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BIG NEWS! I’m launching my upcoming program for FREE (for now!) It’s called Dream and Design, it is for current and aspiring expertise-based online business owners who want to design or redesign a clear and compelling vision of an online business that achieves their version of the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot. We kick off 12th September – register here to take a step closer to YOUR Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot.
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Let’s get straight into it.
A sustainable lifestyle business requires wild alignment. Here’s seven types of alignment to focus on to achieve just that.
Hint: We’ll be covering most of these in Dream and Design (register here if you haven’t yet!)
1. Business model alignment — If your product suite, price point and delivery set up doesn’t suit YOU the founder, that’s a fatal flaw and you’re doomed from the outset.
Examples: Don’t price low if you don’t love spending all of your time marketing. Don’t offer calls if Zoom gives you a headache. Don’t build a model that requires BOTH lots of delivery + lots of marketing if you want to work 5-hour days w/no team
2. Passion alignment — It’s better if you love what you do. Also, the word passion can be swapped out for meaning — maybe it doesn’t always feel enjoyable, but it does need to feel worthwhile. Business is hard, and doing this will help you outrun everyone. It will mean you are intrinsically motivated to keep going and 60% of the time, it won’t feel like work.
3. Authority alignment — Don’t create an offer for a problem you wanted solved, if you haven’t solved it yourself yet. Potential clients/students can smell authority alignment a mile off. You don’t need to be the ultimate authority, but you can’t still be struggling with the problem you’re trying to sell a solution to either.
4. Offer alignment — Passion matters, but your offer also needs to cater to a profitable market, or it won’t sell.
Myth: A profitable market means you need to market to ‘rich people’. Not true: Instead, you need to offer something to a market of people that buy — subtle, important difference.
Ask: does/will my intended market outspend in this area?
They usually do when they’re: a) irrationally passionate (eg surfers — ask my partner) or b) they have a painful, urgent problem. Ideally, both.
5. Time alignment — If you desire ‘work/life balance’, you need to build a model that allows you to divorce your time from your value.
Being booked out isn’t the definition of ‘success’ if what you’re actually angling for are spacious days and calendars.
Prioritising time alignment in the form of leverage will counterintuitively require you to work more in the set up prior to working less. Be okay with this — this barrier is the reason not everyone achieves it.
6. Endgame alignment — When you’re clear on your endgame, you can reverse engineer into the profit goal you need to get there, instead of picking some arbitrary number that ‘sounds’ good but comes at the cost of the things you REALLY got into this for in the first place.
It means that you will make different (less ego-led) decisions, likely need to do less and that you can start optimising for things other than just money (hello time, freedom and happiness).
7. Expectation alignment — Business is hard, and requires hard work (especially at the start, but in some ways always — making money requires you to solve problems, and that requires responsibility — this energetically will never go away even once you’re working less). It gets sticky when the online business world markets a dream, but glosses over the hard work to achieve it. You’re not doing it wrong if you’re working hard. Misaligned expectations killed more dreams than failure ever did.
My upcoming program, Dream and Design, kicks off 12 September, 2023 with free live weekly sessions for 4 weeks, an epic workbook, an amazing Facebook community and more! Register now while it’s still FREE!
