Every few months, someone on my feed announces that they are ready to burn their whole business down. They want to get rid of the offers, change the prices, stop launching, rebuild the website, restructure everything, and possibly go live in the woods.
Honestly, I get it.
By the time someone gets to “burn it all down,” they are usually not responding to one thing that went wrong. They are exhausted, completely overwhelmed, and no longer understand what the fuck is happening in their own business. They have changed things. They have tried to fix things. They have followed advice.
Somehow, they still feel like shit.
This is normally where I start asking questions.
Based on what?
What is making you feel this way? Why are we saying the business is not successful? What benchmark are we comparing it to? You are exhausted, but what are you actually doing? Where are your resources going? What have you already changed, and what happened when you changed it?
You can burn down whatever you want. I am not here to make you stay in a business you hate. But I do want to understand why we are setting it on fire before we know what is actually wrong.
We make business decisions like they happen in a silo
Most business decisions make sense when we look at them individually.
You need more revenue, so you add an offer. You need more time, so you drop one. You want predictable income, so you start a retainer. You are exhausted from calls, so you move them all onto two days. Something is not selling, so you change the price.
None of those decisions are automatically wrong. The problem is that they do not only affect the thing we changed.
Adding an offer changes what buyers have to understand and choose between. It changes what you need to market, sell, deliver, and maintain. It may give people an easier way to work with you, but it may also require a volume of sales you do not have the audience or energy to support.
Taking on another client changes more than your revenue. It changes your calendar, the kind of thinking you have available, how quickly you can respond to everybody else, and how much of yourself is left for your own business.
Moving every call to Tuesday and Wednesday might make the calendar look more organized. It might also mean you are absolutely useless on Thursday, so the uninterrupted workday you thought you created is mostly theoretical.
We keep exchanging one thing for another as if every part holds the same weight.
One client equals ten hours and $2,000.
One offer removed equals more capacity.
One price increase equals more revenue.
Except that is not how any of this works because each decision enters an existing business with an existing owner, existing commitments, and an actual life happening around it.
So naturally, I went down an atom rabbit hole
I started thinking about the business owner as the nucleus of an atom.
The owner is the main circle of the business. Everything else is organized around them, whether or not the business has been designed that way intentionally. Around that nucleus are the different resources and capacities they have available: time, energy, cognitive capacity, emotional capacity, physical capacity, relational capacity, and money.
Then we bring another thing into the system. A new offer. A client. A launch. A revenue goal. A delivery promise. A different schedule.
For that thing to attach itself to the business, there has to be some kind of exchange. It requires something, and it gives something back.
We tend to measure the most obvious parts of that exchange. How much money will it make? How many hours will it take? But those two numbers do not tell us what is happening to the whole system.
A client might require ten delivery hours, but they may also require three calls, regular messaging, preparation, feedback, decision-making, task-switching, and the part where you continue thinking about their business while standing in the grocery store. That client may bring in exactly the revenue you need while using the same capacity you needed to market your other offers.
The problem is not automatically the client. The problem is that we counted one part of the exchange and acted like nothing else had moved.
Different owners create different exchanges
I do not think there is one correct way to design an online business.
The same work does not cost every person the same thing.
One person can write for six hours and feel fantastic. Another can do forty-five minutes of writing and need to stare at a wall. One person loves client calls and gets energized by them. Another person can handle the call perfectly well and still lose the rest of the afternoon recovering from it.
Even the same work does not always cost the same person the same thing. It depends on when it happens, what else is going on, how much switching is required, what is happening in their body, and what the rest of their life already needs from them.
So when somebody says, “This should only take five hours,” I want to know five hours of what, completed by whom, under what conditions, and what happens afterward.
The hours matter. The money matters. They just are not the entire exchange.
When we build the business as if they are, the uncounted part still has to come from somewhere. Most of the time, it comes from the owner.
They work later. They stop doing their own marketing. They become less available to their family. They use the capacity they needed for another part of the business. They deliver resentfully and then feel guilty because the client is technically getting exactly what they paid for.
The exchange looked even because the spreadsheet said it was.
The person running the business absorbed the difference.
Eventually, the whole thing feels unstable
This is the single biggest shift that happens when you start understanding your capacity.
An opportunity comes in, and instead of asking if you can squeeze it in immediately, you realize you can say: "Yes. I can start in three weeks."
That is still a yes.
The online business world manufactures constant urgency: Move fast. Take it now. If you do not have immediate availability, they will find someone else.
Maybe they will. But usually, people wait. Clients join waitlists for people who are good at what they do. They understand that a capable professional cannot always start tomorrow.
And if someone needs immediate turnaround and you do not have space, that is not a business failure. It is just timing information.
Trying to control other people's urgency by overcommitting yourself is an extremely expensive strategy.
Based on what is not a challenge
When I ask “based on what?” I am not suggesting that the problem is imaginary or that everything is secretly fine.
Maybe the business is not making enough money. Maybe the offer really does need to go. Maybe the schedule is completely unsustainable. Maybe you built the entire thing for a version of yourself that no longer exists.
I am asking because we need to know which problem we are solving.
Are you calling the business unsuccessful because it cannot meet your actual revenue requirements, or because it does not meet a benchmark somebody else told you a legitimate business should reach?
Are you exhausted because you have too much work, or because the work you have requires a kind of capacity you do not reliably have available?
Is the offer not selling, or does it make sense once somebody buys it but not while they are deciding?
Is your calendar too full, or is the work arranged in a way that makes the available time almost impossible for you to use?
Did removing the offer create more capacity, or did it remove an important entry point and make the remaining offers harder to sell?
These questions do not tell you what you have to do. They give you better information about the choice you are making.
A stable business does not mean a perfect one
When I picture a stable version of this business atom, I do not picture every part sitting in perfect balance forever.
Capacity changes. Revenue changes. Life changes. Sometimes we knowingly choose something demanding because the result matters to us. Sometimes one part of the business needs more for a while.
Stability, to me, looks more like understanding how everything works together.
You know what your business is asking from you. You understand what you can do, what is limiting you, and what happens when you change something. When there is tension, you have some idea of where to look instead of immediately assuming that you need to rebuild everything or fix yourself.
That understanding builds self-trust.
You might still decide to drop the offer, raise the price, change the schedule, take the client, or burn the whole thing down. But now you know what the decision is responding to and what else it is likely to affect.
That is a very different place to make a decision from than what the fuck, I cannot do this anymore.
Before you change another thing in your business…
Maybe we should figure out what the fuck is actually happening first.
I write about pricing, offers, capacity, buyer behaviour, and all the decisions that seem perfectly reasonable on their own until you have to make them work together in an actual business.
If you enjoy questioning business advice, following the evidence, and occasionally going down an unnecessarily deep rabbit hole with me, you'll probably like my emails.