, my ideas, my frameworks, my philosophy has evolved thanks to my own evolution, thanks to working with hundreds of clients in the meantime, and the market shifting and so on.

Okay, so it’s not that the book was in any way based on outdated technology. And I’ve never been one to hop on the latest trend. It’s not like AI has now rendered it all completely out of date. But the truth is, there will always be more sophistication, more nuance, and that requires a different kind of container.

Maybe also, again, you have a stronger sense of what your boundaries are, but the clients you’re working with right now or the offers or how you’ve set up your business just isn’t structured to support those boundaries.

So you’re not mismanaging your business. You’re just outgrowing an architecture that was built for who you used to be, not who you are today.

So coming down to the crux of it, the heart of the matter: optimisation is things like, okay, asking, how can I make this better? What’s the quickest improvement I can make here? How do I refine what already exists? I’m watching a training to do this, I’m rethinking that bit, I’m rejigging, I’m rewriting the landing page, whatever, right?

Redesign, however, asks far more foundational questions that could potentially shift everything and nothing at the same time, bizarrely. Does this model still fit the person I am now? What business do I actually want to be running? What would make my work feel lighter, cleaner, more coherent? What structure honours my current capacity and identity? And what model supports the life I want now and going forward, not the one I used to have?

So at a certain stage, we get to a point where the work isn’t just about adjusting the parts, but actually re-evaluating the structure they sit inside.

So I want to reassure you, we’re not talking about burning things down. I keep emphasising that we’re not starting again. Everyone I speak to who’s made these little pivots and redesigns, everyone I’ve worked with, you know, it’s a bit of a slingshot. You have to pull back to then be able to shoot forwards.

We’re not abandoning what works, because yes, I hear you on the fear that, oh I don’t want to break something that ain’t broken. I don’t want to completely tear up what was bringing in the income, what is bringing in income, for some kind of pipe dream of a different kind of business.

Rather, we’re talking about a really thoughtful, considered evolution, a recalibration, as I’ve been calling it. So we’re being coherent, we’re simplifying and really locking into that clarity rather than just adding more and adding more complexity.

And so if you’re at that point that redesign feels necessary, it’s because you can’t grow anymore inside the structure you’ve built.

You, of course, cannot redesign when you’re delivering at full capacity. And that’s the barrier we get up against, right? Because again, success gets in the way. You are successful in your current model. And so you’re delivering all the time. You’re doing those talks, the coaching sessions, however your current model looks. You’re delivering at full capacity so there’s very little time to redesign.

You don’t have enough distance from the day-to-day noise and you’re maybe living in your to-do list, right, your project management, you’re just going through a set of tasks rather than taking that step back to look at the business as a system.

And January, I hope, is offering that moment of spaciousness, the more than ideal conditions, I’d say, for getting that clarity and thinking about the architecture as a whole. We probably wanted to do it at the end of last year. And I did run a little programme to help people kind of identify what was getting in the way, where the mismatch was, the disconnect between what they wanted and where the business is today. But possibly Christmas and everything got in the way. And now January, it’s like, okay, you know, buckle up, and let’s do this now.

So I talked about the workshop at the beginning of the podcast episode. It is tomorrow if you listen to this live. And so the workshop’s going to explore this optimisation versus redesign question at a structural level. So we’re looking at the redesign of course.

And it’s hopefully a really good space for you to step back, even if you do nothing but join this 90-minute session tomorrow and you can sign up at intentionalexpert.com. Then this is giving you a step back, an opportunity to look at your architecture.

I’m giving you a framework to think about, okay, where is that friction coming from? And to think more clearly about the business you need next. So not putting more pressure on, not adding more intensity and effort, rather giving you this different perspective and architectural thinking.

So I hope to see you there tomorrow. It’s building your solopreneur operating system, your solopreneur OS, and you can sign up at intentionalexpert.com. See you then.

If this is resonating and you’d like to explore your structure with me then you can join the live Solopreneur OS workshop tomorrow. It’s a chance to step back from the noise, see the architecture of your business more clearly and understand where redesigning it might serve you next. You can register at intentionalexpert.com.