Are You Building the Business You Actually Want? Or the One You Think You Should Have?
Oct 29, 2026
I have a question for you, and I really want you to think about your answer.
How much of your business did you intentionally design, and how much of it exists because somebody told you that's what successful entrepreneurs are supposed to do?
The membership. The online course. The three different ways to work with you. The content calendar. The freebie. The funnel. The fact that you're available to clients at practically all hours of the day.
Did you actually choose those things?
Or did you see someone else doing them and decide that must be what you're supposed to do next?
I've been having some really interesting conversations with women entrepreneurs lately, and there's a pattern I can't ignore.
These are smart, capable women. They're making money. They have clients. They've built businesses that, from the outside, look successful.
But when we start digging into how those businesses actually operate, something becomes very clear.
Some of these women have built entire businesses around things they don't even want to do.
And I think it's time we talk about that.
When Your Business Starts Looking Like a Cheesecake Factory Menu
Recently, I had a conversation with a woman who attended The Boardroom, one of my business events.
She was feeling stuck with her offers and considering hiring another coach to help her figure things out.
After hearing a little about what was going on, I offered to spend 30 minutes talking it through with her.
Because sometimes I hear a problem and think, Please don't spend thousands of dollars trying to solve this before we have a conversation.
And as we started unpacking her business, I noticed something.
She had built what I can only describe as a Cheesecake Factory menu.
If you've ever been to the Cheesecake Factory, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
The menu is approximately 900 pages long. There are so many options that choosing dinner becomes an entire event.
And that's what her business was starting to look like.
She had a successful private coaching practice, a six-week program, a low-ticket membership, and another group program she was preparing to launch.
None of these things were inherently bad.
In fact, her private coaching was essentially full. She had clients renewing and a six-figure business.
But she wanted to increase her revenue without significantly increasing her workload.
And the business she'd built wasn't actually designed to support that goal.
So instead of asking what she should add next, we started asking a different question.
What if some of these offers didn't need to exist at all?
Just Because It's a Good Business Strategy Doesn't Mean It's Good for Your Business
Here's what I think happens to a lot of us.
We start a business because we want more freedom.
Maybe we want to make more money. Maybe we want to pick our kids up from school without asking permission. Maybe we're tired of someone else deciding when we can take a vacation or what our time is worth.
We want to do meaningful work and have more control over our lives.
And then we enter the online business world.
Suddenly, there are approximately 47,000 people telling us what we're doing wrong.
You need an email list.
You need recurring revenue.
You need a personal brand.
You need a course.
You need a membership.
You need passive income.
You need to be on Instagram. Actually, LinkedIn. Wait, everyone's moving to Substack.
And before you know it, you're spending half your working hours trying to figure out which business strategy you're supposed to implement next.
Here's the thing.
A lot of that advice isn't necessarily bad.
An email list can be incredibly valuable. A course can be a fantastic business model. Recurring revenue can create stability.
But there's a very big difference between a good business strategy and a good business strategy for you.
And I think we've lost sight of that distinction.
When Did We Decide That Trading Time for Money Was a Bad Thing?
Somewhere along the way, the online business industry decided that providing a service in exchange for money was somehow an inferior business model.
You're trading time for money? Oh no. You need to scale.
So you build a course.
Then someone tells you that one-time purchases are unpredictable, so you need a membership.
Then you need a low-ticket offer to bring people into your ecosystem.
Then a freebie to sell the low-ticket offer.
Then an email sequence to sell the membership.
Then a webinar to sell the course.
Congratulations.
You've now given yourself four different jobs.
You're running a service business, a product business, a media company, and a tech company.
And I want to ask you something.
Did you actually want any of those jobs?
Because there are plenty of incredibly profitable businesses built around delivering excellent services.
Law firms do it. Accounting firms do it. Consulting firms do it.
Nobody is telling a successful consultant that she's doing entrepreneurship wrong because she has to show up and do the work she's being paid for.
So why have we convinced ourselves that the only way to build a successful online business is to stop doing the thing we're actually good at?
Scaling can be wonderful.
But scaling for the sake of scaling can also create an unnecessarily complicated business that you don't particularly enjoy running.
There's a Difference Between Making Money and Making Sense
Let's go back to that woman I was talking about earlier.
One of her offers was a membership with approximately 25 members paying around $50 per month.
That's roughly $1,250 in recurring monthly revenue.
Or $15,000 annually, assuming those members stick around.
On paper, that sounds pretty good.
But then we started looking at what was required to deliver that membership.
She was showing up live three times every single week.
Now, to be fair, those sessions were also available to her private coaching clients, so the delivery wasn't exclusively for the membership.
But that's still three fixed commitments on her calendar every week.
For a woman whose goal was to make more money without working more.
And that's where we need to stop looking at revenue in isolation.
Because the cost of an offer isn't just the money it takes to deliver it.
It's the time.
The energy.
The administration.
The marketing.
The coordination.
The mental load.
And if you're a mother running a business, those things matter.
We don't have unlimited, uninterrupted hours to dedicate to our businesses. We have children, families, relationships, responsibilities, and hopefully some hobbies and a life outside of work.
So when you're evaluating whether an offer is successful, I want you to ask yourself something beyond how much money it generates.
Is this good money for the life I actually want to live?
Because an offer can be profitable, popular, and genuinely valuable to your clients and still not be the right offer for your business.
You're allowed to acknowledge that.
And you're allowed to change it.
You Don't Have to Keep Selling Something Just Because It Works
This is something I've had to learn in my own business.
I've built memberships. I've created programs. I've launched offers that felt like fantastic ideas at the time.
And some of them were fantastic ideas.
For that particular season of my business.
But things change.
My business has evolved. The clients I want to work with have evolved. The way I want to spend my time has evolved.
And I've become much more intentional about asking myself how I actually want to work with people.
Not just what people will buy.
Not just what's popular online.
Not just what someone else says is scalable.
But what kind of work I genuinely enjoy doing.
For me, I love getting into someone's business and understanding how the whole thing works.
I love looking at the numbers, the offers, the marketing, the delivery, and the opportunities.
I love asking the questions that help someone see something they haven't been able to see themselves.
And I love long-term relationships where I get to watch a woman make meaningful changes and see the results over time.
What I don't want is to spend my days trying to convince hundreds of people to buy a tiny digital product just because someone told me that's the secret to scalable revenue.
That doesn't mean low-ticket products are bad.
It just means they're not necessarily the business model I want to build around.
And that's okay.
There are things you can be good at that you don't need to build a business around.
There are offers you can successfully sell that you don't need to keep selling forever.
And there are clients you can help who aren't necessarily the clients you want to spend your career working with.
That's not failure.
That's intentional business design.
You Get to Set the Standards for How You Work
Another interesting part of that conversation was around the length of this woman's coaching engagements.
She offered both three-month and six-month packages.
But when I asked her where the real transformation happened for her clients, she acknowledged that the six-month engagement was much more aligned with the work she was doing.
So naturally, my next question was: Then why are you offering three months?
And this is where things get interesting.
Because sometimes we design our offers around what we think people will agree to rather than what we know is necessary to deliver excellent results.
Someone says six months feels like a big commitment.
So we create a three-month option.
Someone says they want more access.
So we add another call.
Someone wants more flexibility.
So we rearrange our schedule.
And before we know it, we've created a business where everyone else's preferences are more important than our own capacity.
Now, I'm not suggesting that we ignore our customers.
We absolutely need to understand what people want, what they're willing to pay for, and what barriers might prevent them from buying.
But there's a difference between listening to the market and allowing every objection to dictate how you run your business.
If you know six months is what your clients need to get meaningful results, you're allowed to offer six-month engagements.
If you want to work deeply with a smaller number of clients, you're allowed to build a business around that.
If you don't want to be accessible in a group chat every waking hour, you're allowed to set that boundary.
Not everyone will want to work with you that way.
And that's okay.
You don't need to build a business that works for everybody. You need to build one that works for your clients and for you.
I think this is especially important for women entrepreneurs because so many of us have spent our lives being accommodating.
Making things easier for everyone else.
Being flexible.
Being available.
But you get to have preferences, too.
More Activity Doesn't Automatically Mean More Business Growth
I want you to think about everything you're currently doing in your business.
Are you posting on Instagram five days a week because you've determined that's an effective way to reach your ideal clients?
Or because someone told you consistency is everything?
Are you attending networking events because those rooms contain potential clients, referral partners, and collaborators?
Or because you feel like you should be networking more?
Are you launching a podcast because it's a meaningful way to build trust with your audience?
Or because everyone else seems to have one?
And yes, I'm aware of the irony of asking that question on a podcast.
But you get my point.
Every activity you introduce into your business comes with a cost.
Sometimes it's small.
One more call. One more platform. One more email. One more program.
But collectively, those things create the reality of what running your business looks like every single day.
And if you're constantly overwhelmed, frustrated, or struggling to find time for the work that actually moves your business forward, it might be time to examine how many commitments you've made without intentionally choosing them.
A Simple Exercise to Audit the Business You've Built
If this conversation is hitting a little close to home, I want you to try something.
Set aside 20 to 30 minutes and write down everything your business currently requires you to do.
Start with your offers. Every service, program, membership, product, package, and recurring commitment.
Then look at your marketing. Every platform, newsletter, podcast, networking event, and content obligation.
Finally, look at your delivery. Client calls, group sessions, administration, community management, custom work, and everything else that happens after someone pays you.
Now, for each of those things, ask yourself five questions:
- Why did I start doing this? Was it an intentional decision or something I thought I was supposed to do?
- Is it working? Is it generating the results I actually want?
- What does it cost me? Not just financially, but in time, energy, and mental capacity.
- Does it fit the business I want to build now? Not the business I wanted two years ago. The one I want today.
- If I were starting from scratch tomorrow, would I choose this again?
That last question is particularly important.
Because sometimes we keep doing things simply because we've already invested so much time, money, or energy into building them.
But just because something made sense once doesn't mean it needs to be part of your business forever.
What Would Your Business Look Like If You Stopped Following Everyone Else's Rules?
I want to leave you with one final question.
Imagine you could remove all the advice you've consumed.
All the business coaches you've followed.
All the people you've compared yourself to.
All the expectations about what a successful entrepreneur is supposed to do.
What would your business actually look like?
What would you sell?
Who would you work with?
How much money would you want to make?
How would you spend your days?
And how much of your life would you be willing to exchange to make that money?
Now ask yourself what's stopping you from moving closer to that business.
Maybe there are legitimate financial constraints. Maybe you've made commitments that can't disappear overnight. Maybe the changes will take time.
That's fine.
But we can at least start making decisions with intention.
Because I didn't leave the corporate world to spend the rest of my life taking orders from strangers on the internet about how to run my company.
And I'm guessing you didn't start your business for that reason either.
You get to have standards.
You get to have preferences.
You get to change your mind.
And you get to build something that's not only profitable, but actually makes sense for the life you're living.
That's the kind of business I want for you.
