Feeling like you’re hustling harder than ever, yet results just aren’t matching your effort? In this empowering episode, Anna Lundberg unpacks why working harder isn’t the answer in today’s tougher market for independent experts, solopreneurs, coaches, and consultants. Discover how to move beyond “busy work” to intentional business design – so your business works for you, not the other way around.

Key moments:

[00:00] Why hustling harder isn’t working: The reality of a tougher market

[01:34] The mistake most solopreneurs make: Throwing more effort at the problem

[03:34] Busy work trap: Posting for the sake of posting and catering to everyone

[07:09] The time-for-money ceiling and pricing with value

[11:23] Burnout, lack of scalability, and over-complication

[13:58] Creating an intentional business model: Fewer offers, value pricing, and systems

[17:49] Free workshop invite and getting started with systems

[18:31] Seasonal planning and designing your business from a clean slate

[21:03] How to move forward: Book a call or join the Accelerator

Resources mentioned:

• Free workshop: Register at onestepoutside.com/simplesystems
• Business Accelerator Programme: Next cohort opens in September for an October start. Apply now at: onestepoutside.com/accelerate

Why your business isn’t growing

This one is for you if you feel like you’re working harder than ever, posting, networking, delivering projects, and yet the results aren’t matching the effort. And yes, the market is tougher right now. Budgets are tight, some sectors are slowing, Opportunities can feel scarcer. But this is not about hustling harder to compete for the scraps. It’s about redesigning your business so it works even when you don’t. If you want to stop spinning and start scaling sustainably, then this one is for you. 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. Okay, so we’ve talked about the market being tougher, and that does happen. You know, there are cycles of this, so it’s not the first time. And I suppose what I see, whether it’s the market that’s tough or simply our own particular situation, for whatever reason, I think the mistake that a lot of stuff sailorpreneurs experts make is to respond to that by doing more. More posts, add more offers, more hustle. Okay? And that’s.

That’s natural because you think, oh, I’ve got to do more, I’ve got to post more, I’ve got to do more of this, talk to more people. I’ve got to, you know, work, work harder. But it’s just creating more noise and ultimately we might burn out, which is not helping anyone. And because we’re sort of just beavering away, we’re not taking that step back, which I know is hard to do, and hopefully you had some time over the summer to do so, because that’s always a good time to reflect. But we’re not taking that step back to think about, okay, what do I actually want this business to look like? What does success look like for me, and how do I design that with intention. So, you know, for me, at least in my world of solopreneurs, independent experts, we’re not going after investment, whether from VC funds or from angel investors. We’re not building products, we’re not building teams and big offices, big tech infrastructure, software Whatever we are selling our expertise, being recognised authorities, doing meaningful work within hours that work for us and earning a sustainable living from it. Nice.

Right, so if you’re here, probably you’re one of my gang, you’re also wanting to do these things. And if so, then the types of our business that are doing well now that I see are really clean, intentional models that deliver clear outcomes, attract the right clients and don’t rely entirely on the founder or the expert’s time or energy. Now that’s a bit of a tricky one, so we’ll look into that because I’m not talking about passive income, I’m also not talking about having teams of associates delivering for you and so on. So let’s double click on that to see what that means. But it’s about being intentional for me, but it’s about designing what success looks like and then designing the business around that. So, three reasons, I suppose, why working harder isn’t the answer. The first one is the busy work trap. And again, I’m sure I’ve written articles on this podcast episodes on this busyness epidemic that we have in our society.

We post just for the sake of posting, because we’re told to be consistent and post every day and we’re on all the different channels. And I hold my hand up here, you know, I upload my videos to YouTube and to TikTok. When I remember, it’s kind of, oh, I should be on there. So I do it. But I know and I’m told daily by various experts in my DMs that I’m not doing well there. Right, fine. It’s not strategic, but nonetheless, I’m doing it. So I’m keeping busy posting there anyway, so posting for the sake of posting, saying yes to misaligned clients, you know, reinventing the wheel every time because, oh, that didn’t quite.

I’ve spoken to two people and they don’t want it. So now I’ve got to change the offer completely and I think I’ll redo the website and I’ve. Now, what about new branding? That would be good. I’ll get some more business cards. You know, actually, this is what I want to do. Again, not not judging or being critical. I’ve been and been there, done that, bought many a T shirt, but especially in a difficult market. Again, this is exhausting and it makes you super reactive.

If you are then jumping around and let’s be honest, nobody really is paying any attention. So it’s possible if you’re in luck, then nobody’s going to notice your scattergun jumping around. But if they do, then you’re not going to feel like that kind of safe strategic choice. So we’re kind of people pleasing. I’m very responsive and I’m very good at delivering to a brief. So I can work with a B2B client and, and talk to them about their problems, their outcomes and design a workshop or a talk or an off site, whatever it is for them. Likewise the coaching. If you come and tell me what your issues are, then we’ll design a programme for that that works really well for me.

It’s harder for me, I think, to just a blank slate go, okay, this is what my one flagship talk is going to be and this is my one programme independently of what’s going on around me. And to some extent that’s good because we shouldn’t be designing in isolation. But it also means that because I’m so reactive, responsive, and many of us are generalists, multi passionate, you know, coaches in theory can coach anything. Right? So we could do all sorts of things. And I meet more and more people who are similarly to me, doing sort of, on the one hand the entrepreneurial B2C stuff, and on the other hand B2B leadership and stuff. And it makes sense to us, but it might be confusing to other people. I think my point there was that if we’re just being reactive, oh, I can do that. Yeah, I can do this.

That’s fine in the immediate short term when we’re kind of exploring and just starting figuring out what we want to do, experimenting a bit where there’s traction. But there comes a point when we need to go, okay, hang on a second. I’ve got these 29 offers. What’s working, what’s not? Where is my energy? Where is my time best spent? You know, no longer just saying yes to everything and trying to be everything to everybody. And I know, I’m sure you’ve heard that a gazillion times, but please hear me now because it’s really important. I have to tell myself this again, again. But the number one point, as I said, was the busy work trap. That’s the key here.

It’s posting, posting, posting on all the different channels. It’s, I’m going to pitch this and to that and I’m going to say yes to this. And yes, I could, of course I could do that because, like, yeah, okay, actually I was promoting this programme, but yeah, I could change it and do this. Right. You’re just kind of contorting yourself to fit for Everybody. So number one, the busy work drop. Number two, and this is where it gets a bit tricky, is the time for money ceiling. Okay? Because the conventional kind of business advice I suppose is, you know, you shouldn’t have your name on the door because you want to be able to sell your business.

And, you know, you shouldn’t tie your time to money in the sense that people are paying hourly rates or, you know, I have to be there in person to deliver things. And yes, the dream to some extent would be at least have some passive income. So let’s say maybe not one book because one book doesn’t usually make so much money. For experts, it’s a very small number of books that make the millions, if any, and sell lots of thousands of copies. But if I have, let’s say five, six books, you know, I’ve got three books at the moment and they’re kind of, you know, there’s a little trickle every month. So if I grew that to more books, some of them were more successful, perhaps that would be a nice little so called passive income. Maybe you’ve got recorded workshops that people can buy and watch or ebooks or whatever that looks like. So there’s an element of having stuff that works for you even when you’re not there.

The point about selling hourly, I think is tough for somebody and I think in particular for freelancers. Some clients will go, what’s your hourly rate? And it takes confidence and having that boundary to set and experience to know that it’s okay to say, well, my rates vary depending on the scope of the project. Let’s go get on a call to talk about what your needs are and so on. I would argue. And in my experience, if someone is just asking you for your rates, it’s often a very junior person who’s just being asked to kind of check ballpark figures. I had that, I want to say last year, someone who was, who was junior. But I managed to ask them, okay, what’s your budget? And they said, oh, we’re around this. And I pitched it to just a little bit above that because it was lower than what I’d usually charge.

But because she said that there was the budget, I was like, I’m not going to go, you know, five times as high. That would be ridiculous. But I also don’t want to just price under her budget just because that’s what she happened to say. But we don’t want to be tied to hourly delivery. That caps our income. Right? Because there’s only so many hours. If you go back to an episode I did over the summer around term time, working. Hopefully you’ve done the maths of understanding, you know, how many hours do you want to be working, can you be working? And how many of those are billable? That’s simply not going to work if you’re earning this small fee for hourly work.

And even if it’s a big fee, unless it’s a massive fee, there’s a limit to, you know, how much you can earn because you can’t add any more hours on top. And that’s where, you know, obviously a group version of a one to one programme or ideally, you know, repurposing, redoing. I have some colleagues who have run the same workshop 40 times for one of the big four consulting companies. Right. That’s amazing because that’s, you know, you design a workshop, they got a whole amount of feedback actually from the client, which is helpful. Lots of upfront work. Once that’s done, 40, selling that at whatever fee you have, you know, happy days. Right.

If the, the challenge becomes. If you’re constantly. Every off site, every workshop, every coaching programme is completely from scratch and that builds on the first one, which was saying yes to everybody. So then we’re having to design new things all the time. Whereas if we have. Look, my core expertise is in this area and I have these frameworks and I can draw on those for possibly a workshop, a talk coaching, but these are the things I work through, then that makes it much easier these days with my B2C stuff. The reason I can just babble at you now or do a workshop with an iPad and a pen and that’s sort of just me, is that I’ve been doing this for a decade. So of course things have evolved and my thinking has evolved and things are challenging and the market changes and technology and so on, but I have so much to draw on.

As long as I’ve kind of structured roughly what I want to talk about and obviously of course thought through frameworks and okay, this is selling to the accelerator or to one to one or whatever. I’m relatively confident and comfortable with that. Whereas if I suddenly go, oh, I’m going to picture, I don’t even know what could that be like an empathetic leadership keynote to consulting companies or the financial, I don’t know, whatever that I haven’t done before, then that would be possible, don’t get me wrong. And I do an amazing job, but it would take a whole more lot more time and energy. So I guess the balance is between if we’re just doing the same thing all the time. It’s really boring. But boring is good if it’s paying you well. Right? So the second issue, I suppose is this time for money ceiling.

And obviously if clients are delaying projects, if they’re paying later and so on, that’s not good either because there’s no room to scale or step back or things are just kind of dragging on. And then finally, and we talked about this a little bit last week around sort of the perception problem, if we’re over complicating things, working harder and harder, we become harder to buy actually, because again, decision makers with tighter budgets want clarity. They want simplicity. You’re the expert, you’re going to tell them. Okay, based on what I’ve heard, you’d be ideal for the accelerator. Actually, I think you’re too early on, I think you’re too advanced or you know, with the B2B client, they’ve asked for a keynote. Oh, we could do, but in my experience you’d get more impact from a series of workshops or it would be great if we get the whole lead team to go off site and we do XYZ facilitation or whatever or it’s one to one coaching or small group coaching. Obviously if you can’t deliver those things, there’s no point in having all these things to offer.

But that’s the whole point. If I am a decision maker with tight budget, I don’t want you to go, hey, these are 10 different things I could do. Bespoke sounds great, but it’s also very confusing. Oh yeah, I’ll design it for you. Okay, but what works? What has worked with your other clients in this industry? You’re an expert. So tell me, what should we be doing? So those are three kind of issues, I suppose, where we can get trapped in working harder and it’s not going to get us the results, even though it feels like it is. So that busy work trap, doing more, more, more, the time for money ceiling, we just can’t add more hours and so we therefore can’t add more money. And then that kind of perception problem, if we keep adding complexity and so on, we’re actually again creating more noise and not coming across as the confident, expert, thinking partner that we need to be in order to work either with B2B or B2C.

Okay, so, okay, what does a better business model look like? And I hesitate to use the word better, but let’s call it a more intentional business model. I am a huge fan of being multi potentialite. Portfolio, career, renaissance woman, like to call myself that. And yet it’s better to be more intentional and have fewer, clearer offers that are then easy to buy. And to repeat, you’re not reinventing every proposal. So that’s what I was saying. If I’m doing an off site here and a workshop there and it’s all on different topics, you know, that’s much heavier for you than if you have certain frameworks, things that by all means can be tweaked in the format. But this is my framework, this is what I do.

And when I’ve seen successful speakers, you know, I was surprised years ago to see these adventurers just, they delivered the same talk every time. I was like, ugh, that’s so boring. But as long as they’re finding it entertaining and, and in the meantime, you know, they’re talking to different audiences every time and each time you hear it actually you hear something different. So you know that that’s really powerful. So yes, portfolio, career and yes, having these different income streams, but ideally they’re building on each other. You know, same message, different audiences, same audience, different messages. But it all kind of fits together coherently. You’re not doubling, tripling, quadrupling your work by having four different audiences, four different channels.

I’m doing this LinkedIn and that Instagram and also the networking here. And I’ve. Depending on who I’m talking to, I’m going to introduce myself in a totally different way. That is, it’s exhausting, take it from someone who’s been there and still, still finds myself there sometimes. So fewer clearer offers is a big part of that intentional business model. The second is pricing and that’s obviously linked to the offers. And I know this is something that sounds really empty but should reflect value, not the hours, but it’s really important that that is the case. We’re thinking of what is the impact that we’re having here, what is the roi? And maybe we don’t have the data on our particular thing, but there is data that the ICF provides on coaching, on the return on investment and there are studies, of course, that managers who get proper leadership training are X and Y percent more so successful or, you know, etc, companies that invest in this are going to.

And that’s all there. There are case studies, all sorts. Right. So it’s not about justifying it, but it’s demonstrating the value and, and having that there. Ironically, when we undercharge, if I go to a massive company and say, oh yeah, I can run a workshop for, you know, 500 of your top leaders for £500 that they’re not going to take you seriously. It’s sometimes hard to know where exactly the number is. And obviously we need to start where we’re kind of a little bit uncomfortable, but also relatively comfortable. I.

I can’t go in going, yeah, no worries. 500 million to work with me, that’s like too much. But it’s probably going to be a higher number than you feel comfortable with, let’s be honest. But it’s getting that number right. And no, it’s not an easy answer. And I’ve got podcast episodes and workshops galore on pricing, so let me know if that’s something you’re struggling with. But the important thing is it’s not just like a 50 bucks per hour kind of thing, because that’s not going to work. Third one is systems, so that could be clean onboarding, offboarding of clients templates.

Again, you have a setup. You know, you’re always using zoom and you’re always using, you know, these slides or at least this kind of iPad, plus whatever app setup. You know, you’ve got certain workbooks that you can draw on. You’ve got your simple marketing rhythms. I mean, a really specific example, and this might sound too much for you. And in fact, by the time you listen to this, probably I will have rethought this. But for a long time, I’ve had this flow on LinkedIn that I do. Mondays is a poll, Tuesdays is a story, Wednesday is carousel, Thursday is an image or a video, and Friday is a call to action.

And that just, you know, that’s a system, that’s a process. That just means I can sit down and go, right, I’m going to write four polls, four stories, or then what shall I write today? Which is very exhausting. So I’m not talking hugely complex tech funnels and things, but simple processes and systems. And by the way, I’ll mention that. Now, where are we at with today’s episode? I think it’s next week. Thursday, the 18th. Double checking my calendar. 18th.

That’s the 18th. I’m running a workshop on this piece on processes and systems. So I’m going to say email me because I don’t know what the URL is yet. Oh, no, let’s make one up. Let’s go. OneStepOutside.com/simplesystems. There we go. If you go there, hopefully by the time you listen to this, you’ll be able to join the workshop.

So, onestepoutside.com/simplesystems. And that’s a free workshop where we’ll be talking about the systems and processes and things that will set you up for success. And by the way, next week we’re talking about how structure was that next week. Oh, gosh, I’m really losing myself. I think in two weeks time, structure is, is actually the thing that will set you free because I know it can feel like, oh, I don’t want lots of rigid structure, but actually it’s what gives you the very freedom that you want. Okay, and the fourth one ties back into our term time piece of sort of seasonal planning. Front load, your sales cycles. If you know you’re taking summer off, or if you know there are certain times of year when you can’t work or the market is slower, create those buffers.

So if you know, and I’m making numbers up, if you know you need to earn 5k a month, but you know that July, August, you’re not going to be working, hey, surprise, surprise, you’re going to have to earn 10k in a couple of months. Well, that needs to be, you know, 7K per month in the rest of the year. Right. So again, it’s the maths that needs to be mathing. Okay, so more intentional business model means fewer, clearer offers, pricing that reflects your value, not the hours, systems that protect your time and energy and seasonal planning. And a few reflections, you know, if you stopped reacting to what’s going on and forgot even what’s kind of on the table right now, and you designed with a blank sheet of paper, blank slate, what would or could your business look like? Someone asked me this a few years ago when I had an existential crisis 10 years into running my business. And he said, oh, imagine if you let go of all this stuff and what if you just did keynote talks? I was like, huh? And I didn’t make that shift. Although I’m leaning towards doing more talks.

But, you know, it’s quite an interesting exercise. Okay, I do 10 talks earning 10k each. Happy days. Right? That’s already a nice little income there. So those theoretical questions, it doesn’t mean you have to then do that thing, but it’s a really nice thought experiment that doesn’t drag you down with where you happen to be right now and what’s one offer or system or something that you could simplify today that would make things easier. Where is it? Oh my gosh. I just, you know, when I’m on a call with this kind of saleopreneur, I’m offering them and this is My own personal example, there’s either the academy, there’s the incubator, there’s the accelerator, or there’s one to one. It’s just too complex.

How about I just go all in on the accelerator? The academy might be something I have in my back pocket in case people aren’t ready for the accelerator. I can sell that kind of behind the scenes, but I lead with the accelerator and that’s the thing I become known for. So what’s an offer or a system or something in the business that you could simplify that would make everything else easier? Okay, so again, yes, the market may be tougher, maybe not. But that’s exactly why clarity and confidence and this sort of simple and I say scalable model, it doesn’t. We’re not scaling to be, you know, millionaires, at least I’m not, certainly not big team and so on, but a simple model that can grow to where you want it to be and help you stand out and become that recognised authority. I think a lot of us are still throwing spaghetti at the wall. You do not have to be one of them anymore, at least. So, next step, I’d love for you to book a call to map out what that business that works for you would look like.

And of course, whether the accelerator or one to one mentoring could be the best fit. So if you go to onestepoutside.com Accelerate is where you can apply to join the accelerator and that will actually get you to automatically book in a call and then we’ll have a chat and if, don’t worry, if, if you’re not sure, you’re not locked in, we’ll have a chat about it. And I will always recommend one to one or say that, you know, I’m not the right person to help you right now and point you in a better direction or perhaps give you a free resource. So that’s a great place to kind of tell me a little bit about what you’re up to, what your goals are and whether the accelerator might be the right fit for you. Okay, see you next week. Bye for now.

If this episode has you thinking that something needs to shift, whether that’s streamlining how you work, redesigning your offers, or finally building the business that you actually wanted when you started, let’s talk about what’s next for you. We can look at where you are, what you want these next few months and years to feel like, and whether one one support or the business accelerator would be the best fit. Just book a call at onestepoutside.com/call. It’s a simple conversation to explore what would make the biggest difference for you right now. That’s onestepoutside.com/call.

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