This isn’t a piece on passive income. 

It’s not a piece on the freedom to work from anywhere. 

Or, to pick up and travel the world. 

Instead? It’s about building a drop everything business and how I built it. 

You see, when most of us think of course or digital-product based businesses we think of the fun freedom that it may one day give us the opportunity to enjoy. 

We aspire to build the “bucket list” business:

One that creates deep impact for those we serve, whilst simultaneously giving us time, freedom and happiness in spades to spend time with little ones, live without financial burden and go on extended staycations. 

I know I sure did. 

Happily, six (almost seven) years of hard work, trial and error in, I have mostly done that. 

But, here’s the clincher. 

It’s not the “bucketlist” business that I have been the most grateful for this year. 

It’s the drop everything business. 

It’s building a business that has afforded me the ability to scale back and work less not by choice, but by necessity. 

From about March on this year, I have worked around 5-hours a week.

The fact that I even COULD – without financial burden or business ruin? – is something that I will always be eternally grateful for.

And so, in today’s podcast episode I want to share with you some of the things that made that possible for me.  

The truth is that it is, unfortunately, highly likely that at some point in all of our business careers there will come a time that we’re forced to slow down, pause or stop business as usual for less-than-desirable reasons. 

It might be a diagnosis, or a chronic health condition, or an accident. 

Whatever the reason, having the foresight to know HOW to set your business up in a way that supports you even when you aren’t “in it” is, I think, a superpower and a gift. 

Here’s how I did it. 

1) Prioritising a Leveraged Business Model 

Here’s some tough love: 

Building a leveraged business model is MORE work up front than building one where you are swapping each hour for money. 

And it’s for that reason that most people don’t do it. 

Online, we’re sold the “passive income” dream. 

The truth is? That passive income is actually up front work, and most people don’t want to do the “work” bit to get to the “passive” bit. 

A leveraged business model is one where you do up front work to build assets, systems and structure that allow you to increasingly divorce your value from your time. 

It looks like this: 

Where as a service model where you are swapping dollars for hours looks like this: 

The catch-22 comes when you are currently in that dollars for hours model, and you want to swap into a more leveraged model. 

When it usually falls apart is when someone in that situation is already at capacity with their hours, and tries to “squeeze in” the upfront work associated with building a leveraged model too. 

It doesn’t usually work. 

Here’s a few possible ways to approach it instead: 

Option One: Scale down the dollars for hours side: Building a leveraged model involves up front sacrifice. Drop a client so that you have the capacity to build up the new model. This will mean a temporary reduction in income, unless you are able to raise your prices to compensate for it.

Option Two: Choose a season of your life where you are willing and able to invest the up front labour to build a leveraged model. The right time to do that isn’t when you are in the midst of NEEDING that extra time and space – it’s well before.

Both involve sacrifice, and the up front investment of time that will pay dividends later. 

Often though, when things are “good enough” it’s easy to delay making a change like this and to move it to an undefined later. 

I know I’ve done that in the past – for example, it took many years for me to leave the comfort of my corporate job to commit to the “hard” of starting a business. 

Ultimately though, we choose our hard. 

A leveraged model has been hard work, but it is now paying me back in ways I could have never imagined. 

2) Developing Multiple Streams of Income

I’m no financial advisor, and I don’t pretend to be. 

In fact, don’t ask me about money or to add anything up by hand – I will get it atrociously wrong, and I admit it. 

However! I am thankful to have sought the guidance of those much smarter than me to help me to set myself up for a rainy day. 

I remember listening to an Amy Porterfield podcast many years ago. 

One thing she mentioned is that her biggest regret or “learning” was not focusing on prioritising personal finance earlier. 

I didn’t even know what she meant. 

I had to Google “personal finance”. 

But listening to that podcast was a catalyst for me to learn what it was, and how I could avoid making that same mistake. 

The result of those efforts are documented in my Dream and Design Course inside of Lifestyle Business School – but here’s the cliff notes: 

1/ Build a Cashflow Business: We’re blessed in this online world to be able to build a model with comparatively low overheads (as compared to, for example, an ecommerce business).

2/ Invest Profits: Rather than spending those excess profits on Gucci bags or lifestyle creep, instead invest them into assets outside of your business.

3/ Let Compounding Work For You: The earlier you start doing this, the better. Compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. Don’t believe me? Here’s $100,000 compounding at 8% a year. In 20 years, you’ll have $492,000 in assets (not to mention, a salary that truly makes work optional – see below)

4/ Enjoy “Passive” Income Stream: This is where a “leveraged” business can eventually lead to “passive” income. Eventually, you can stop reinvesting your profits and instead live off the dividends. You can do this in “retirement” – or earlier, in the event of a rainy day.

The truth is that i haven’t actually needed to “touch” my passive income.

However, knowing that I could if I needed to has given me a sense of calm

3) Knowing My Enough Number

Working 5-hours a week for many of the weeks of this year hasn’t been the most “profitable” time in my business.

And also, it doesn’t matter. 

This is the power of knowing your enough number, and how to reverse into it to ensure that your business is serving you.

Your enough number (a concept I teach and help you define inside of Dream and Design in Lifestyle Business School) is the amount of revenue your business needs to generate to fulfill the operating requirements of the business and also your personal profit and investing goal numbers that will one day make work optional.

From there, you can figure out how many units of your offers you need to sell to achieve that number. 

The first time I calculated this number, it was a big release for me. 

It meant that I didn’t need to scale to the moon, and that I could instead work in a way that didn’t burn me out and still get everything I wanted.

That was incredibly powerful, and freeing. 

I had an additional realisation this year that helped me in this season: 

That I didn’t need to hit my enough number in a linear fashion. 

Meaning that: 

In the hypothetical example of my “enough number” being $120,000 (PS – that’s not my number, this is an example for easy math), I don’t need to make exactly $10,000 every month for 12 months to get there. 

Instead, I could “scale down” in this season where that was required of me, and instead focus on achieving that enough number in concentrated pockets of the year. 

It’s a different way to think about business growth, especially when we have been conditioned to find safety in “consistent income”. 

But what if instead of consistent income, you instead knew your enough number and committed to achieving it in the first three months of the year? 

Or in the last?

Or in a manner that suits YOU? 

A simple business gives you time freedom. 

4) Business Simplicity

Think of it like this: 

Every little additional piece of complexity you add to your business is committing to an additional investment of time, or team. 

For that reason, I fight myself daily on making sure that my business remains as simple as possible. 

One offer. 

One tier. 

One, one, one. 

I also have simple systems and processes built for every operation in this simple business, so I have been able to hand those off when needed too.

This topic deserves its own podcast episode, and I will expand on it in detail in the next episode. 

But, by resisting complexity, I have been able to streamline, systemise and simplify, which ultimately means less time required to run the business. 

5) Knowing What’s Important

In every business, there is one function that is critical to the existence of the business. 

In Run Like Clockwork, this is referred to as the “Queen Bee” role of the business. 

Knowing what that is and prioritising JUST THAT has helped me focus my limited time on only the most needle moving things. 

For this business? It’s content creation – meaning, the creation of thought leadership content both publicly via this podcast, and privately inside of my Lifestyle Business course. 

And so, I have just done that. 

As you may know, I’m currently on a multi-month sojourn around Europe. 

In advance, there were two things I needed to get done to make that happen:

1) Create enough podcast episodes to get me through; and
2) Finalise course content. 

That’s it. 

This has meant other things falling by the wayside. 

Random emails (not customer service emails) have gone unanswered. 

Little admin tasks have been eliminated. 

And everything OTHER THAN my Queen Bee role has been put on the backburner or deleted altogether. 

The truth is? 

Being in a time crunch really shines a light on what is important, and where you may have been leaking time on unimportant things in the past. 

This was apparent when I first became a Mum, and it’s apparent again now. 

By ONLY working on the things that actually matter, I can still keep my business running without needing all of the hours in the day to do so. 

Of course, the leveraged model, previous up front work, and focus on automations and funnels has contributed to this too so the ability to do this doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

—

So, there you have it! 

Five things that have allowed me the time and space to work 5-hour weeks for much of this year have been:

• Prioritizing the creation of a leveraged model BEFORE I needed it; 
• Focusing on diversified income streams as a “back up”;
• Knowing my enough number and realising that achieving it doesn’t need to be linear;
• Prioritizing business simplicity; and
• Focusing ON on what’s important. 

Want to build a leveraged business model NOW? 

We show you how inside of Lifestyle Business School. Get an all access annual pass to six courses for less than the price of one here.