Beyond Margins: Designing Calmer B2B Agencies & Consulting Firms | Transitioning to a 4-day Workweek with Nathalie Lussier

What if you could build in more space to your business? An extra day off? More time to strategize? Less urgency and more rest? 

We're continuing in our mini-series on my calmer framework for a calmer business. This week, we're diving into margins -- financial margins, capacity margins, and energetic margins -- to decrease urgency and burnout and create calmer, more sustainable businesses. 

We're joined by Nathalie Lussier, an award-winning entrepreneur who has been making websites since she was 12 years old. She graduated with a degree in Software Engineering. She was the founder and recently exited AccessAlly, the digital course and membership solution for industry leaders. Nathalie has been featured in Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, Success Magazine, Entrepreneur, Venture Beat, and Mashable.

On this episode, we learn how we can rethink our work so that we build in margins, and dive deep into one founder's journey to transitioning to a 4-day work week for their entire company -- with exceptional results. 

Listen to the Full Episode to Hear:

1. How to build in margins, beyond profit margins, to your business
2. What the transition to a 4-day work week can look like in practice 
3. How to experiment with and build comfortable margins for your business 

Learn more about Nathalie Lussier 

• Check out Nathalie's website
• Subscribe to The Momentum Memo
• Connect on Linkedin

Learn more about me, Susan Boles:

• Beyond Margins
• Connect on LinkedIn
• Connect on Threads

 

We value your thoughts and feedback. Feel free to share them with Susan here. Your input is not just valuable, it's crucial in shaping future episodes.

• (00:00) - E106 - Nathalie Lussier - FINAL EDIT
• (00:52) - Understanding Margins in Business
• (02:03) - The Importance of Building Margins
• (03:21) - Challenges of Traditional Work Culture
• (04:59) - Introducing Natalie Lucier and the Four-Day Work Week
• (07:18) - Experimenting with Flexible Work Schedules
• (08:57) - Transitioning to a Four-Day Work Week
• (13:06) - Implementing the Four-Day Work Week
• (18:22) - Addressing Concerns and Feedback
• (20:17) - Cultural Impact and Future of Work
• (22:01) - The Impact of Overworking
• (23:08) - Improved Team Cohesion and Communication
• (23:49) - Efficient Work Processes
• (28:38) - Prioritizing Feature Requests
• (30:24) - Embracing a Slower Pace
• (32:36) - The Influence of Environment on Work Pace
• (36:11) - Selling the Business and Maintaining Values
• (39:48) - Global Work Culture Comparisons
• (41:21) - Building Comfortable Margins

Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here

Creators & Guests

Host

Susan Boles

Speaker, Podcaster & Consultant at Beyond Margins | 15+ years of experience as both a CFO and COO

What is Beyond Margins: Designing Calmer B2B Agencies & Consulting Firms ?

Can you build a business based on… “calm?” On Beyond Margins, host Susan Boles looks beyond the usual metrics of success to help you build a business where calm is the new KPI. With over 15 years of experience as an entrepreneur, CFO, and COO, Susan shares the business strategies that lead to a business with comfortable margins—financial, emotional, energetic, and scheduling margins. Join her and her guests as they counter the prevailing “wisdom” about business growth, productivity, and success to provide a framework for making choices that align with your values and true goals. Episode by episode, you’ll get a look at the team management, operations, financials, product development, and marketing of a calmer business.

Susan Boles: 00:05

What if I could give you a whole extra day in your week? What would you do with that time? Hey there. I'm Susan Bowles, and this is Beyond Margins, the show where we deconstruct how to engineer a calmer business. We're in the middle of a miniseries where we're exploring the common elements of calm businesses.

Susan Boles: 00:23

So what makes a calm business actually calm, and how do you intentionally design and build for that? There are 8 elements that all calm companies have in common, clarity, autonomy, a lens of care, margins, efficient systems, rest, and reduced urgency. Now we've talked about clarity, autonomy, and a lens of care in previous episodes in the series. So if you haven't listened to those, I highly recommend you go check them out. Today, we're tackling margins, and this is a topic that is near and dear to me.

Susan Boles: 00:58

It's so important that I put it in the name of my business. When we think about margins, most frequently we think about profit margins and then we kind of stop thinking about it. But we need to think beyond that. See what I did there? So you absolutely need profit margins to build a sustainable business.

Susan Boles: 01:18

Let's be real. I'm a CFO. I'm not gonna say otherwise. But that is a pretty limited perspective. The word margin just means space and you need margins everywhere in your business, not just in your finances.

Susan Boles: 01:33

You need to broaden how you're thinking about margin. So profit margins build financial space and longevity. Capacity margins allow you to have time to think, to lead, to breathe. Energetic margins mean that you can work consistently and sustainably without burning out. Emotional margins, they allow you to be there for yourself and for the community around you.

Susan Boles: 02:00

And you need all of these and more. There's no area of your business where you couldn't build in just a little bit more space because that's a big part of engineering something calmer. So think about it this way, if you operate at a 100% or more all the time, you don't have any surge capacity. You can't handle anything unexpected and the unexpected is inevitable. When you have spacious margins built into various aspects of your business, you are better equipped to absorb those surprises.

Susan Boles: 02:33

So for example, if your schedule is jam packed and you have to deal with, you know, a sick kid, it can throw you off for weeks. But, maybe you have a buffer day with no tasks or calls. If that's built into your schedule, you have a much easier time rescheduling or shifting things around and that's because you built in some margin, some space for things to go unexpectedly. Likewise, if you're running your business right at your break even point and you don't have any cash reserves set aside and then your biggest client decides to leave, you're really up a creek. You don't have any financial margins to absorb that.

Susan Boles: 03:09

Building that margining gives you more breathing room to absorb losses like this. But margins aren't the default. The default is max capacity. So when you think about traditional work culture or business culture, the goal is to work harder, last longer, be more productive. It's all about cramming in as much work as we can.

Susan Boles: 03:32

Everything is focused on being more efficient so that we can do more work. And that leads to workers that are exhausted, that are burnt out and unhappy. Nobody does their best work under those circumstances. But so many of the companies that we're told we're supposed to look up to have these kinds of cultures where you're expected to work 80 to a 100 hours a week. Sure they provide food and nap pods which on the surface seems like it's to take care of their team but in reality it's just so that they can get folks to stay there and work more hours.

Susan Boles: 04:07

The default business culture ignores that people are in fact people. Instead it treats them like machines. So the only thing that matters is growth and productivity. And everything else is pretty much disregarded and ignored even profit. So think about Silicon Valley culture where the goal is move fast and break things.

Susan Boles: 04:28

And the mentality is that you have to invest so that you can grow and grow and grow and grow. And the assumption is that profit or sustainability will just happen eventually. But we don't have time to worry about that now. So the default here is basically the opposite of building margins and the default margins don't matter. But when you focus on building space, building margin into all those different areas of your business, It allows for a calmer environment for better work for a happier team.

Susan Boles: 04:59

My guest today saw that firsthand when she transitioned her team to a 4 day work week. Natalie Lussier is an entrepreneur who has been making websites since she was 12. She was the founder and recently exited AccessAlly which is a digital course and membership platform. Before she exited the company, they went through the process of transitioning to a 4 day work week. Now on the whole, western cultures are pretty much stuck on a 5 day, 40 hour a week work week.

Susan Boles: 05:28

That is the default and it's so ingrained that it's actually really tough to imagine other ways of working. But the data on 4 day work weeks is pretty good. The companies that have tried it see an increase in productivity and also employee happiness. And if you think about it, it totally makes sense because you are literally building more margin into your life. By going down to a 4 day work week, you're essentially creating an entire day to take care of yourself or anything that you need.

Susan Boles: 05:56

Now we're gonna take a quick break to hear from our sponsors but when we come back, Natalie and I are gonna get into how she actually transitioned the company to the 4 day work week. So we're talking those nitty gritty logistical details. So what went well? What didn't go well? And we'll talk about how that move to the 4 day work week impacted Natalie's ability to exit her company.

Susan Boles: 07:04

So tell me a little bit about what was happening at AccessAlly when you were thinking or considering making this transition to a 4 day workweek. What was happening and kinda what was the impetus behind the shift?

Nathalie Lussier: 07:19

Yeah. So a few years ago, we had decided that we wanted to just ever give everyone a Friday off or, like, usually 4 Fridays off in the summer just to as an experiment, just to see what would happen. You know, it's summer. We moved back to Canada, and it's a short season, so you wanna take advantage and really get outside and enjoy the nice weather and all of that. Go berry picking, all of those seasonal things.

Nathalie Lussier: 07:42

And so we said, okay. Well, we think it'd be great just to see if people like it, what happens to the business, what happens to everyone's productivity, and, obviously, everyone loved it. They all booked, you know, slightly different Fridays, and it worked. So we decided, okay. Well, let's kind of keep experimenting.

Nathalie Lussier: 07:59

So what we ended up doing is that we decided to just go. Everyone gets every other Friday off, and everyone works a tiny bit more during the rest of the week. And so that wasn't a full 4 day work week. It was more of, like, another kind of schedule where, like, you still work 40 hours, but you get at least a Friday off. Right?

Nathalie Lussier: 08:16

So every 2 weeks. So that also worked pretty good. Some people didn't want to do that. Some people prefer to just work every Friday and not work extra and just have a shorter day. So some people have that schedule, and some people have the regular 5 day work week schedule.

Nathalie Lussier: 08:32

And so we did that for a while, and then a lot of research started coming up about 4 day work weeks. And it was actually the team that came to me and they were like, you know, let's try this. We've already been kinda circling around doing something like this. So what do you think? And I was like, yeah.

Nathalie Lussier: 08:47

Let's just do it. That's basically, it came from the team asking for it and us having experimented with something similar, but that wasn't quite a full 4 day work week before.

Susan Boles: 08:57

It makes sense that the evolution to the 4 day work week came from the team and trying it out. But why try it out at all? Like, why start experimenting with it?

Nathalie Lussier: 09:12

Yeah. So, obviously, we're all human, and I think that we all have limits and capacities and things for doing work and also have, you know, personal lives, families, pets, you know, all kinds of things that we wanna take care of outside of our regular workdays. We just kinda realized, you know, definitely around COVID times, people are burned out and we didn't wanna keep pushing people. We wanted people to recover, to feel good, to be able to come into work with energy and including ourselves because, you know, as as founders sometimes, we just push push push and we never take time off. And what we found also for ourselves when we were experimenting with the different Fridays is that my husband and I would always work, basically.

Nathalie Lussier: 09:53

So even though we had, you know, people were off, you know, half the team was off on one Friday, we would still be on just to cover or if people had questions, we'd be there, and the same for the next Friday. So when we decided to do a 4 day work week, we were like, this will be a day where everyone's off. So we ourselves could also take that time off and recover and not be always on. You know, as humans, we have to remember our limits and also think about, like, the holistic view. Right?

Nathalie Lussier: 10:18

What are we really doing this for? And I think sometimes, even as business owners, we get caught up into this whole thing of, like, this is my identity, this is my career, this is this thing that I've built and it's amazing and at the same time, you know, it's there's more to life than just work. So I think that all of those things together kind of helped us to realize, like, yeah, like, let's just try it. And, you know, the results have been really amazing.

Susan Boles: 10:41

I think you bring up an interesting point because I have had this challenge as a business owner and a team leader as well in that I am really good at giving my team members flexibility or letting them take the time off. And it seems a lot harder, I think, to do that for myself. As you mentioned, having some team members on, some team members off, and somebody has to always be around. Can you talk a little bit about how that felt for you and your husband who is, for listeners, was also in the business?

Nathalie Lussier: 11:18

I've taken, like, tons of training about, you know, entrepreneurial time and management and productivity and all of that stuff. And a lot of times, you know, they say founders need to take time off. They need to take weekend. They need to take free time where they're not thinking about their business. And I've done that, and it was great.

Nathalie Lussier: 11:34

But, also, sometimes, it feels like you should be working. It feels like there's just deadlines or there's, you know, team stuff or it could be customer stuff that you need to step in for. And so there's always this kind of pressure to to be there, to be on, to answer just one more thing. And I think that when you create these boundaries for yourself where it's like, no. Actually, the business is closed right now, then you can't just, you know, dive in for one more thing and I'll answer one more ticket.

Nathalie Lussier: 12:02

That is kind of the line that you can set for yourself, and I think that's what we kinda had to do because we just found ourselves, like, constantly having this push to work more. You know, you think, like, oh, well, I'm responsible for payroll and for everyone's well-being in the company. So if I don't show up and I don't work, then, you know, things could go off the rails. Right? So there's there's these little niggly thoughts in the back of your mind that that's going to happen.

Nathalie Lussier: 12:24

If you say, no. Actually, the business will be fine. The team will be fine. Customers will be fine. You're able to rest and recover.

Nathalie Lussier: 12:31

And then when you do show back up on Monday, then you are refreshed. You have the energy, and you're a lot more motivated to actually do the most important things and get those done and take care of business and all of that stuff that you need to do.

Susan Boles: 12:42

Yeah. I've definitely found the same. It's the hardest to, like, put that boundary in place, but really, really powerful in terms of building up energetic margin, having, like, the capacity to actually show up and do good work is so dependent on making sure you're building on in enough rest into your overall work design, I guess. As you all were thinking about we've experimented with 4 days in the summer and that's gone well, but now we wanna try and implement this every Friday throughout the whole company. What were some of your biggest hesitations, your concerns as you were kind of thinking, hesitations, your concerns as you were kind of thinking, considering, planning for making the switch?

Nathalie Lussier: 13:28

Yeah. So some of the big considerations was the support angle. So because we're a software company and we have people sending in support tickets 5 days a week, We were going to be closing on Fridays, and so that would leave, like, a 3 day period where if somebody had an issue, you know, they'd be waiting for us to to actually resolve it. And we also looked at our stats. So we looked at our data, and we have much lower tickets that come in on Fridays.

Nathalie Lussier: 13:52

So we knew that people are already maybe taking their Fridays off or not tinkering with tech maybe on Fridays as much. So we knew logically it would probably be fine. And we did definitely have a little bit of stumbling blocks where we had holidays on Mondays, so there was like a 4 day gap. So we had to figure out some of those things of maybe on certain longer weekends. We would check-in again one more time just to make sure there's nothing urgent, kind of put some systems like that in place.

Nathalie Lussier: 14:17

But, yeah, overall, the biggest hurdles were the actual, support side of things. And then also just making sure that we weren't overloading everyone with, like, the same amount of work that would have fit in 5 days. For us, that was just really prioritizing, making sure that we're really focusing on the most important projects or the most important types of things. We're working on a, like, a whole website redesign and things like that for our members area. We're gonna do these workshops and all of this stuff, and we realized the amount of time to coordinate and invite guests and send reminders and all of that just didn't make sense with the amount of time that everyone had on the team to give to that project.

Nathalie Lussier: 14:52

So we decided to just scrap it and just keep going with office hours, which is what we had already been doing. So it kinda just helped us focus on the most important stuff and not spread ourselves too thin and try to jam pack, you know, so much work into just 4 days. And then, yeah, I think some people on the team had some hesitation. So just talking about that with each person and just seeing, you know, what were their hesitations. For some people, it was just, I wanna make sure that, you know, I can still deliver the same quality of work.

Nathalie Lussier: 15:20

Kinda each person had a slightly different reaction to it.

Susan Boles: 15:23

Interesting. So let's talk about the actual transition. As you were approaching kind of your transition date, how how did you plan for how did you prepare, communicate, actually making the switch?

Nathalie Lussier: 15:37

Yeah. So we gave ourselves, I wanna say, like, 3 weeks before we actually, like, implemented it. So I told everyone on the team, okay. We're gonna do this. Here's the date that we're going to start.

Nathalie Lussier: 15:45

And then we looked at, like, our website, our communication, our auto responders, all the stuff that people would get in touch with us through, like our contact page and all of that. Updated all of that to make it super clear our business hours are from, you know, Monday to Thursday. And we also extended our business hours slightly during those 4 days. So we were able to do that because we have people in different time zones. We also wrote an email to our customers and, obviously, social media post to make sure everyone saw it because it did take a little while after we sent that post in those emails.

Nathalie Lussier: 16:15

Not everyone reads every email. Right? So we also included it in our release emails after that just to make sure that if anyone missed it, they would still be in the loop. I think we kinda covered all of our bases on in terms of that communication side of things. Some of the people on our team had scheduling days that they could take calls on, so they just obviously removed those openings on on their calendars and things like that.

Nathalie Lussier: 16:35

So just kind

Susan Boles: 16:36

of making sure that all of our bases were covered. And what was your strategy or approach for the actual 4 days? So for some companies, when they move to a 4 day work week, it's 4 longer days, but only 4 days. And some just take the approach that we're working our same hours, we're just doing it 4 days, and we're just cutting out a day of essentially unnecessary work?

Nathalie Lussier: 16:59

Yeah. So our approach was basically everyone was working 32 hours. So we're basically cutting off one day, keeping the same regular business hours that we had before. And the idea was this is like a raise, essentially. Right?

Nathalie Lussier: 17:10

Because you're getting paid more per hour if you kind of break it down that way. So they're getting a day off, but they're still keeping their same salary. So we think it worked out really well that way. We were not trying to overload them because we had tested that with our every other Friday off method where we had increased the daily hours. There's just a limit to how much you can really work in a day.

Nathalie Lussier: 17:28

So I feel like if you're gonna increase the length of the day to get a Friday off, it's great. It's like a trade off, but at the same time, you might not get that much more productivity out of it. So it's like, we're just gonna go for it by just cutting out that full day.

Susan Boles: 17:42

Yeah. I mean, especially with the things like knowledge work and I can do 4 hours, and that's about as much, like, legit real work that, like, I need my brain Yes. On that I can do in a day. Anything more than that is just diminishing returns.

Nathalie Lussier: 17:58

That's exactly what we found too. Like, there's some stuff you could do when you're, like, at half capacity, but in terms of, you know, really good quality work, like, there's no point forcing subpar work for an extra hour a day or something like that.

Susan Boles: 18:14

So looking back on the transition now, talk to me about, you know, what you think went well, what didn't go so well, what would you change, if anything, if you were gonna do it again?

Nathalie Lussier: 18:23

Yeah. So our worry about support was interesting because, like I mentioned, there were a few cases where something came in on a Friday, but it was a long weekend. So we had a couple of those kind of kerfuffle type type situations, but we really learned from the 1 or 2 that we had and we figured out, okay. Well, we also have to communicate to people, like, hey. If it's a Thursday before a really long weekend, we'll tell people we'll be back on Tuesday.

Nathalie Lussier: 18:47

And if it's not super urgent, then we we know, like, that'll be the first one we tackle coming in on Tuesday. And if it is urgent, then, yeah, maybe we will kind of check-in on the weekend or see if we have a resolution for them. We also had people push back a little bit on us when we sent our communication out, so we had some of our customers respond to our email announcing the 4 day work week and saying, you know, hey. That sounds great for you, but I think you should actually be going to 20 47 support as opposed to 4 days a week support, and other businesses are moving in that direction, and you should be too. I feel like that was almost like a cultural push where it was more of, like, this is what you should do as opposed to this is good for your team.

Nathalie Lussier: 19:29

At the same time, when they were telling us that, they were like, I'll be fine. Like, I don't need support all the time, so it's fine for me, but I really think you should be doing this. So I thought that was

Susan Boles: 19:38

really bad. Interesting that it wasn't a need for them. It was just their opinion about what you should do with your business. So did you respond to them?

Nathalie Lussier: 19:49

Yes. We definitely responded to every person who sent back any comments or any feedback or anything like that for sure. We're a very small company, and doing 247 support would be kind of ridiculous. Or even 7 days a week support would be really hard for our team because all of our team members, they have families. They have all these things going on.

Nathalie Lussier: 20:07

So I feel like it didn't quite make sense for for us to do that, but we explained all of those things too. And we definitely had people also who were excited and they were like, hey. You know, that's awesome. I hope more companies do this.

Susan Boles: 20:18

The cultural feelings about the 5 day, 40 hour work week is so fascinating when you start pushing up against the, does this actually make sense? What's actually good for the team, the employees, the company, and honestly, even, you know, the clients and customers. You did this and didn't really, it seems like, notice any negative impacts from the client side. It's so interesting how passionate people are about 5 day work weeks.

Nathalie Lussier: 20:51

It's very true. And the 5 day work week is still relatively recent. It's really up to us how we wanna structure our time, and businesses have changed and evolved over the years. So I feel like at this moment, it's kind of the 5 day work week is set in stone, but I don't think it it's going to be like that forever. As the trailblazers, we have to be the ones who decide what makes sense for our teams, for ourselves, and for our customers.

Nathalie Lussier: 21:16

I really feel like also the support and the focus that we brought to our customers was better because we weren't so burnt out. I have the energy. I have the capacity. I have the fuel and the passion to do that. And, and I think that came because people were excited to have those long weekends and be able to come back refreshed.

Susan Boles: 21:33

That is so powerful and yet so underestimated when we're talking about allowing for rest and building in margin to everybody's kind of capacity areas. It's so underrated how impactful just increasing the rest a little bit can recharge people and bring them back into doing some really good, really impactful work. And I think that's the part that frequently is missed in that 5 day work week. Most of us can do about 4 hours of thoughtful work a day, and we're doing so much more than that. It's just constantly creating that burnout, and the impact to that is lower quality work, but it's taking a long time to do it.

Susan Boles: 22:19

Exactly. If you feel

Nathalie Lussier: 22:21

stretched time wise, like, you don't have time to schedule, like, personal appointments or, like, things for your health and things like that, We definitely had a lot of team members who use those Fridays to catch up on going to the dentist and the doctor and, like, all these things that they hadn't done for a while just because life gets busy and you feel, like, kind of how we feel as entrepreneurs of, like, you have to be at work. Right? But even though they have days off, they wanna use those to travel or to visit family or to do certain things, and then they kinda neglect their own personal well-being or upkeeping. We saw a lot of our team members scheduling those personal type things on those Fridays a lot afterwards, and I was like, oh, wow. Like, that makes such a big difference, and everyone can take care of themselves the way

Susan Boles: 23:00

that they should be. That's amazing. Do you think the switch to the 4 day did actually create more space for you, for the team.

Nathalie Lussier: 23:08

Yeah. I definitely think it created more space and more creativity and better discussions as well. I feel like people would have, you know, more creative ideas and show up with, you know, hey. We should try this or maybe we should change this. I feel like that kind of thing was possible because we came back refreshed.

Nathalie Lussier: 23:26

Also, I feel like, interpersonally, everyone on the team was really more cohesive, the communication kind of improved. You know, if you're you can always get in touch with people. It doesn't really matter when you do it, then, like, okay. Make it happen when it when it needs to happen. But we kinda got a little bit more efficient with our communication where it would be like, okay.

Nathalie Lussier: 23:45

So we have a random Slack channel. We had our general and, like, some other specific channels. But also, if if we had to to have a call or do something we knew, like, okay, there's only 4 days to work, so I don't wanna disturb that and have a huge meeting with everyone if I don't meet everyone. Like, we kind of honed in on our communication a little bit more. So we consolidated some of those calls and, you know, what we need to to do to communicate better.

Nathalie Lussier: 24:07

So I feel like that also helped a lot where it's, like, maybe we were wasting some of that communication time before, but now we had to be a little bit tighter with some of that and just be more efficient essentially.

Susan Boles: 24:19

For a lot of us, I think we let things expand to fill the time that we have. If you have an extra day, essentially, that you don't really have the work to necessarily fill or you're trying to fill time when you are too tired to do real work, that communication does kind of tend to get lazy. And I think frequently we use meetings as a way to communicate lazily, where when we're communicating asynchronously or we are proactively communicating, we save a whole bunch of time that we don't have to be in meetings. But I I do think you're right. At least that's what I found in my work as well that communicating asynchronously can actually be a better form of communication in a lot of instances versus meetings, which are just easy to be like, oh, we have to talk about something.

Susan Boles: 25:13

Let's have a meeting.

Nathalie Lussier: 25:15

Exactly. There's different personalities on the team too. Some people love having meetings and are more extroverted and wanna chat. And other people are like, you know, I have really to focus, like, the developers on the team. Like, they need their super focused time to code.

Nathalie Lussier: 25:28

And so for them, having a lot of meetings can be kinda trickier. We can have obviously, we have our general meetings for the whole team, and then we have sub meetings for specific topics. And so that really helped us to make sure that we're only having the right people in the meetings. It seems

Susan Boles: 25:43

like you maybe eliminated some meetings or unnecessary live communication. Was there anything else that you found that you kind of just stopped doing because you didn't really have the time or it wasn't worth the time to use during those 4 days?

Nathalie Lussier: 26:02

Well, we definitely got more efficient with things like editing podcasts and having transcriptions done and things like that. So we found tools and other ways to kind of improve our processes, and we were hiring a lot of paid interns. So there's a lot of work around hiring paid interns that has to happen on a regular basis. So for the time being, we'll take a break on hiring new interns and just focus on what we have on our plate. So we kind of made some changes like that.

Nathalie Lussier: 26:28

It doesn't mean that we weren't gonna go back to hiring interns and things like that. But just realizing, like, for the season that we were in that transition especially, we didn't wanna add big projects. For example, hiring an intern would have to look at, like, hundreds of resumes and then do interviews. That can take up, like, several weeks of time. And so we realized, like, okay.

Nathalie Lussier: 26:46

No. We need to pair that back a little bit. So, yeah, there was things like that where it made sense to do it this way. And we did have paid insurance again after, but just really getting really clear on on what our priorities were for that transition period was important.

Susan Boles: 26:59

And was there anything that you noticed help you become more efficient that made the transition to 4 days? Because essentially, you're really trying to eliminate a whole day's worth of work somehow, whether that's because it's not useful time spent. But essentially, if you're gonna keep doing it, you have to eliminate a day's worth of work. What tools or resources or projects did you do that helped you actually do that?

Nathalie Lussier: 27:30

We always were big fans of quarterly planning. So we were doing our quarterly plans and, you know, how you might have boulders and rocks and stones and the smaller pebbles. So we kinda realized, like, realistically, we can't fit as many things on on our quarterly plan as what we would have done in the past. And to be honest, I feel like we always overstuff our quarterly plans anyways. But I feel like that that really helped us, like, looking at how big is each project and how big is each pebble and realizing, like, realistically, how many days would this take?

Nathalie Lussier: 28:02

And so that kinda helped us prioritize and cut the fluff a little bit of what we were planning to do or things that sounded good. And so just kind of honing in on, like, what are the actual things that we need to focus on.

Susan Boles: 28:14

As you were eliminating things from your quarterly plan, did you notice that you ended up having to either reposition, reprioritize projects that really were real projects that you really did wanna do that you had to slow the timeline down on or reprioritize? And how did you approach that?

Nathalie Lussier: 28:38

Yeah. So I think on the software development side, that definitely happened because there's a limit to how much time our developers have. Obviously, they're still gonna need to communicate with the team, so we're not reducing too too much on that side of things. There's always tons of feature requests. I think we had 200 or 300 feature requests at all times.

Nathalie Lussier: 28:57

There's always things that we could be working on or could be developing on the software side. So for us, we decided to just really prioritize the things that really matter. And so we had a couple of different ways categorizing feature requests. So we would look at is this something that impacts people's ability to make money? So because AccessAlly helps people sell their courses, their memberships, and coaching, and things like that.

Nathalie Lussier: 29:19

If it was, say, part of the shopping cart and it could improve sales for them, then that's something that we would prioritize a little bit higher, or something like that that would be sort of a show stopper for people in running their businesses. Those tend to be the things that we prioritize the most. And then from there, other features that people are asking for a lot. So, like, the more people ask for it, the higher up it goes on our priority list. And we have, like, a little click up system that basically, like, calculates 10 people have asked for this, 5 people have asked for that.

Nathalie Lussier: 29:49

This one's easier to do, and that one's hard to do. So we can kind of, like, get a number at the end of the day that says, if you do this one, it'll help x number of people plus you can do it faster. So just get that one done first. At the end of the day, we were probably releasing a little bit slower than we would have if we were working 5 days a week. But at the same time, it's more sustainable, so our team can actually keep showing up every every week, right, and not be like, I burnt out.

Nathalie Lussier: 30:12

So tortoise versus the hare. Right? We can just slow and steady do it and get the work done, do it great, or try to rush and then feel stressed and burnt out and kind of flame out.

Susan Boles: 30:24

With my clients and, honestly, with me personally, one of the things that I have found to be kind of one of the hardest things in transitioning to more sustainable work or to calmer work tends to be that feeling of urgency, that feeling that things are important and they must happen now and deconstructing the fact that most urgency is made up. How did you approach that? Because I know it's been something that you focus on as well. And it seems like this whole 4 day work week project is an exercise in training yourself to be okay with things going a little bit slower.

Nathalie Lussier: 31:05

You know, as an entrepreneur, I've definitely had, like, this quick start. Like, things have to move quickly. I need to see results fast. And my husband is sort of the the opposite where he's more of the thinking long term, thinking in the next 10 years, 20 years, like, where is it going. He was really, like, my balancing person, I would say.

Nathalie Lussier: 31:24

And he's taught me so much about slowing down and being comfortable with the results and the pace that I'm at right now. And I think that we can all use a little bit more of that if we have that kind of go go go. Like, that 4 day work week is an exercise exactly like you said to pace ourselves, slow down, and do the important work, do it well, and then trust that the results will come even though it might not be the next day. We're all probably relearning and rewiring ourselves to be at that comfortable pace if you will. And I think part of that also is just, like, knowing what enough looks like.

Nathalie Lussier: 31:58

A lot of times, you know, we want more faster, bigger, grow more growth, more, you know, more whatever metrics you're going after. Right? And I think that knowing what enough looks like so that, you know, your business is paying you, paying your team, maybe it has a nice profit, but it doesn't have to constantly be, like, doubling, tripling, and doing all these, like, crazy growth metrics every year or every month or quarter or whatever it is that you're tracking. And I think that that is huge right there because that's sort of unhooking from this culture that we have to keep going faster and bigger and more growth and all of that. So I think over time, you kind of sort of gently learn how to let go.

Susan Boles: 32:37

You moved to a farm, which is a relatively different pace of life than a city, and I did something similar. We moved to the middle of nowhere up in the mountains in Colorado. Do you think that physical kind of reminder about how nature paces you like, I have noticed that here where there are more seasons and just the pace of life is slower by just because it's harder to do things has helped me unpack a little bit of that need for urgency. And I'm curious if you found something similar as you've transitioned to life on the farm?

Nathalie Lussier: 33:18

I think you're spot on. Yeah. Because, you know, I used to live in Toronto, New York City, and then we moved to Texas, which was a little bit slower paced, and then to the farm, which is way slower paced. And I think, yeah, there's definitely something to it. It's not that you're not doing anything because I think there's daily chores, there's daily things are always happening in your business, in your life.

Nathalie Lussier: 33:39

It's not like there's no movement, but it might not be the big splashy things that that you think should be happening, but they are slowly happening over time and the timelines might not be what you expect. So I like thinking about trees and there are timelines that are super long, you know. A short lived tree is, like, 50 years. And, like, most trees live, like, 100 and 100 years. If you just planted a tree, yes, you want fruit next year, but it's probably not gonna be ready then.

Nathalie Lussier: 34:08

So you have to really be patient and think about those expectations that you set for yourself. That piece of life on the farm is changes how you think about things and also the timelines, I think, are really different too.

Susan Boles: 34:19

I have started to move more towards just thinking about my business in terms of seasons or in terms of much bigger blocks of time than I thought about it when I started my business. You know, when you start your business, you want things to happen right now. The longer I do this, the more patient I get, the more comfortable I get with things just taking kind of a while. It's a more realistic expectation, but trying to align my expectation with reality, having that gap was so much more of a challenge at the beginning. And the longer you do something, the more you realize things just take time.

Susan Boles: 35:02

You have to be able to show up saying and doing the same thing over a longer period of time and getting more comfortable with things kind of being boring. And that that's okay and kind of the goal.

Nathalie Lussier: 35:18

Yes. Absolutely. I totally agree with that. And there's a book called 40 Chances. It's a farming book, which I actually have not read it, but I've I read a review and I was like, oh, that's a brilliant idea.

Nathalie Lussier: 35:29

But, basically, this concept that most farmers will have about 40 years of farming in their lifetimes to try different things. So each season you get any other another shot. Basically, you get another year to try to plant things. And so you can try a different method or improve something that worked last year, but now you wanna try slightly better. And I feel like maybe that applies to entrepreneurship too.

Nathalie Lussier: 35:52

Maybe 40 years of work approximately. Like, you have 40 chances of each year to try something different, improve what you have going. And that timeline of 40 years changes how you think about things a lot.

Susan Boles: 36:03

Now I have to go read farming books because that sounds super interesting. So is there anything you think we should touch on or talk about that we haven't yet?

Nathalie Lussier: 36:12

When I was looking to sell AccessAlly, the business, I wanted people to who are buying it to keep the 4 day work week, and there was definitely a lot of pushback around that too. So I think that's, something to think about depending on what your exit strategy might be for your business or it is nice to have that long term view for yourself as spreading the business, but if you ever decide to step out of the business, what are the plans for either transitioning back to a 5 day work week or negotiating that into a deal as well.

Susan Boles: 36:41

That is so interesting and something I hadn't even considered. Tell me a little bit more about how you handled that in terms of negotiations or finding a buyer.

Nathalie Lussier: 36:52

Basically, it depends on the market, how marketable your business is, you know, who your potential acquirers are, like, what their cultures are like as well. For us, we didn't have a whole ton of people that we approached. The WordPress space is kind of, I wanna say, like, an insular community. There's not a ton of people who are buying WordPress businesses. We knew kind of going in, like, we may need to negotiate that.

Nathalie Lussier: 37:15

We may not be able to negotiate keeping the 4 day work week. We ended up going with the buyer that was most aligned with our values and had the most experience in our space. We didn't actually get to keep the the 4 day work week when we sold. So that's something that I want to mention, which Interesting. Also a tough transition for the rest of the team as well, including my husband who's still working for the company.

Susan Boles: 37:35

When you were considering selling, was that something that was kind of always on your radar or something that you had a buyer come in and offer to purchase and you were like, hadn't really thought about it, but that sounds okay.

Nathalie Lussier: 37:50

Yeah. So for many, many years, I've had people approaching us saying, like, hey. We wanna purchase your company. Pretty much every single person, I was like, no. No.

Nathalie Lussier: 37:58

No. I don't wanna sell. This is not a good fit. I don't think this is gonna work. There were a couple people who were interesting over the years, and we definitely explored a little bit more.

Nathalie Lussier: 38:05

And then for whatever reasons, the deals kind of didn't go through. But then more recently, when I decided, k. I think I'm starting to get ready to let go of this. My kids are getting a little bit older, and I want to spend a little more time with them and, obviously, the farm and all of things are are kind of keeping me really busy. And I was like, okay.

Nathalie Lussier: 38:22

I had been approached by the buyer who ended up buying us, and I was like, okay. Maybe. So I kind of put them off, and I basically said, like, okay. In a few months, maybe we'll circle back. And I really got clear on whether or not I wanted to sell and did it make sense to do it now.

Nathalie Lussier: 38:37

And I had a discussion with my husband, Robin, and figured that, yeah, I think maybe we should consider this. And then I decided to if we were gonna actually do it, I should approach other potential buyers too because if we're just gonna do it, like, let's see what the interest is. And so I did approach a couple of other companies too and had discussions with them too and then ended up going with the person who had originally gotten in touch with us. And, also, I wanted to make sure that they kept everyone on the team. Everything kinda kept going as much as possible.

Nathalie Lussier: 39:05

So the 4 day work week was one of the things that didn't make it, but most of the the rest of our systems and things kept going. And I have a feeling, like, the team may convince them to go back to a 4 day work week because, it really worked well for us.

Susan Boles: 39:18

Just the concept of a 4 day work week, I think, is in such contradiction to what we, at least in the western part of the world, see as the default. And sometimes I think it's really hard to envision that anything else could work outside of what currently works. Like, we assume that what is the default. There's a reason behind it, and I'm not sure that there always is.

Nathalie Lussier: 39:47

And, you know, you mentioned kind of this part of the world. So my husband, Robin, is from China, so we keep up on what's happening in China a little bit. And over there, there's a schedule called 996, which basically means you work from 9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week. So that is sort of like their corporate schedule. And when you think about that, you're like, what?

Nathalie Lussier: 40:05

That is ridiculous. Who does that? And how how could they survive that way? And, yeah, a lot of people get super burnt out, and it's it's not good. So I think we can look at other cultures and see, like, okay, they're taking it in another direction, and that's not going well.

Nathalie Lussier: 40:20

And so maybe we shouldn't, like, keep going in this direction. Right? We should go in the opposite direction and do something that's a little bit better for everyone.

Susan Boles: 40:27

Yeah. That's totally in the opposite direction from where a lot of companies are trying to head right now. And it's really interesting post the COVID work revolution, I guess, all of the impact of so many companies transitioning to working from home and then transitioning some back to hybrid or back to the office. It's been really interesting to watch just what's happening around work culturally and what's working and what's not really working.

Nathalie Lussier: 40:57

Yeah. And, like, what we're willing to say yes to and what we think maybe should change. We have that power. And especially, as business owners, we have the flexibility to be like, hey. I'm gonna try an experiment.

Nathalie Lussier: 41:08

And, you know, you can tell people, like, how we did in the beginning. We're just gonna try this for the summer. We're gonna just try this and see what happens and, you know, look at the results because they think the results speak for themselves once you start doing that.

Susan Boles: 41:22

Comfortable margins are the cornerstone of any calm business. Without margins in the different areas of your business, it's unlikely it'll ever feel truly calm. And remember that you need to think beyond just profit margins when we're thinking about this. So consider your capacity and your time margins. Think about what gives you energy or takes it away.

Susan Boles: 41:44

Examine what's taking up your emotional bandwidth. So are you a caregiver or someone who maybe doesn't handle big emotions particularly well, or you have some kind of crisis happening in your life? You might need to think about that and focus on building more emotional margin right now. Margins really just means space, and more space means less urgency, fewer emergencies, and a better ability to respond to surges. And that means that it's calmer.

Susan Boles: 42:15

Thanks to everyone who supports Beyond Margins. If you're a listener, a sponsor, or a partner of any kind, I couldn't do this show without you. If you're interested on learning more about how to build a calmer business with comfortable margins, head to beyondmargins.com. While you're there, you can send it for my free newsletter. I send it every week, and it's all about exploring one thing.

Susan Boles: 42:37

How do you engineer a calmer business? Until next time, stay calm.