If the start of the year is already showing you what feels easy – and what feels heavy or out of step – this episode will help you make sense of what you’re seeing. Anna explores why the landscape feels noisier, why capacity matters more than ever, and how a simpler, more coherent business structure can create clarity, stronger boundaries, and easier demand.
Key moments:
[00:00] What January reveals – What feels easy vs what feels heavy in your business
[01:04] A noisier landscape – More experts, more competition, more clutter
[01:55] Buyers are more discerning – Shifts in budgets, economy and priorities
[02:07] Capacity as a critical resource – Why “more productivity” isn’t the answer
[02:27] The 15-hour week prediction – Why technology hasn’t delivered more leisure
[03:05] The real craving – Coherence over constant complexity and scale
[03:29] Why effort stops working – You can’t compete with AI on output
[04:03] A useful moment of clarity – When “heavy” isn’t just a busy season
[05:00] Moving away from bigger goals – Cleaner positioning and simpler models
[06:09] The challenges aren’t personal – Friction is often architectural
[09:14] Be the architect – Redesign the structure so work feels lighter
[12:14] Design, demand, delivery – The three pillars to align your operating system
[13:18] Where to go deeper – Next steps at intentionalexpert.com
Resources mentioned:
Explore next steps and learn about the Solopreneur Operating System – intentionalexpert.com
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.
A Simpler Business
This episode is for you if the start of year is already showing you what feels easy in your business and what feels heavy, complicated or out of step. If you’re noticing the same patterns that you’d hoped would shift with time off and you’re wondering what your business actually needs from you this year, then this conversation will help you make sense of what you’re seeing.
Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business 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.
Okay, so we talked in the last few months about this, and I’m sure you have experienced this yourself. The truth is that the landscape is noisier, and there’s no denying that. There are more of us, which is amazing, who are solo operators, thought leaders, experts, solopreneurs, coaches, consultants.
Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, the corporate world has been pushing more people out of that world, fortunately for us, because I think there’s an amazing opportunity to do great work on our own terms. But it does mean that because there are more people out there, those of us who started our business quite some time ago might sense, it’s not quite as easy as it used to be, you know, I used to be able to just put this out and people would listen. And now it’s quite a cluttered landscape.
Also with shifts in the budget and the economy, in politics and all sorts of tectonic plates that are shifting, buyers are more discerning. I mean, I think that’s often always the case, but even more so now.
And I think something else that I see, and of course, this is through my lens of being a parent of young children, but capacity has become a real critical resource, because all this talk of productivity, and with AI coming in, we’re just adding more and more to our plate.
Something I talk about in my keynotes that I do, this Keynesian prediction that was in 1930. So he predicted it by 100 years from now. So we’re not far off now, four years away, we’d be working 15 hour weeks, thanks to technology. And our biggest problem would be what will we do with all this leisure time, which I don’t know about you, but that is not my lived reality.
And of course, more and more people, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, it’s all sorts of experts that I’m predicting now the same with AI. But that won’t happen if we’re just using AI to create more content, if we’re just using it to build more things.
And so more and more of us are exhausted by that complexity.
And I think that what I’m seeing, at least what I’m hearing, and you let me know if it resonates for you too, is that we’re craving a kind of sense of coherence instead, that we’re like, OK, this is my lane. I know what I want. You know, I don’t want to build an empire. I don’t want to chase scale at all costs. This is what I want to look like and feel like in my business.
And that means that we’re more intentional in what we’re building, not just pushing through with effort. Because I think effort can only get us so far. And especially with AI, AI is always going to be able to do way more than us. AI will always beat us on effort. So there’s no point in even competing there, I think. Where we can compete is on being more human, more personal, and bringing more meaning.
So we’re not talking about doing more. It’s rather choosing to build with that clear architecture that I’ve been talking about and more intentionality.
And so I don’t know about you, but I hope that January has created just about enough space for some truths to surface.
Maybe already after that break, you know, coming back and sensing, OK, these things feel aligned now. So that was just a bit of a blip in a busy December. But these things actually feel pretty heavy. The business feels out of step here. And that’s not just a momentary stress, you know, in a busy time period, that’s something more structural, more foundational.
And so if we feel perhaps that we’ve been operating with kind of patchwork, just patching up things that weren’t working so well, rather than rethinking the structure, and I hope this moment of clarity right now is valuable. It’s not a problem. We used to call it an opportunity area. So identifying that, having the awareness, those questions that are emerging now are often much more meaningful than having all the answers and setting all these exciting resolutions and goals.
Rather beginning to ask these more discerning questions that befit a more discerning business owner.
And so I think there’s a lot, and certainly when I started in coaching and entrepreneurialism still, it’s very much the vibe in certain circles, but it was all about these big, hairy, audacious goals and setting bigger goals and being courageous and tripling your income target and all this and scaling and going viral and bigger offers and so on.
And I think, and I know that there is a growing kind of community of us that agree that that’s not what we need right now. And it’s not what our businesses need and our families and our own mental health, to be honest.
Rather, we do well to focus on cleaner positioning, simpler business models, human-first operations, please, please, please. And really that sense of coherence with who we are and how we want to show up. So we’re not scaling, we’re fitting it more harmoniously around ourselves and our lives, right? It’s alignment. And I know that’s a very coachy word, but it does resonate with a lot of people. So bringing things into alignment rather than expanding for the sake of it.
Again, and I’ve kept repeating this over the last few weeks, it’s so important: the challenges are not personal. When you first start out, we often think, oh, it’s just me. Am I cut out for this? Am I good enough? People are ghosting me, and the ups and downs, the roller coaster of both the finances and the emotions.
Hopefully, we’ve recognised that, no, we’ve survived those ups and downs. We understand that it’s not personal. It’s not about our motivation. It’s really just about the nature of working for ourselves. It’s the market. It’s a “them, not us” problem in so many cases.
So with that in mind, even now at a more advanced level of your business, these problems are not personal — they’re really architectural. And so the friction is rather coming from the mismatched capacity, the incoherent business model or the outdated positioning.
It’s possible that your business hasn’t kept pace with who you’ve become. Which means, again, that if there is a resolution in 2026: to go for simplicity and to go for depth, rather than complexity and going bigger.
Look, I am so much for following our interests and being multi-passionate. And yet, in this world of clutter and noise, having depth and going deeper with fewer people is far more effective and rewarding for us as human beings in this particular type of expert business.
So it sounds really dramatic when I talk about structural redesign. It sounds like I’m going to tear the whole house down and start again. It’s a much more nuanced shift. We’re moving away from reacting to being proactive and intentional. We’re being the architect now, getting out the blueprints again and asking those questions: what is the business I actually want to run now, and what structure is going to hold that well?
When the architecture is right, work is going to feel lighter, decisions will become clearer, and boundaries will naturally tighten because we are filtering decisions through structural principles. We’re following ambitions within our capacity. We’re designing the business around what we can do and want to do, rather than taking everything that comes and everything we feel like we should be doing.
And our message and our model and everything matches. So actually demand becomes easier as well. It feels more easeful and aligned with who you are. It doesn’t feel like this constant tug of war negotiation because the structure is there to support you.
It doesn’t rely on your motivation, which of course can fluctuate. It doesn’t rely on overextending yourself every time. So it may be, if you are at that moment, the redesign isn’t just attractive — it becomes necessary. It can feel like a relief. Like, yes, I’m excited again about the next stage of the business. It brings a whole different kind of energy.
So if you are feeling this shift, you’re very much not alone and you’re not behind.
You may have joined the Solopreneur Operating System Workshop last week. There’ll be more around that in the coming months as well. And there are spaces where you’ll be able to get my support, if that’s something that you’d like, to navigate this redesign and to ask those deeper questions and to restructure and create your own personal operating system.
And it’s not about me giving you the blueprint, the template, and you’re just going to install that into your hardware. Rather, it’s about your own intentional design and bringing those three pillars that I’ve talked about: design, demand and delivery.
When we bring those three pieces into alignment and that becomes your structure, everything changes. And from the outside, it might not seem that way. Other people might not notice the shifts you’re making behind the scenes, but for you, it could change everything in terms of how it feels.
So if you do want to go deeper into that structural redesign of the work, then you can explore the next step for you at intentionalexpert.com.
And it’s a theme that we’ll be bringing into the rest of the year: the simplicity, the resonance, the ease with building your business intentionally. And disregarding some of that “internet business” advice we get from people who have a very different model, very different vision of what success looks and feels like.
See you next week when I’ll have an interview for you — our first of 2026. Bye for now.
If you’re ready to go deeper into the structural redesign side of this work, then you can explore the next steps at intentionalexpert.com. It’s where you’ll find the path for founders who want a business that genuinely fits who they are now, not who they were when they first built it. That’s intentionalexpert.com.
