Ever wonder when business is going to start to feel easier? Whether you’ve been in the game for years, or you’re just starting out, the weight of entrepreneurship can be heavy. You’re working so hard to grow the business, to give your customers an amazing experience, to take care of your team, to provide for your family, and all the while trying to carve out that life you dreamed of for yourself… but when you’re juggling so many balls it can feel like you’re constantly dropping some of them.

As a business coach, I have the honor and joy of working with so many successful entrepreneurs: individuals who have created something out of nothing, are making a genuine impact in the lives of others, and are providing for their families with their own ideas & execution of them.

The one question they all eventually ask is “how do I grow my business in a way that’s fun & fulfilling, without having to push so hard all the time?”

As a start up founder, you may have constantly asked yourself:

What are all the things I can do to make this work?
How do I make this successful?
How do I grow and make more money?

Once you’ve reached a comfortable level of success, the urgency to hustle dissipates, and you start wondering:

What are all the things I don’t want to be doing?
How do I make my business more fun?
How do I free up time for life outside of business?”

This is a natural progression of an entrepreneur’s growth journey and an exciting point to be at in your business!

But this stage comes with its own challenges because we high achieving humans are so unaccustomed to letting things be easy.

Why letting business be easy is a challenge

You’re used to pushing hard for results from your start-up days. As an early-stage entrepreneur you had to build everything from the ground up, wear all of the different hats, and maybe even try to fit it into the side of your day job.

That way of working got you to where you are today and your brain has caused you to believe that this is what makes you successful.

Changing your approach to business growth is difficult because it means letting go of what you know works (pushing hard) and embracing a new way of operating that hasn’t proven itself yet.

Not to mention that society doesn’t exactly praise what’s easy. How many times have you heard someone say “if it’s not hard, you’re not doing it right”? Western culture constantly reinforces the idea that ease is bad and hard work is valuable.

As a result, we get all wrapped up in making business as hard as possible instead of letting it be easy.

While challenges and problems will inevitably arise, if your entire business growth journey has felt like a grind for years, it’s time to look at what you can change to grow your business without the constant grind.

5 Strategies To Grow Your Business Without The Grind and Have More Fun In The Journey

In this article, I want to share my suggestions for how you can start to make the shift from pushing so hard for growth, to experiencing more personal fulfillment as an entrepreneur (while maintaining steady growth!)

My insights stem from my own entrepreneurship journey from the last 5 years as well as coaching conversations I’ve had with my clients that have helped them change their relationships to their businesses and experience more ease in their own growth journeys.

If this article resonates with you, I’d love for you to share it on your social media so that others can find ways to experience more joy and fulfillment as well.

Recognize What’s Working

Is this the season that you need to push harder and do more? Or are you failing to recognize all that’s already working and just need to let your current strategies do their work?

I started my business in 2019 and was making 6 figures by 2021 – along the way I had worked a full time job, had 2 kids under the age of 5, and most of my work happened in the 1 hour before they woke up and 1 hour before I went to bed. (You can read more about my journey here).

In those two years, I tried countless marketing strategies: starting and engaging in Facebook groups, posting on Instagram, creating YouTube videos, running paid ads, building an email list, writing blog posts, and more. I did everything I could think of to grow my business.

As I booked out my 1:1 coaching practice, I no longer had time to do everything! But I was terrified to stop anything in case it all fell apart.

When I analyzed my business strategy objectively (using the Intentional CEO’s Success Planner), I realized that 95% of my clients came from one strategy: blog posts.

Blog posts I wrote long ago continue to bring in new discovery calls every month. I didn’t actually need to do anything else to continue growing at this rate, but I was spinning in circles trying to keep up with all the initial growth strategies!

Once I recognized what was truly working in my business, I could release the other strategies that were consuming my time without yielding results.

Related Post: How To Practice Mindfulness

So, if your business is feeling like a grind and you’re constantly pushing for growth, take a look at what’s actually working in your business.

If you’re not sure how to identify this, the Intentional CEO’s Success Planner is a workbook designed to help you analyze all areas of your business and identify where to focus for easier & faster growth!

Hint: The thing working best is usually the thing that feels the easiest!

Spend More Time On What Lights You Up

The more time and energy you can devote to the things that put you in a state of flow, the bigger results you will see in your business.

If you’re busy haphazardly splitting your time between a dozen tasks that drain you, you’re definitely not focusing on the things that will truly move the needle forward.

Yet, if you can get really clear on the things that light you up in your business and start to spend more of your work hours on them (and fewer on the things that drain you) you’ll immediately start to see better results and experience more ease.

Have you written out your “job description” as a CEO?

What are the 2-3 things that you, and only you, can do? Write down all the things you LOVE doing in your business, in order of how much you love them. Then dedicate more of your time to the things on the top of the list than the bottom of the list.

Obviously, the things on the bottom still need to happen, but your goal is to spend less time on them. This might mean delegating or outsourcing those tasks to someone who actually enjoys doing them, or it might mean putting in place a better process or system to make it less time consuming.

Either way, start paying attention to how much time you spend on things you love vs things you don’t and start to shift those numbers if you want to create better results and more ease in your business.

I’ve created a fantastic resource for determining what gives you energy & what drains it. I can pop it into your inbox if you drop your email below.

Work Through Your Fears

The more intrinsically motivated you are to do something, the more successful you will be at it.

So, if you find yourself constantly pushing in your business to avoid something you’re afraid of, that’s a problem.

You’re acting from a place of fear rather than fulfillment.

Are you pushing for growth because you’re genuinely motivated and fulfilled by the idea of taking your business to the next level, or because you feel like you “should”?
Are you afraid that it will all fall apart if you don’t keep pushing?
Do you tie your self worth to how much you accomplish in a day and feel more worthy as a person when you’re busy as a bee?

These questions are hard to answer but important to ask.

When you can identify where the pushing is coming from, you can look at whether or not it’s actually serving you and your bigger goals.

Most entrepreneurs assume business growth is all about the strategy, and it certainly plays an important role, but a lot of your success comes down to your mindset.

How often do you think about the way you think?

If you don’t have a coach to help you work through your fears, limiting beliefs, and self doubt, you’re not only slowing down your growth but you’re making entrepreneurship way more emotionally exhausting than it needs to be.

Click here to see if one-to-one coaching is the right next step for your business growth journey.

Get Clear On What You’re Optimizing For

I love the question, “What are you optimizing for?”— I’ve seen it asked by Zita Cobb, James Clear, and many other influential entrepreneurs.

Most people are optimizing everything for something.

You might be optimizing your workouts for building muscle, or for building cardiovascular fitness.
You might be optimizing your food for taste or for nutrition.
You might be optimizing your business for growth, or for profitability, or for market share, etc.

If you don’t know what you’re optimizing for, you’ll feel lost in the decisions you are making.

It’s important to get crystal clear on what you’re optimizing for in your business because it allows you to prioritize what’s actually important/aligned with your goals and be more intentional in your choices and actions.

If what you’re optimizing for and what you value most aren’t aligned, your business will feel like a grind.

For example, if you’re optimizing for revenue growth but you’re craving more time to spend with your kids, your work is going to feel like a grind because it’s counterproductive to what you truly desire.

If you want to spend more time traveling, optimize your business to support that desire.
If you want to have more money to build your dream home, optimize your business for profitability.
If you want to have a bigger impact, optimize your business for growth.

There is no right or wrong answer to what you want to optimize for, but it’s important that you’re clear on what it is.

For many of my clients who have created successful businesses, what they want most is to free up the time and energy for a more fulfilling life outside of their identities as entrepreneurs.

Recognizing the desire to optimize for fulfillment or joy or free time then allows them to make the strategic changes in their business required to make that a reality.

So, ask yourself, what are you optimizing for in your business right now? Does that align with what you most value or crave in this season of your life?

Related post: How to Define your Core Values

Revisit Your Definition Of Success

How much do you even want to grow your business?

This can seem like an odd question to ask. After all, isn’t the entire point of business to grow, grow, grow, and make as much money as possible? The answer is, it depends. What are you actually trying to achieve?

For example, you might have no desire to manage a team and be utterly fulfilled by continuing to operate as a solopreneur with the help of free-lancers. If your vision of success is a multi-million dollar business, you’re going to experience a lot of friction in achieving that because it doesn’t align with what you actually want.

Business can start to feel like a grind when you don’t intentionally decide on your definition of success and let other people’s values dictate what you’re working toward.

Most people view success in financial terms: Richard Branson is successful, Tony Robbins is successful, Obama is successful. These are all people that have accumulated a lot of wealth, power, and fame/status.

But is that all that success means to you?

It’s easy to shoot for more, more, and more growth. But sometimes that growth might directly contradict some of your other important values and desires.

Related post: Redefining Success as an Entrepreneur

What if you broaden your definition of success? How does your definition of success encompass your role as a parent, as a partner, as a community member, as a friend?

When you intentionally examine your definition of success, you might come to realize that it actually doesn’t include fast-paced mega-star business growth, and yet you’ve been holding that as the bar this entire time.

Most of the entrepreneurs I work with aren’t striving to become billionaires, they simply want to have an incredible impact with their work while making a great amount of money to live fulfilling lives.

(Sound like you? Book a discovery call to see how private coaching can help you scale your business to the next level while freeing up more time and energy for a life you love.)

Knowing your definition of success and making decisions in alignment with it is critical to not only living a life that’s authentically yours, but also experiencing the kind of ease and fulfillment you’re craving in your business.
Ana McRae

Business growth can absolutely be fun and fulfilling.

When you recognize what’s working and focus more of your role on the things that light you up, when you make decisions that align with your values instead of stem from your fears, when you’re really clear on your definition of success and what you’re optimizing for, it becomes quite clear on how to run your business in a way that meets your goals and feels good in the process.

Whether you’ve achieved a level of comfortable success and are now looking to free up more time and energy for a more fulfilling life, or you’re focused growing and scaling your business to the next level, take a look at how 1:1 business coaching can help you focus on the right things to achieve your goals and build a life and business you didn’t know was possible for you.

PS – I’d love to hear from you! What is ONE thing that would make your business more fun and fulfilling? Leave a comment below.

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