I had made millions and was still deeply afraid that if I stopped my life would fall apart and I would lose everything. I got really good at tricking myself into thinking that I was indeed taking care of myself. I was in therapy doing the mental work of unpacking my little T and big T traumas. I would go on these lavish self care retreats, get regular massages and do weekly bubble baths people don't call me a spa snob for nothing. I was self soothing, but I was not self caring.
Mhm. Thank you for joining me during this season of the Jereshia Said podcast titled homecoming. When you are living life from a place of survival, you don't realize how disconnected from your body and your being. You truly are. At least I didn't. And that gets projected into how you build and run your business. This season, we'll be diving into what it looks like to build from a place of significance rather than survival.
What it looks like to re-establish your owner's intent and realign your business model, best practices for what to do with your profit to ensure stable and steady cashflow and cleansing your mental self-talk in order to strengthen yourself trust. I'm honored that you're here and listening to this season of the show, let's get into today's episode. Okay. So the big question that you're probably wondering, and question I've been getting asked a lot is why did I take a sabbatical?
And how did I survive divorce descaling my multi seven figure business. And how did I give myself permission to pause? I was working about 30 hours a week on average taking six to eight weeks off every year I had spaciousness because of how lean my business model was. I had two main offers, one front facing offer that made up about 80% of my annual revenue. And a backend offer that was primarily for existing clients to go deeper with me, that helped me increase my lifetime value.
I had two core full-time team members and two to three program coaches, just depending on what time of year it was, who were past clients who had found success in my programs and wanted to give back to my community of coaching clients. And they supported the delivery of the group coaching program. I had incredible team support. I had a sustainable offer structure.
I had a streamlined workflow for content and marketing efforts that worked converting over 60% of qualified prospects into paid coaching clients. Listen. I was far from business burnout. But as time went on and my personal life got more complicated, I was growing more disconnected from my body and losing touch with my center. My life was starting to feel disjointed by business was thriving. Clients were winning. My team was crushing it and supporting me, but my personal world started to unfold.
And that unfolding of my personal world made it more and more challenging to see a vision for my future. Which made it difficult to show up in my business because I lost sight of what I was doing. All of this for. Have you ever felt like that before? If so you aren't alone and I'm happy to share what I've learned from this experience. In this episode, we'll dive into how I plan my sabbatical in advance, why I decided to take a sabbatical and why I think you should consider taking one to.
How I prepare my business for my absence and the steps I took to ensure a smooth operations. All while experiencing death of a close family member in going through divorce. Back in 2019, I was in Ubud, Bali. At some enchanted smoothie shop. As I was in all of the breathtaking views. I sparked conversation with this married couple who was taking the year off, traveling with their two little kids around the world. Hashtag goals, right?
They both worked for a boarding school on the east coast and as part of their work benefits after seven years of working, they'd get one year off salary paid. At the time, I didn't know what a sabbatical was. I had never heard of the term and I definitely didn't know anybody personally, who had taken an entire year off, especially by choice. Most of the time when you hear about people taking time off, or at least me people were doing it for some unforeseen health crisis or medical issue.
Seeing this married couple and seeing how happy they were seeing their kids and just an alternative choice of their lifestyle. It really inspired me to add that to my goal list. Taking time off by choice. So 2024 became the year that will become my sabbatical year. While that lived on my vision board year after year as my business grew, it felt further and further out of reach.
The unique part about my business journey is that my business grew every single year, either doubling or tripling in annual revenue or profit since 2017. While this is the dream right to grow get bigger, enroll, more clients, make more money. You don't realize the downside of being in hyper growth year after year after year. It was an experience I don't regret. And one that completely changed my life.
And I'll share more about how I was smart about managing the profit and not blowing it all in a little bit in this episode and especially in some future episodes. But after a years of the instability that comes after having to rebuild your operations, when you grow that fast, I was losing grip of my purpose. Chasing the accolades and the recognition I was getting out of touch with the inner alignment and the heart behind the why. I was losing inspiration to grow for the sake of being bigger.
In every time I set new goals to double or triple my annual revenue yet again, because that is what I had experienced, I felt like that was the only new goals to set. I was left feeling deflated, unmotivated, and just wondering why. What am I doing this for? Who am I doing this for? And what am I trying to prove? I was left with the most pressing question that I didn't have an answer to. How much is enough? I got addicted to the game.
As I was losing control of my personal life, I tightened my grip in the business. I recently read an excellent article in psych central. That summarize my experience perfectly. One of the ways that black women have coped with not only our trauma, but just our emotional suffering in general is by avoiding it says, doctor. Iyengar Burnett Ziglar, a licensed clinical psychologist in Chicago and the author of the book. Nobody knows the trouble. I've seen the emotional lives of black women.
The psychologist and author explains that because so many people have experienced trauma and don't label those experiences as such. They also don't know that they're engaging in a trauma response. Those responses from physical harm to numbing through food, drugs, sex, shopping, and more.
Or even hyper productivity as known as toxic productivity are all considered unhealthy coping mechanisms, being busy, having a packed calendar that can be busy with work that can be busy with social activities just always being on the go that busy-ness serves as a distraction from what emotions can potentially come up. What I began to realize is that my business had become my coping mechanism. Why am I like this? Why are we like this?
I mean, I know why culture society, the grandmother who raised me taught me that being able to outwork anyone and survive extreme periods of struggle was the bare minimum requirement for success. I've felt a sense of pride wearing that badge of honor for how buoyant I could be. Falling down was inevitable. And I got really damn good at bouncing back up without taking a moment to tend to the wounds and the bruises that come with the falls.
Shattering glass ceilings was a requirement, but rarely do we talk about the blood gushing scrapes. We endure from the glass breaking. Bouncing back and breaking through takes a toll, not only on us physically, but mentally the strides I've made the success I've achieved and the talents. I've poured into thousands of other people, to the clients I've served. were truly an act of spiritual obedience.
I used to think that my worth and my value though, came from how much I could do for others, not just in business, but for the people closest to me and my personal life. I believe this so deeply that I would ignore the very clear and very loud instructions from God to slow my pace and tent to myself. 'cause I thought so little of my self worth at the time outside of the valley that I could provide for others.
I would distract myself from doing the things that would allow me to truly refill my cup. Fast forward to 2022. During a session, my therapist helped me realize that I was hiding behind my pin and my note taking. I was keeping my brain so occupied with being productive. Focusing on growing the business. That I was distracting myself from the deep level of grief that I was experiencing beneath the surface.
This led me to revisit that 2019 goal of taking a sabbatical after my seventh year of business. The fear and my chest tightened, just thinking about slowing down and what I would do with all that spaciousness. But I felt like that was the exact thing I needed to focus on and prepare for. So that same year I read this book called company of one by Paul Jarvis, which is all about building your business around your desired lifestyle and not the other way around.
Jarvis suggests that you don't always need to grow in drives home. The value of focusing on staying small and profitable. This felt so in alignment in three years of consistent seven figure revenue average and around 60% or more in profit. I was tired of making millions without a sense of meaning. In order to tap back into what mattered most to me, I had to get still with myself and explore the parts of myself I was avoiding. This was the kickoff of an 18 month experiment.
I tested every department of my business at scale. Client delivery and coaching. Content creation and distribution, social media management, and engagement. Lead qualification in sales. Customer service and client relations, project and task management. The list was exhaustive. Scaling from me meant to how could I decrease my owner dependency while experiencing substantial growth? That was the qualifier that I was using to evaluate this experiment.
By the reason I did this was because I wanted some data to help me decide what type of sabbatical I would take. In a previous episode, I go really in depth about the three different types of sabbaticals you can take as a personal brand, online business owner and how your business can be in service to you. So I highly recommend that you go back and check out episode 230 and 231. I didn't know if I wanted to keep my business operational enrolling new clients.
While I was away from the business and on a break, or if I wanted to just maintain the clients I had already had and figure out how to delegate client delivery, or if I wanted to take a sabbatical with zero cognitive load, meaning that I would have no clients to serve no marketing or sales that I needed to worry about, I would fully be able to be disconnected off from the business and only have to take care of myself.
The engineer in me and needed and want it to see what would be required for each of those scenarios and options. So I had to create some constraints and I had a few considerations while going through this process. First how to scale client delivery without damaging client results. How to scale content output without diminishing the quality of content. How to do all of this with three or fewer full-time employees. How to maintain 50% or more profit margin while testing and making these changes.
How to track and measure the before and after outcomes of every thing being tested and what size company, what type of offers and what level of responsibility do I want to hold long-term. These are all the variables that I was testing and experimenting. During that 18 month time period to help give me more clarity on how I want it to take a sabbatical, what it will look like for me to take time off and just to help me make the decision. So don't worry.
In the next episode, I'm going to share the top 10 lessons learned from scaling my business before taking a sabbatical and dig into more detail. But these constraints served as healthy guard rails for me. The outcome was important, but how I went about achieving that outcome was the true test. While preparing the business for my absence life, decided to throw its curve balls. It's funny how every time I commit to trusting my gut and prioritizing myself. Everything.
That's not meant to stick around, starts to get uprooted. This was the most challenging part of preparing for my sabbatical, returning home to myself and realizing what and who no longer needed to be there. Coming face-to-face with myself. I was scared to tell myself the full truth, because I was afraid that it would also mean letting go of aspects of my identity that I was attached to. The more I explored what it meant to choose myself.
The clear it became, which things in my life were out of alignment. And when you are building an online business, it requires you to put yourself out there to show up publicly to share your perspective. And it requires that you package a layer of your identity to generate income. You are monetizing a part of yourself, and that takes a lot of effing courage.
If you are wrestling with being fully honest with yourself or with making a tough decision and choosing yourself, let me remind you that the flip side is also true. It takes just as much courage, if not more, to give yourself permission to slow down and to choose yourself. It takes a lot of courage to actually act in alignment with what you truly want, especially when those choices will lead you to changing direction and redefining what success means to you.
I had made millions and was still deeply afraid that if I stopped my life would fall apart and I would lose everything. Having spent tens of thousands of dollars on therapy, coaching self-help books and hours, listening to personal development podcasts. I know better. Despite how much I knew this decision to slow down is one I had wrestled with for many, many months. When you have been going at such a fast pace for so long, it can feel nearly impossible to slow down.
The thoughts of doubt and fear were all consuming. Like, am I putting my business at risk longterm? When people see me as less credible, if I took a break, am I a failure? If I decide to take a break, is this me quitting? Like, well, people still want to learn from someone who isn't in the grind and the hustle mode. What's wrong with me for not wanting to keep doubling and tripling my revenue every year. Like who am I if I no longer want what I've spent nearly a decade pursuing.
I just felt so disconnected and out of sorts with myself. Like I don't know if you can relate, but it was just a really disassociating time because so much of what I had wrapped my identity around no longer felt true for me anymore. I couldn't recognize myself. These past few months of unwinding, the complexities of my business have instilled faith in me that slowing down, especially this particular season of my life.
That is going to birth my biggest blessings, not just from a business before my personal life. Letting it be easy and surrendering to stillness is going to bring to fruition desires I never fully believed I was worthy of experiencing and being on the other side of it. After taking time off and slowing down in D scaling. I can say that those thoughts, like this is the truth. Choosing myself and giving myself permission to pause, led to a kind gentle and amicable divorce.
It led me to learning how to take care of myself, how to prioritize my nutrition and fitness, gaining new tools to regulate my nervous system. It led me to having the space to grieve the death of a close family member. And just really how to learn, how to reconnect and listen to my body. One thing this season of death and divorce really taught me is that good books are allowed to come to an end.
And all endings are not a sign of failure or defeat, whether that be death, divorce, or loss of any kind. All of these experiences that I've gone through over the past year, year and a half have allow me to return home to myself. And that's the greatest gift I believe you can receive in this lifetime. What I can say is that it's been a true privilege to be in a position where I can pump the brakes in my business without my lifestyle and financial stability being negatively impacted.
I had an incredible team who helped me through the transition Kisha and Katy, if you are listening to this, my gratitude for you is so deep. Thank you for supporting the business and our clients, as I was navigating this transition and also preparing the business to go on sabbatical. Also saving heavily over the years and optimizing my business for profit is how I was able to do this without having to reduce my lifestyle expenses.
If you started at your business for freedom and choice, recognize that money buys you more options. How you choose to structure your business model will influence how you make money. How you operate your business is what will dictate, how you manage that money you make. And aligning your business model with your personal lifestyle is what will ensure that after paying uncle Sam and covering payroll, you'll have money available for the options and choices you want to make for yourself.
So here are three actions to consider taking to help you apply the insights from this episode to your own personal life and business. One plan for sabbatical, even if you don't think you need one.
It will cause you to view your business model from a more sustainable perspective, even if you don't need to take an extended amount of time off having a business that can survive in your absence and having the cash on hand to afford, to not have to take on more clients is the best gift your business can give you. Two, optimize your business model for profit and flexibility.
Start by looking at how sustainable your current offers, delivery, marketing and sales efforts are and make the necessary changes to ensure your current business model is aligned with your definition of success and your desired lifestyle preferences. Third is answer this question. How much is enough? Get aligned with your definition of success and run your numbers. You might be surprised at everything you want is much closer in reach, then you may think.
Knowing how much is enough will help you maintain a balance between growth and sustainability to ensure longterm success without compromising your personal wellbeing. So, thank you so much for listening. In next week's episode, we'll be digging into the 10 lessons I learned from planning my sabbatical in advance. And I cannot wait to share those with you. Plus I'll be sharing bonus resources to dig deeper on these topics with my email list.
So if you'd like to receive those extra resources in your inbox, make sure to join my newsletter. Check the episode description for info on how to join. And lastly, subscribe on apple iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to get notifications when new episodes drop. As you're listening, please leave a review and tell me what you think. I look forward to hearing from you and continuing the conversation. Until next time, keep listening.