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Rooted & Relentless is the business strategy podcast for entrepreneurs building service-based businesses designed to grow, adapt, and last. Business strategist Steph Rubio shares practical guidance on a range of topics meant to help you sell, scale, and stabilize.
Think sustainable business growth, revenue strategy, systems, capacity, client experience, and the founder leadership required to turn your skills into a successful, sustainable company.
Steph Rubio (00:07.374)
I'm gonna talk about a little bit of a hot button today, but a very common conversation in our space, which is about burnout and avoiding burnout and what burnout feels like. And as someone who has been burned out, it's close to my heart too. As someone who leads a community that helps entrepreneurs that are frequently exhausted by the weight of everything that we constantly have to do, right? The never-ending to-do list. It's close to my heart consistently.
I often talk about entrepreneurship as a constant game of prioritization and reprioritization, which is also why I'm a big advocate of pulling it up and planning from the top, reflecting from the top and getting out of the day-to-day of client meetings and executions and calls and selling and social media content and the hamster will, right? Those things have to happen. But how do you ever know that they're the actions that need to happen, that there are the decisions that need to be made if you don't pull it up to the top?
Frequently, right? It's a combination of both. It's not a one or the other. But not every season of exhaustion is burnout. There's a difference here, and I want to talk about some of that. Sometimes people are exhausted in business because we're spending time, energy, and money inside of a business that no longer fits our life, our values, our vision, where we want to go, our capacity.
Steph Rubio (01:36.543)
Rest can help you recover from burnout, from overworking, but it cannot make the wrong business, the wrong offers feel right. I'm gonna run that one back for you. Rest can help you with being overworked, but it cannot help you and will not help you if the business, if the offers, if what you're building is wrong.
Steph Rubio (02:04.152)
We throw the word burnout around constantly in entrepreneurship. And it's not only in entrepreneurship, in corporate and leadership and stuff like that. Burnout is very common. Sometimes that's actually what is happening. It actually is burnout.
Sometimes you're working too many hours, carrying too much responsibility, operating without enough support. And then solopreneurs and entrepreneurs, a service-based people who are creating something literally from ground zero up. That's very common. We need rest. We need recovery. We need fewer things on our plate. I took two weeks off over the summer to do a combination of pulling it all the way up to the top and future casting where I'm taking my business.
realigning, if you will, figuring out what I want to tweak, what stays and goes, what I'm loving, what other people are loving. I also took time to just rest in there, to just come home to me, to just stabilize me.
Steph Rubio (03:06.186)
I've worked with enough businesses and enough entrepreneurs to know that what often gets labeled as burnout isn't necessarily so. It's the work it's the exhaustion of working and working and working and never getting closer to where we actually want to go, to living the life we actually want to live.
Steph Rubio (03:32.32)
It's finally making the sales that you used to dream of making and not feeling any better now. Not happier than when you first started out.
Steph Rubio (03:45.888)
It's spending every week unsure where your time, energy, and money should go.
It's spiraling over every decision or delaying it for months or not making a decision at all because you don't have something to filter those decisions through, to know what should get your time, energy, and money, what to say yes to, what to say no to. That's not always burnout. That is misalignment. And that distinction matters. Because if you misdiagnose misalignment as burnout, you'll keep trying to solve it with rest.
You'll take the weekend off. You'll cancel a launch, which is very brave by the way. You'll go on a vacation. You'll reduce your schedule or rework it again, or have a ten hour conversation with Claude or Chat GPT about how you should restructure your schedule.
And then you'll come back to the v exact same business that was straining you and draining you before you left.
Steph Rubio (04:49.272)
So the real question isn't, am I doing too much? Am I working too much? I think it's also
Am I doing too much of the wrong work in the wrong way or toward a goal I may not even want anymore?
Steph Rubio (05:06.604)
You need to answer that.
Burnout is often a capacity problem, while misalignment is often a direction problem. Two different things there, right? If you're not taking actions and getting results that get you closer to where you want to go, to what you want every day to look and feel like in your life and business, that's misalignment.
Steph Rubio (05:34.092)
Burnout looks something like, I cannot continue to carry this w amount of work. My body and brain need recovery.
The workload is exceeding my available capacity. If I continue at this rate, I'm going to crash and burn.
Something needs to be reduced, delegated, et cetera. And that will solve the problem, right?
Misalignment feels a lot more like I don't want to be doing this type of work anymore. I'm seceding at something that no longer fills me up or feels meaningful.
Steph Rubio (06:11.23)
My business requires a version of me or something from me, I'm no longer willing to give.
Steph Rubio (06:19.244)
The goals I've been working toward no longer or never did fit my life.
I keep achieving things. The accolades are rolling in, but it doesn't feel good.
Both burnout and misalignment can make you tired, resentful, uncomfortable, disconnected, avoidant of what you need to be doing. But they require different solutions, which is why it's important to know what you're dealing with and what you're up against.
Steph Rubio (06:54.582)
Rest may help you identify that misalignment because you're giving yourself space and grace to think and be honest and raw with yourself. But see the rest and the space to think was the key there.
Rest alone won't solve it though.
Steph Rubio (07:14.082)
This is a question I'd encourage you to sit with too.
If you had two full weeks away from your business, would you feel excited to come back to it?
I had to answer that question over two weeks away.
Steph Rubio (07:32.246)
If the answer for you is no or complicated, then the problem is probably bigger than your calendar. And it's probably not burnout.
And misalignment can create decision fatigue. And like I've talked about the past couple of weeks, leading a business is one string of decisions. And the better, more quality, smarter, faster decisions you make, the better and more likely you are to have a business you love that makes the money you want, that allows you to live the life you want. It really is a practice of making better decisions and you use your data to make those decisions.
And decision fatigue is not always caused by having too many decisions to make.
Steph Rubio (08:23.33)
Sometimes it comes from repeatedly making decisions you should have already made at a foundational level.
Steph Rubio (08:30.902)
You debate every opportunity because you haven't decided what kind of business you're building. You say yes to opportunities you should actually say no to. You question your pricing every time someone pushes back because you haven't decided what your business model actually needs to produce. Maybe you rebuild your marketing every month.
Steph Rubio (08:54.626)
because you haven't committed to a clear audience, a clear message or a clear strategy, or you haven't even looked at the content you've been putting out to see what's resonating with people and if they're your people.
Steph Rubio (09:08.598)
You keep rewriting offers or developing new offers because you haven't actually given them the grace and space that they need to see if they're right or if there are minor tweaks or what's working or what isn't, or whether you're simply impatient, or whether you're using new offers to mask an underlying problem, which is misalignment.
Steph Rubio (09:32.643)
The daily decisions start to feel unbearable because there are no larger decisions that are actually guiding all of these. There is no guiding light. There is no top level, what are we marching to? There is execute, fall into the noise of what people online are saying, execute some more. I've done too much now, I'm burning out. And / or same thing, falling into the noise online, execute, more noise, more execute. I tried, I joined the program, I learned, I implemented things.
And none of those are things I should have been doing and I'm actually building a business I no longer want, doing work that I no longer want to do and that's misalignment.
If you haven't clearly decided what you're building, why, obviously, what success looks like now and in the future, what you're oper to optimizing for, what opportunities support that direction, which trade-offs you're willing to make, and what your current capacity can realistically sustain, without those filters.
Every decision becomes a fresh emotional negotiation. And after five or ten or twenty of those, that emotional negotiation will leave you drained and likely burned out.
With those filters, every decision becomes easier. And that is leadership. That is leading yourself and your business.
Steph Rubio (11:01.556)
Knowing your direction will eliminate decision fatigue because it eliminates options that were never right from you in the first place. You'll be able to identify what's noise online, what's rage bait, what's making you think you need to do something, and then turning around and grounding yourself back in your business, in your reality and where you already said your time and energy needed to go, unless you have a valuable reason and evidence that you should change it.
Steph Rubio (11:34.156)
And the thing is, the sucky part of this is that it can creep up on you. No one really wakes up in a day or two or in a week or two and creates a misaligned business. It stacks up over time, a little over time, brick by brick.
Steph Rubio (11:50.349)
You take a client because the money is good, but they're misaligned. You create an offer because one or two people asked for it, or because you're talking to people who cannot afford your offer. So you think you need to create something different. You add another service because it seems easier than marketing the one you already have.
You follow a certain tactic or strategy because someone more successful said it worked for them. But you might not be building their business.
Steph Rubio (12:20.588)
You set a bigger revenue goal because growth is supposedly what you're supposed to want.
Steph Rubio (12:28.246)
Maybe you keep saying yes because you're supposed to be grateful for every opportunity.
Then one day, after all of this has incrementally built up to leave you exhausted and uncertain and resentful, you wake up and you look at your calendar and you look at your offers and you look at your clients and you look at your responsibilities and you realize
I didn't intentionally design this. I accumulated it over time.
Steph Rubio (13:05.154)
That's why this isn't just a conversation about values and abstracts.
Every value has an operational consequence.
Steph Rubio (13:17.206)
If you value flexibility, your deliveral your delivery model has to
If you value flexibility, your delivery model has to include flexibility.
Steph Rubio (13:37.824)
If you value spaciousness, you can't create a business that constantly relies on you.
If you value deep work, then your calendar can't be filled with back-to-back client calls. If you value time away with your family, then you can't go a year without taking time off to be with that family. Or operate out of scarcity that you'll lose clients if you take off for kids' events. You have to build around what you value.
Steph Rubio (14:16.822)
If you value family, caregiving, health, travel, creativity, then those things can't remain vague hopes.
Steph Rubio (14:29.464)
They have to influence your goals, your offers, your capacity, your pricing, your schedule.
Every business creates a lifestyle.
Steph Rubio (14:44.492)
The question is if you're creating one that you consciously chose.
Steph Rubio (14:51.734)
And like I already said, misalignment doesn't typically happen because of one decision, one dramatic thing. It happens incrementally over time.
Steph Rubio (15:05.696)
It builds through a hundred small decisions that each might have made sense in that moment, but they weren't aligned to you.
Steph Rubio (15:18.402)
Which is why it's so difficult to spot when you're living inside and working inside of your business every day, when you're taking the client calls, when you're working on the client deliverables, when you're showing up on social media and at events and networking and working on selling. When you're doing that, which we have to do, when you're doing that all of the time though, and you're not creating the space, you cannot identify that because it's happening incrementally over time. You adapt to the extra client. You normalize the offer that you don't even want to do.
You s it just accept that your calendar's always going to be full.
you tell yourself that that lower margin service is just temporary.
You keep carrying goals that belong to a different season of your life, if they belonged at all.
But collectively those build a business that isn't one you want to work in or live in or wake up to every single day.
Steph Rubio (16:20.3)
Which is why I believe that having annual planning is one of the most valuable
Steph Rubio (16:32.994)
Which is why I believe that annual planning that pulling it up to the top of your business again and getting out of that day to day is one of the most important leadership practices in your business. Not only leading your business, but leading yourself.
Steph Rubio (16:49.004)
Because it's how you zoom out far enough to identify patterns, to reset back to home base here with yourself, right?
Steph Rubio (16:59.97)
This kind of annual reflection can help you.
This kind of annual reflection can help you see which frustrations were temporary, which have real solutions, and which are patterns that you need to pay attention to. Which offers repeatedly drained your time and energy and might not even be that profitable as a result.
Where your calendar stopped matching your stated priorities from the last time that you sat down and planned.
Steph Rubio (17:37.324)
which decisions kept resurfacing because you never actually made them, because you just kept putting them off.
Steph Rubio (17:55.043)
This kind of reflection helps you stop reacting in the moment and start identifying trends over time, patterns and signals. That's what leadership is. You spot trends and patterns, what you need to pay attention to to repeat, or maybe to stop it in its tracks, or to tweak before it throws the whole thing off the rails. You're no longer asking things like this launch felt hard, should I change it, trash it? You're cons you're asking what has consistently felt heavy?
It's not just the launch by launch reflection. We're talking the entire ecosystem of your business that you should be reflecting and planning on every single year. Because then you can ask what's consistently felt heavy? What went really freaking well? And was I excited to do again and again?
What is all of this actually telling me? That's strategic leadership.
Steph Rubio (18:51.372)
this kind of annual planning will turn insight into design.
Because that reflection component, that's why there's two parts, and I keep saying this, reflection and planning, right? Reflection tells you what happened while planning decides what changes because of it. Reflection tells you what happened while planning tells you what changes because of it.
Steph Rubio (19:19.49)
You might notice that your highest revenue offer is also your least sustainable. And you might also notice that just because it's your highest revenue, maybe it's not your highest profit based on the time, energy, and money you're putting into it.
And that means now that that's what the reflection told you, right? Now you have a decision to make. Now this is where the planning part comes in. Because take that same one that's not sustainable over long term, that it actually isn't your highest moneymaker just because it makes the most revenue, maybe it has the lowest profit margins. That's your reflection. Now what are you gonna do about it? That's what the planning will tell you, right? So now you get to to decide, do you redesign it? Do you raise the price?
Do you reduce capacity or do you stop selling it altogether?
Steph Rubio (20:06.88)
Maybe like me in the last year taking on care of my brother, you realize that your caregiving or you had kids or something like that, your caregiving changed your actual capacity in the work week. And this was a challenge for me, let me tell you. Because I knew we were moving my brother in, right? But then the kids started school, my husband got laid off, he took different jobs and suddenly I went from having an eight-hour workday to two, three, four. And that significantly changed. That's a reflection. But what does the planning look like?
Steph Rubio (20:38.626)
The planning looks like I had to renegotiate my own goals around my actual capacity and what I could pull off. I had to taper my expectations. I had to get nifty. I had to decide what could stay and what could go.
Steph Rubio (20:53.536)
Maybe in this reflection, you realize that your best leads are actually coming from relationships and referrals and not from posting your content or going to events. That's your reflection. So now you can intentionally shift your marketing strategy to make sure that for your leads, you're most heavily dependent on your relationships and your referrals.
Steph Rubio (21:23.126)
And here's the thing, annual planning is not about predicting and knowing every single detail. That's why a lot of people avoid it, I found, is that they don't know where they want to go. Oops, I'm hitting my mic over here. Or they feel like it locks them in. Or they need to know everything for the year to come. They're like scared of this or something. And I'm like, we're not putting it in stone. The best plans can change. That's kind of the whole point when there's a reason to change them, right? But it's not about predicting every detail of the next year.
Annual planning is actually meant.
Steph Rubio (21:59.319)
It's meant to make sure that another year doesn't roll around taking you further from the life and business you actually want. And it instead that the places that you're spending all of your time, energy, and money that you know what those even are, right? And that you have your reflection points throughout the year to see if you're getting closer to those. You don't need to blow up your business every time something fills off. You don't need to pivot. You don't need to create a new offer. You don't need to get distracted and talk to chat for 12 hours.
But you do need a recurring place to tell yourself the truth, to identify the patterns, and intentionally redesign what no longer fits.
Steph Rubio (22:39.98)
Your definition of success is allowed to change. And my encouragement to you is that you always make sure it's yours, your definition of success, not mine, not that other guru online, not that person you admire, not what's noisiest or loudest this week.
A business that fit your life three years ago might not fit your life now. Your family may have changed. Your health may have changed. Your goals may have changed. Your spirituality may have changed. What you value most may have changed. Your tolerance for certain kinds of work may have changed. Your tolerance for certain kinds of clients may have changed. Your expertise might have changed. You might have learned a lot and you might want to pivot and do more of that.
Steph Rubio (23:27.064)
So if any of this is resonating, start with this question.
Given what I know about myself and my life right now and in the future, where I want to be two to three years from now, based on how I feel right now, what am I actually trying to build?
Steph Rubio (23:48.48)
Evolution isn't inconsistency, it's responding to new information.
Steph Rubio (23:57.473)
Refusing to evolve just because you announced a goal or something you wanted a year ago.
It's not a commitment issue. It's rigidity. And we need these plans and these reflection points. That doesn't mean we can't flex within them or that they can't change. But the mistake, the costly mistake, is trudging ahead and never stopping to align with what any of that even is.
Steph Rubio (24:26.328)
Sometimes you really are burned out. Sometimes your body is asking you to stop and rest and recover.
Steph Rubio (24:35.32)
But sometimes what feels like burnout is actually just the exhaustion of working inside of and towards something that you don't want to be anymore. And no amount of rest is going to answer that question for you. No person on the internet is going to answer that question for you.
Steph Rubio (25:02.508)
The goal isn't really to build a successful business. That is how, right? Building a successful business is how. It's the vessel to building a business that supports your life, that reflects your values, and still feels worth leading once that goal becomes real.
Steph Rubio (25:33.058)
Which is exactly why stepping away to plan to get it out of the weeds, mark that off on your calendar and give yourself permission to just sit in your brain a little while to reflect on all of this.
Steph Rubio (25:49.55)
Seriously, why planning annually is so important. And I'm not talking about a vision board exercise. I'm talking serious strategic planning for your business.
Because without creating space to intentionally evaluate your business, it's dangerously easy to spend another year.
Steph Rubio (26:10.006)
Running a business you never knew you still wanted.
Sometimes the lec next level isn't more, more and more. Sometimes it's just different. And until you pause to do this reflection, pull your business up to do this planning, you might find that you're continuously living in misalignment. And that, my friend, would be the greatest travesty at all.