Ep. 381 The minimum viable week to keep your business moving

When life is busy and your energy is low, you don’t need more hustle — you need a minimum viable week. In this episode, Anna shares the three protected blocks that keep your business stable and moving forward, even in heavy delivery seasons.

Timestamped key moments

[00:02] The minimum viable week – What to do to keep the business moving when life is busy or energy is low.
[00:53] Four-hour workday replay – Practical workshop replay link and what it covers.
[01:20] Why weeks “fail” – Not lack of effort, but failing to protect the few things that stabilise the business.
[02:10] The three protected blocks – Demand, delivery and design as the foundations of a resilient business.
[02:38] Why you need all three – What breaks when you over-focus on only one block.
[03:33] Demand block recap – Momentum, authority, visibility (and why momentum is the non-negotiable minimum).
[05:50] Minimum demand moves – Simple follow-ups and outreach that prevent desperate selling later.
[07:24] Delivery boundaries – Stop invisible work, reduce context switching, and protect time with clearer scope.
[09:30] Design as a decision block – The “CEO hour” that prevents rebuilding the same messy week again and again.
[11:23] Two example weeks – What a normal week vs. a minimum viable week can look like in practice.
[13:15] Support options – Book a call if you want help defining your three blocks and what to stop doing.

Key resources

• Book a free consultation call with Anna

• Get the Four-Hour Workday live workshop replay: onestepoutside.com/fourhourday

Minimal viable week

In this episode, we’re talking about the minimum viable week. So this is what you need to do to keep your business moving, even when life is busy, your energy is low, or client work is heavy.

Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert when 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, quick note before we dive into today’s episode. Now, if you missed my four-hour workday workshop last week, you can still get the replay. So this is a practical 90-minute working session on what to prioritise, what to stop doing, and what needs to be repeatable so you can run a commercially strong business inside limited time. You can find the replay at onestepoutside.com/4hourday.

Now, let’s talk about the minimum viable week. So here’s what I see. Most weeks don’t fail because we didn’t work hard enough. I think we worked too hard, but that’s another episode. And they fail because you didn’t protect the few things that actually keep the business moving forward and stable.

So the reality, as we know, is school holidays, travel, illness, heavy client delivery, low energy weeks. And unfortunately, if your business only works when everything goes smoothly, and let’s face it, when does it ever go smoothly, then your business is not resilient, it’s not sustainable, and it’s not commercially strong. So just like the four hour workday, a minimum viable week isn’t about doing less, but rather doing the right minimum on purpose, if that makes sense.

Okay. So I’ve talked about my solopreneur operating system. And really, that’s what the minimum viable week is all about, distilled into this really tangible action. So if you think of three protected blocks, right, you have your demand block. And we talked last week about the demand rhythm. So please go back and listen, because there’ll be more detail on that. But I will touch on it again today. You have a delivery block. And of course, it’s not just one block. Hopefully, you’ve got lots of delivery, but we’re protecting outcomes without over delivering there. And you’ve got your design block. And again, it could be more than one block to make the decisions that simplify and strengthen.

Okay, so why three? Well, look, if you only do delivery, obviously, demand dries up, right? If I’m only doing the workshops and servicing my existing clients, then I’m not getting any new clients. If I only do demand, just lots of LinkedIn posting, you know, unfortunately, we’re not content creators, and we’re not getting paid for our posts and impressions, then you’re not going to have any time for delivery. And obviously, if you only do design, then, you know, again, you don’t really have a viable business, you’re just painting the picture of a theoretical reality. But on the other side, if you don’t do any design, then you’re only being reactive and possibly staying trapped in the same messy model.

Okay, so I’ll do the first quick recap on the demand rhythm. But again, do go back to last week’s episode. But this is really a recurring weekly block. And we’re talking about the minimum viable week. So I’m not going to say daily now. But it’s a weekly block that creates consistent desire and demand as consistent as we ever can be without relying on constant posting or just hope.

Okay, so again, the three components kind of loosely mirroring the traditional marketing funnel. So at the bottom, we have the momentum moves. Those are the critical follow ups, outreach, referrals, invites, DMs that actually lead to sales. And if not sales, then at least conversations that are getting closer to sales. Literally, if you do nothing else, then that would be my recommendation to just keep that going. People are contacting you to work with you, please say yes, assuming you want to work with them. But you know, that’s where the most important urgent thing is to respond to interest and to make sure that’s happening, chasing invoices and so on, right?

And if you are, let’s say that the reason why you’re doing a minimum viable week is that it’s not that you’ve got lots of money and lots of client delivery, but rather life, then I’d also recommend doing outreach in that little window, right? So that we’re beginning to put more people into the funnel so that we have more client delivery another time.

Okay, so that’s the momentum moves. Then the authority amplifiers kind of middle of the funnel, that’s collaborations, guesting on podcasts, running workshops, sharing case studies, proof, and so on, right? We’re building that trust, credibility, positioning, and moving people closer to making a decision to work with you.

And again, if you’ve got a lot of client delivery, all very low energy, low amount of time, then you’re not going to now be able to run, you know, five live workshops and all this but what can you do can you share a case study that you’ve already written and can you post a testimonial can you pitch one podcast at least you know so again to keep things moving.

So momentum moves, authority amplifiers, and finally visibility vectors. These are the top of funnel content that you’re putting out that you’re getting in front of new people. If you don’t do that again you’re just talking to the same people all the time they will get fatigued and they won’t want to buy from you, right? If they haven’t bought from you yet and you can try lots of different offers, but there will be a moment when you run out.

So visibility could be commenting on other posts on LinkedIn, it could be posting on LinkedIn, it could be reels on Instagram, if that’s your thing. And again, it could be pitching a podcast to guest on there. That’s a great double whammy of both authority and visibility. And again, if you have limited energy and time, of course, you need to just choose one maybe thing to do, right?

So let’s make this super practical. What are your minimum demand moves? Busy week, just do one, perhaps. Minimum, follow up with three people you’ve had calls with and you haven’t responded, or even just one, to be honest, but just follow up with people. Message two past clients and see how they’re getting on. Send one invite to someone who was going to work with you, but they missed it. Invite them to the workshop that’s coming up. Ask them to join a wait list, whatever.

Of course, even better if you don’t have a regular newsletter going out. If you can do a mass kind of email to everyone on your list, that’s great. But an individual personal email to someone whose particular situation you know is going to come up better.

Key here is if you don’t put demand on the calendar, you’re going to end up trying to catch up later. You know, if I’m selling a programme next month, if I delay this until sort of the last few days, it’ll be a really desperate energy that I bring. Hey, I’m selling this thing. Are you sure you don’t want to do it? Quick call and I’ll discount the price and so on. Whereas if you start early on, you can have really low pressure conversations and you can give some nudges, you can share valuable content and so on. And it just feels far more natural. There’s no rush because you have that longer lead time to build the pipeline.

So that’s the first demand block. And again, go back to last week and I talk about that demand rhythm, but really distilling it down. If you have a really busy week, whether busy means life or work, then really still doing that minimum set of momentum, authority, and visibility. And if really nothing else, then at least the momentum moves.

The second block, of course, is delivery, right? Delivery is, unfortunately, where the business becomes heavy if you don’t have those edges and boundaries. So if we’re looking at a minimum viable week, you might have client calls, you might be working on a presentation, or you might actually be delivering a workshop, whatever that looks like.

What you want to avoid here is doing the invisible work. And that’s where, you know, the whole power of having those constraints, the four hour a day, really works in your favour, because you literally do not have more time, energy, or capacity to over deliver. So the extra calls are just not possible, extra revisions, endless email access back and forth, and so on, right?

So really look, okay, perhaps can you carve out specific days when you do your client calls or you know I try to do, for example, I have my accelerator calls on Thursdays, architect calls Tuesdays and Thursdays and I have certain mornings are for my sort of deep work.

But you can have blocks and rather than having one day it’s a client call and then it’s a sales call and it’s a workshop and then it’s a content thing and it just oh it’s a lot of context switching. So really blocking that delivery and setting clear boundaries, maybe thinking about kind of a default turnaround policy and going forwards having much clearer scope on what’s included, what’s not.

If you’re working with corporate clients or small companies, even you, they may start treating you like an employee, depending on the type of work you do. And that’s really where you need to be the expert and be more assertive and setting those boundaries.

Because a business that needs you to be constantly available just isn’t working. And it will — something will break either the business or you.

So delivery, you know, having those really clear boundaries and making sure then you’re not over delivering.

Of course, if you’re really struggling, if it’s a one-to-one call or something consider asking if you can reschedule. You’re not going to be able to deliver your best work and if that’s the case obviously if you’ve got thousands of people signed up to workshop it’s a bit harder to do that but you need to make that call.

And the third block is design and that’s what some people might call your sort of CEO hour — sounds a bit fancy — but it’s the block that we either skip entirely because it’s not urgent until it is, or we just spend way too much time on it and because you know let’s face it’s really fun to envision and plan and stuff but then again that’s why we have these three things.

So design you can see it also as a decision block. You know, it might be considering what you’re selling. You know, is it coming up with a new workshop topic for next month or finalising your programme that you’re going to pitch. Or thinking about what’s going to stay bespoke, what’s going to be standardised. Maybe revisiting your pricing, looking at especially on a quarterly basis at least what you want the next 90 days to look like, you know, and not just the next seven.

And also I had a client say recently, you know I just don’t have a strategy because I don’t even know what my vision is. We realised, right? So we need to work, okay, where do you want to be in let’s say a year from now, three years from now, five years from now, and then we can work backwards and decide what the building blocks are to get you there.

Okay, so it could be making decisions here, right? I’m no longer starting new work without a clear scope and a start and end date. You know, there’ll be a different onboarding mechanism. It might be a systems processes decision. Or I’m only offering this package, you know three months for new clients because I don’t want to be tied into like a year-long coaching engagement.

Or as I was hinting at before, you know, I’m moving calls to two set days and that means I can do deep work on the other day.

So design is really where you stop rebuilding the same week over and over. You gradually get closer to what your ideal week looks like.

So put this together in sort of a real week. You know, let’s say a normal week, you might be doing that demand rhythm, if you’re in a growth phase every day, 60 minutes. You’ve got, you know, five or six focus blocks of delivery. And then you’ve got your design, let’s say Friday morning is like your CEO design time.

If on the other hand, you’ve got back to back delivery, maybe you planned not so well when you designed this particular week in the past. Or again, if you’ve got really low energy and not well, you’ve got family stuff going on, then you might dial that back to, okay, 30 minutes of demand rhythm, and maybe only momentum moves this week. Protecting commitments, tightening those boundaries to make sure that you don’t, you know, even if you have got calls and workshops and things, just make sure they don’t flow over.

And by the way, that will probably happen naturally, because you literally don’t have the energy or time to do that.

And then maybe sort of, if you can, one decision or something, even if tiny on the design side, but possibly that’s the one that you could compromise on and not do this week.

The danger is it’s one of those important things that if you keep skipping every week… and I had someone in a workshop recently say, like, I keep having this weekly meeting with my co-founder to decide the strategy for the future and shift the direction, but we just keep cancelling it because of client delivery and urgent requests and things. You know, it’s okay to do that once. But if you do that for weeks, months, it becomes a bit unproductive, and you’re not going to make those strategic decisions that will get you out of that really, really busy rhythm, I suppose.

So if you’re thinking, I just don’t have time for this, that’s exactly why this minimum viable week exists, you’re choosing the minimum that’s going to prevent chaos later.

Or, you know, all my business is different, you don’t understand, fine. But you know, these blocks can flex, right? It’s just that the categories don’t. So you need to have design, you need to have demand, you need to have delivery, but you’re the boss, it’s your business, you get to decide what that looks like.

Or if you feel, oh my goodness, I’m not doing any of these things, I’m totally behind, then don’t worry, this is how we take little steps, you know, let’s start protecting that demand block in particular, protecting setting those boundaries around delivery, and beginning to make those longer term decisions, even if it’s just a small one, as I said.

You know, so if you’re thinking, this makes sense, but I just don’t know what my three blocks should be or what to stop doing or like my clients I just don’t know what I’m working towards and then that’s exactly what I help with.

So and if you want to have a quick call you can go to onestepoutside.com forward slash call. We can have a look at your current week and what’s creating friction and then we can look at how we can tweak your business. It might be and probably will be a combination of immediate short-term tweaks and then longer-term business model shifts and to keep the business commercially strong without stealing your life.

And a reminder again, if you did miss the four-hour workday, then you can get the replay now. So you can go to onestepoutside.com forward slash four-hour day, and that’s the number four. So onestepoutside.com, the number four-hour day.

Thanks for listening to today’s episode. If you are building a business that’s already up and running, but you can feel it needs a bit of tightening, so it’s easier to sell, easier to deliver and actually fits your life, then that’s the work I do.

You can book a call at the onestepoutside.com/call if you want to have a chat and talk through your particular goals and challenges. And of course, if you found this episode helpful, then do hit follow so you don’t miss next week’s episode. So again, that link to book a call is onestepoutside.com/call.