If you’re craving a more intentional, streamlined and sustainable way to run your business next year, this episode is for you. Anna introduces a new way of thinking about how your business works behind the scenes – and what it takes to design your business operating system for 2026.
Key moments:
[00:32] A final episode before the break – Why intention matters at this time of year
[02:15] The rise of doing business differently – Why so many are opting out of old systems
[04:10] Revisiting Anna’s original Five Pillars – The roots of her framework
[08:05] Why the business model becomes the bottleneck as you grow
[10:44] The problem with blueprint thinking – Why copying others no longer works
[13:25] Introducing the Solopreneur Operating System
[15:12] Component 1: Designing your intentional business model
[18:00] Component 2: Authentic marketing & resonant sales
[21:27] Component 3: Simple systems that help you stay consistent
[24:10] How Frankensteined businesses drain your energy
[26:00] January workshop: Design Your Solopreneur Operating System
[27:40] Final words before the holiday episodes
Resources mentioned:
Join the waitlist for the January workshop introducing the Solopreneur Operating System – intentionalexpert.com
- Groundwork 10-day reset (mentioned in the episode) – onestepoutside.com/groundwork
The Solopreneur Operating System
A structural approach to redesigning your business so it works – financially, energetically, and seasonally. If you’re ready for a more intentional way of working, the next step begins here.
Design your business operating system
This one is for you if you’ve been doing your business one way, but lately you’ve been wondering, maybe there’s a better way. One with more focus and fewer moving parts, and a little bit less pressure to be constantly on. Maybe you’ve outgrown how things used to work, or maybe you’re just ready to build with more intention instead of defaulting to what everyone else is doing. In this episode, I’m going to be walking you through a different way to think about how your business runs, your solopreneur operating system, and what needs to be in place to make it work for you in 2026. 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. Right, well, this really is the last proper episode of 2025, and as a good girl, I’ll still be releasing episodes next week and the week after that as well for Christmas and New Year’s. But I’m sure you’ll be doing far more enjoyable things than sitting at home listening to my podcast. If you do listen, when you do listen, there’ll be light and fun and full of gratitude and optimism for the new year. But in the meantime, this week is still an important so I hope you’re still here with me before you check out for the break. So, a few weeks ago, I looked at some of the trends that have been shaping 2025, and I think if this year has showed us anything, is that the old ways of growing a business don’t work as well anymore, and a lot more of us are waking up to doing things differently. In fact, a trend that I didn’t even talk about was, of course, even more people, and often women, parents, people with neurodivergent needs.
A lot of us are opting out of the corporate system and choosing as a result to work for ourselves, sometimes sort of out of necessity. But through my lens, I see it, of course, as an opportunity and a really, in fact, the best way to design better to build something that really works for you. And that’s what we’re talking about this week. So last week I looked at setting intentions for the new year. So not resolutions as such, but bringing a different kind of energy into 2026. And this week I wanted to already give you a bit of a sneak peek, I guess, at how to do that. So we’re talking about the solarpreneur operating system, which is a new way of framing this. New, but not so new as you’ll find out, because it’s the stuff I’ve been banging on about for years, with an evolution, with adaptation to the world as it is now, and of course to my many, many years of experience navigating these various ups and downs and twists and turns of working for myself.
So speaking of the many years I’ve been doing this, if you have followed me for a while and if you worked with me in the past, perhaps, or if you’ve come across my book, then you’ll be familiar with what I call the five pillars of building a profitable and sustainable business that brings you freedom, flexibility and fulfilment. I shouldn’t laugh at my own materials. They were really the five pillars that guided all my work. It was came out about organically, really, from working initially individually with, with clients who were leaving corporate and then working in group programmes that became, in fact, ultimately the structure of my programmes and so on. So just a brief insight into where this all comes from. The first pillar was defining what success looks like for you. And this, you know, is a foundation of my philosophy, really. It’s that we’ve inherited these success scripts that, that worked for us perhaps in the past at school and in our corporate careers, but they don’t work for us anymore.
And many of us are still operating on that old model and we’re following kind of accidental paths. We’re on autopilot, we’re not really questioning. And those of us who are here have broken free from that at least once, probably more times to define what success looks like for us in a much more values aligned, family, lifestyle, balance, first way. And of course the podcast is called Reimagining Success. So this should be no surprise to you that the foundational tenet is what does success mean to you? So that’s something to revisit, of course, regularly, but it’s really the foundation. And I sort of almost assume that you’ve done that. But of course, again, it evolves with different seasons, so I’d encourage you to do it again at least, you know, once a year. And this is a great time.
Why not revisit it in this kind of arbitrary calendar moment of setting resolutions and looking ahead to the new year. So that’s the first pillar, your definition of success. The second was all around mindset is all around mindset around building confidence and resilience to deal with the ups and downs of working for yourself. Third one was choosing the right business model. Fourth, building an effective personal brand. And the fifth pillar was really designing flexible work life integration. And so those five pillars have guided my content. As I said, they make up my book, they, they make up the Academy course which is a self paced course I’ve had to help you navigate in particular the transition out of corporate to build your business in the first place.
And they’ve really, you know, I still very much stand by them. What I find, what I have found over the years rather is that funnily enough, I guess I started in the marketing world and therefore the personal branding piece was a really natural fit for me. And it’s a really important part of building your own brand. And as much as we can be good at marketing a product or someone else or some other brand, marketing yourself is a very different thing. So personal branding was a really important piece. As I said, the definition of success was a really important piece. And of course the work life integration is really the underlying tenet of everything in terms of, you know, it’s not about work versus life, it’s very much an integrated approach and, and one that is much more balanced and, and synergistic and harmonious. Having said all that, where I’ve really seen the biggest value and where I’ve seen the biggest gap in the market in, in this kind of state of space is in the business model because what, what.
And I don’t want to throw, yeah, I don’t want to say too many negative things and I’m certainly not going to call out names but what I’ve seen in the space is a lot of very well meaning, let’s say that well meaning experts who are model and they’re doing so very successfully, they’ve obviously been successful themselves. I’m sure many people in their community have been successful, many others have not. And the reality is that, well, there are a number of things going on here. The world has changed since that person built their business. For example, When I started 10 years ago, my goodness, a lot of things have changed in the economy and the space technically algorithms, AI of course was barely on our radar there and then, and so on. And most importantly for me that takes nothing into count from your life, your Personality, your desires, your goals, your energy, your health, your family situation, your income, et cetera, et cetera, you know, your mortgage, whatever, like all the financial situation. So unless you find someone who’s living your exact same dream life and business and even so, I would caution you it’s not a good idea to just follow someone else’s blueprint and copy paste. Now of course, caveat being, if I know that I want to become a better speaker than finding a speaking mentor, mentor is 100% the right thing to do.
And that can be really effective. If I know I want to be better at speaking on camera, you know, video, I can work with a video coach. If I want to get better at a sales process and have a sales system, that’s absolutely something I could find an expert to help me do. So once I know a specific thing I’m trying to learn, then of course there are people who can help us get there faster. But again, I’d caution you on not signing up to something thinking that, oh, this is going to, you know, be the thing that unlocks like my LinkedIn virality or like this is the thing that’s going to get me lots of leads or, or you know, sales even, or whatever it is. Right. Because unfortunately, if it sounds too simple, then it probably is. And if it doesn’t require work then, then it’s definitely not going to be effective.
All this to say that it’s the foundation that’s missing from there is one, asking what your definition of success is and two, designing intentionally the business model that will get you there. And like I said, then you can go and learn from specific people and so on. You know, the, the nuances and once something is working, you can kind of expand to something else. But all the while you need to bear in mind what matters to you, what success looks like to you, both in the big picture vision sense and in the day to day weekly rhythm of your life. Okay. So I am leaning into, and have been for some years this business model piece and really what I’m now calling your solopreneur operating system, which is out of date. Just like our success, scripts from the corporate world, you know, are not fit for use. Working for ourselves equally.
The scripts we had in the system we had when we first started our business are not fit for use now because we have evolved, because the world has evolved and because our business has evolved. Okay. And so that’s where I’ve been talking about recalibrating and kind of the invisible is pretty visible, but the infrastructure behind how your business actually works and how it either supports you or how it drains you. Okay, Most of us haven’t designed that operating system. It’s just happened. And over time, it becomes a grammes, a patchwork of tools, you know, to a Frankenstein, like longer, longer to do list, lots of habits, half finished funnels, adding more and more onto it, and eventually that starts holding you back, even if it looks successful. So you might be working longer hours, you’re not charging as much as you want to be or could be. You’re saying yes to clients when you don’t want to be saying yes.
You know, they’re not respecting your boundaries, however that manifests for you. And so I wanted to talk to you today, I guess, about a sneak peek of this operating system. And again, it’s new, but not new. It’s just reframing and bringing in some new concepts, tools, frameworks and ways of thinking about it that have evolved over the last months and years, I guess, but in particular, coming together now, I really see this as something that’s going to change the game. So, three components. The first one is that intentional business model. Okay? Your business model is how your business actually works. And you know, on paper and in economic terms, it’s how you actually make sales.
And that is what success is, right? It’s sales. For us, of course, success is much richer than that. So it’s making sure the business model is delivering on our version of success. And things that are in there are, you know, what you sell to, who you’re selling it to, whom, how you’re delivering it, which means tangibly and especially through our lens of wanting design, you know, around life offers and pricing that work for your income targets and for this season of life revenue models that are built around, you know, the kind of delivery you want to be doing and how your working week looks and a really clear foundation so that you’re not constantly reinventing and questioning everything. It’s fine to tweak things on top and to add things and change things and move things around, but that foundation really needs to be there, right? And that’s where we move from accidental growth, which is great that we’ve got there too. And it’s not taking away anything from what you’ve achieved, but it’s moving to more intentional design, which we can afford to do at this stage of our business because we’ve proven to ourselves we can do it. You know, we’ve got that initial momentum and now we want to actually go to that next level. And make it feel better as well as looking shiny from the outside.
So that’s the first one, the intentional business model. The second piece, yes, I’m bringing back my old marketing expertise, my new marketing expertise, because it’s very much evolved over the years and I call it sort of authentic marketing and resonant sales. So I’ve added sales in. You know, it took me many a year to recognise that it’s not just about marketing. We need that sales system as well. And, and this is, you know, we’re not chasing the algorithm, we’re not just shouting louder and posting more and using AI for all our content and so on, but really showing up in a way that lands, that lands with our ideal clients, with the right people, the right message at the right time, and that feels good for us. So that includes things like message clarity, visibility that doesn’t feel forced, and just a really calm, human, consistent sales approach that doesn’t feel pushy, but it’s also not passive and automated. So, you know, if you found that your content wasn’t converting as you hoped it would this year, it’s not because you failed.
It’s because the way we build trust has changed, or at least the. Yeah, perhaps it hasn’t changed, perhaps it’s always been like that, but it’s just that it now has come into more focus because of AI, because of the growth in solopreneurship and content and creators and so on. So authentic marketing, resident sales. And then the third building block really is simple systems to help you be consistent. You know, a lot of businesses break when we get tired or ill or go off on parental leave. This is all around designing a business that holds you and your life and that will involve things like delivery systems, automations, templates. Anything that reduces decision fatigue is great and rhythms that protect your energy. So I’m not like a hugely structured, strict, rigid schedule kind of galaxy and a lot of us being creative and kind of wanting to be spontaneous and go with energy and so.
And that’s fine. And yet if we only go with our energy and passion and so on, we’re not going to get the results we want. So having this kind of anchor week, I talk about momentum moves, things that we need to be doing consistently. Designing around that is really important. So simplifying things, but documenting, automating where possible and just kind of. Yeah, reducing that exhaustion that comes from constantly starting from scratch and rethinking everything and redesigning every day. Okay, so intentional business model number one. Number two, authentic marketing and resonant sales and three simple systems and processes.
And this is what we’re going to build together in January’s workshop. So we’re looking at how you’re going to design your solar panel operating system. So a bit of a deep dive, more so than I can do in a short podcast today. And so if you’re interested in that, if you go to Internet, not international, Intentional Expert, a lot of us are international, but that is not the domain. Intentionalexpert.com you can sign up to that. And I’ll also be talking soon about a programme coming in the new year as well, which may feel like the right container for you to do it in. But this is a free workshop. Design your solopreneur operating system.
We’ll be building on what I shared today. And so it’s going to be running in the middle of January. And yeah, I can’t wait to share this with you. I think it’s going to be really valuable for those of you for whom it is right at this season of your life. Okay, so again, you can sign up@intentionalexpert.com why can’t I say that? I need to practise that. Intentionalexpert.com and as I said, that is the last kind of full episode. But I will be back in the next couple of weeks. I want to say thank you to everybody, maybe a few final insights and thoughts on the new year.
And yeah, looking forward to seeing you then in January, in 2026. Bye for now. If you’re starting to feel like something needs to shift next year in how you work, in how your business runs or what it’s all really building towards, there’s something new coming soon that’s designed to help. It’s for experienced solopreneurs who want to grow with more clarity, more structure and more calm without burning everything down. If that sounds like you, head to intentionalexpert.com and pop your name on the wait list and you’ll be the first to know when more details are ready. That’s intentionalexpert.com.
If you’re starting to feel like something needs to shift next year in how you work, in how your business runs, or what it’s all really building towards, there’s something new coming soon that’s designed to help. It’s for experienced solopreneurs who want to grow with more clarity, more structure, and more calm without burning everything down. If that sounds like you, head to intentionalexpert.com and pop your name on the waitlist and you’ll be the first to know when more details are ready. That’s intentionalexpert.com.
