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The construction industry knows how to talk about the tangible—build your team; get off the tools; scale.
What gets less airtime is the internal work running underneath all of it — the identity shifts, the competing forces, the particular experience of the femme founder building alongside and within a male-dominated industry.
The Holistic Home Service Podcast is that conversation.
Energetics and strategy and everything in between for the women leading home service businesses.
As we rise, everything built around us does too.
Welcome, welcome back to the Holistic Home Service podcast.
I'm Edi and today we're talking about business cycles and seasons.
So something that is super helpful for me is buckets, cycles, structure.
I imagine that most humans benefit from having a system of looking at and categorizing data, right?
That's how our brains work.
And I find this extremely potent in business and especially on the business journey.
For some time, more towards the beginning of my business journey, I really resisted the idea of these set stages in business because every business is so different and nuanced and all these things and it's so true.
But as I've worked with more and more businesses over the years, I've realized that there really are stages and seasons.
And the nuance often comes in when we talk about what aspect of their business is at what stage.
And so that's the piece that's newer to me in the last few years that has really helped me fully embrace the idea of recognizing seasons.
And so it's typical to have a questionnaire, a diagnostic or something that says this business is all this or this design is all that and this is all this.
But what I found with business seasons is that one, they're very circular, they're cyclical and that different aspects of our business could be at different stages.
If we're launching in a new market, we might be at the beginning stages where we might be at a later stage in a different aspect.
We might be very stable in one department, one aspect, maybe the finances, maybe the client delivery and another aspect may be underdeveloped like sales or post-production follow-up, you know.
And I don't want to over complicate things in our conversation today, we'll kind of talk about the business as a whole at one season but I want to just keep in mind that the idea of these cycles and these signs can be applied to many different aspects of your business and not just your business as a monolith.
I also want to mention because I always come back to nature when I am developing principles in my business, in my life and nature herself gives us so many examples of the cycles of life, the cycles of the season, the cycles of farming and you know growth and decomposing and fertilizing and growth again and so I think it's a very organic thing to embrace cycles in our business.
We just want to make sure that we're not being too rigid or prescriptive or silencing our inner wisdom, data, etc because we're so tightly adhering to the idea of this framework or this particular season we're in.
Like I'll go through the seasons but one of them is foundation, the first season, so we don't want to get to the place where like I'm in foundation so and your business might be asking you to do XYZ that is different from what the foundation season might typically need and you're not tuned in or willing to take those steps because you're like I'm in this season I don't think about that, right?
We always want to come with a flexibility and an organic flow to what we do.
So without further ado, after edging you a little bit at the beginning of this episode, there are five seasons, I have five seasons, five stages in business that I have identified.
This is by no means the end-all be-all but it might be helpful for you and what it might also be helpful for you is the fact that I've created a little five question questionnaire.
The link will be below for you to discover what season might be closest to you and not only does it come with a cute little report that gives you insight, pitfalls, energetics and all of that, it also comes with a private podcast where I go into deeper depth about into deeper depth go deeper into the those things that I mentioned about your season, the pitfalls, the highs, the lows, the energetics, how to support yourself in this season and help yourself accelerate to the next season.
So the five seasons are foundation, growth, inflection, stabilizing and scale.
So foundation as you can imagine is the first and foundational piece of our business.
This is when we are in that scrappy just started what the fuck are we doing is this thing gonna work stage.
We are experimenting, we are throwing things at the wall, we are trying everything and anything and it is a really beautiful season, we are fueled on pure passion and adrenaline and star eyed dreams and hopes.
I gravitate so much towards the stage because of the the frequency at which people are operating at this stage, there is just so much delight, so much excitement, so much scrappiness.
At this stage our biggest thing is to continue experiment experimenting but with boundaries.
We want to test and try out but we want to give ourselves some time limits.
We don't want to get stuck in a loop of trying one thing and doubling down or pivoting too quickly without give it letting it take root and so I find six weeks to be the minimum amount of time that we want to experiment with a significant change.
You know if you're tweaking one or two words maybe in how you introduce yourself you don't need six weeks, you can have a few conversations and that will give you good feedback, right, but if you are if you've built out a new offer, you're moving into a new industry, I encourage you to give it a few weeks, six weeks.
Six weeks is an arbitrary number again, we want to always listen to our inner wisdom.
Some people say 90 days, I find I rarely experiment with something for 90 days which may be why I am struggling to move past my own stage in business and but I do find that six weeks feels a little bit more tenable and still provides good data.
It may, whatever we might be experimenting with may not come to complete fruition in six weeks but we'll see if there's good momentum, right.
The second stage is growth.
At this point you have gotten a few clients under your belt, things are still a little shaky, your biggest problem is still, and I won't even say problem because it is literally just it's like saying you know a two-year-old is learning a one-year-old is learning how to walk, they don't have a problem because they can't walk, that's just development, that's developmentally appropriate.
So I would say your biggest milestone, growth milestone, what you're working towards is getting to the point where you are spending more time serving clients than finding clients.
So at growth stage that's still not the case, you are still hunting for clients, refining who you are, deciding who you want to be and at this stage it is important to start narrowing down a little bit.
At the foundation stage we are throwing everything at the wall, it's in a lot of ways it's like can I make you will give me a buck to do this I will do it even if it's not in my quote-unquote niche, even if it's not what I want to do forever, I'm just getting some money honey and getting my reps in and building that inner confidence that I can sell and make money.
But in the growth stage we want to start being a little bit more discerning, we want to start paring down because a big theme through all of this is pruning.
My whole practice and advisory firm runs on the idea of elegance and simplicity and I'll even say simplicity and then elegance, simplicity is our first principle.
You want to begin the process of simplifying, of getting laser focused on the things that are really generating momentum and that you enjoy so that you can continue to put more and more effort behind them and let fall to the side of the things that are not generating the joy, the excitement, the revenue.
Caveat, if you literally just need to make money, if you are in a position where you don't have another source of income where this is do-or-die kind of vibes, then you do what you have to do.
You might find yourself pruning back a little bit later than maybe somebody else was a bit more financial stability outside of this.
Again, look at your unique situation and make your decision.
The third stage is inflection.
I love this stage, this is where I often start working with people, at inflection.
Oh, because I'm a little bit of a, I have, like, a kink for this, this tension, right?
It's like that pain and pleasure, it's like it hurts so bad, no, hurts so good kind of place where you are now reaching the crest, in that point where people are coming to you.
You are spending a lot of time on client delivery but you have not yet put the systems in place, put the support in place, to have the freedom to truly deliver fully and without burning out.
So you will be finding yourself probably also still doing a lot of the business development stuff that you were doing before, all the networking and the calls and the social media, but then also dealing with a higher client load and most often without the systems needed to sustain it, without a team member or VA or anybody to support you.
And so this can be really hard and there can be a lot of internal shame around this because you're now at a place where your income is starting to stabilize, where you're realizing like, okay, this is the real deal, this can be not only sustainable but can be thriving, and there should be excitement, but what you're feeling is exhaustion, right?
Because the thing that you wanted the most is now draining the fuck out of you.
That's normal, again this is the developmental milestone.
A big part of this inflection point is getting help.
It sounds so cliche, I, but I know in the midst of it it sounds hard.
And this is a stage when we are most liable to make questionable decisions about hiring, about technology, because we're in so much stress and strife and we can make a decision for something hastily that doesn't serve us and then we take steps back and we're like, I can't, that fell through with that person, I can't trust anybody with my business, I've just got to hold on to this, and we stunt our growth.
Most businesses don't make it past the foundation stage, right?
I think it's within five years 90% of businesses close.
The next huge stalling point is the inflection point.
This is where businesses clamp down and they sustain and they coast but the founder never moves fully into her CEO identity.
She stays in scrappy founder mode, who handles everything, running ragged but making bank.
This stage is the biggest one to get stuck in because it feels so productive.
It feels so productive, you're making money, you're super fucking busy, right?
But it's not sustainable.
The biggest thing is to get help.
That is literally why Via de Oduraa, my firm, exists.
We take this work off of your plate in a way where it's not gonna end up back there.
We help you build your systems and then we place somebody to run them, even if not us.
When you're looking for support, find something that is truly gonna meet your needs.
It might feel like a stretch to spend the amount of money that you need to spend to get the right solution, but it's worth it.
Do not go on to Fiverr and find the first VA that you can find.
I do not bring on the first VA you can find, that's a surefire way to burn out further, to get resentful and to be frustrated.
I don't know how many people have talked to you who have been like, I got in Fiverr but I had to do a lot of hand-holding and they didn't quite do this, and I'm like, man, like think about the revenue you could have generated with that 20 hours plus that you spent trying to train them, and then it bonged through anyways, now you're back to square one.
What is your time worth?
What was that $20, 20 hours worth?
Was it worth, you know, $5 an hour, which is what you paid that person on Fiverr, or is it worth so much more?
Do you trust yourself that if you give yourself the support you can continue to generate even more money?
This is an inflection point, it's an inflection point in so many ways, right, with how your client load is shifting, with how your time is shifting to more client delivery and you're being pulled in that tension, and also the internal world where you are stepping into that CEO identity in a major way and investing more in yourself, investing more in support and structures.
There's a lot going on in this stage.
Highly, highly recommend that you take the quiz if you feel like you're in the stage, any of these stages, but especially if you're in this stage, take the quiz.
Even if you don't get inflection point, you can in the private podcast, you can listen to all of them and tune in, I have some really good nuggets for you.
The fourth stage is called stability, stabilization.
It's a breath of fresh air after the inflection point.
You got the help, brava.
You've done what a lot of people won't do, you've got yourself out of that tar pit and you've got some support, got some help, and now things are not so fucking chaotic, right?
There are continuing to grow, continuing to stabilize, you're finding that you are truly spending more time on client delivery and maybe now more so team building, mentoring your team members, keeping track of them, learning to relinquish and delegate more.
This stage comes with its own internal traps where you have weathered the storm of the inflection point and you feel like you should be completely relieved.
You feel like there were much bigger problems you were dealing with a few months, a couple years ago, that you're not dealing with now, so you should be fine and happy, but you might have things in your business that just don't feel quite right and it feels almost silly to try and resolve them when you had bigger problems that you had dealt with and you kind of, you put up with, if that makes sense.
Your discernment is refining, your ability and your, your ability to say, actually, no, this isn't gonna work for me, I want to refine this and tweak this in the business is heightening because some of the big things are in place.
Lean into that, own that.
This is when you start really, really refining your operations, your client experience, when your brand and all the beautiful work you do starts really infusing the back end of your business, right?
Brand is more than just your visuals and your messaging and your portfolio, it's how every, it's how everybody outside of your business perceives your business, and that includes your operations and your systems.
In this stage you're often invited into that fine-tuning and refinement.
And then the last stage is scale, where you are now on track to reduce input but increase output.
So if you inputted two hours of your team's time here you would get two hours out, but now you're inputting two hours and you're getting four hours out, and then maybe in a few months it's five hours.
So this is the stage where we're really refining, things are flowing, not everything is perfect but there's a lot that's in place and established.
At this stage it can be tempting to slow down, to get complacent, and I'm not pro hustle grind all that, right, but I am acknowledging that in nature if things are not growing they're dying.
And so even if you're not somebody who is like, I want to keep on adding team members, you want to maintain your team, you want to maintain your client load, you're happy where it's at, you want to continue to pour into your business, pour into yourself, tune in and see what still feels good, what doesn't, just these little course corrections.
So those are the five stages on a very high level.
As mentioned, take the quiz, listen to the podcast episodes, each one is about 20 minutes to a half hour so I really condensed it for this episode.
And I would love to hear what you think and what season you feel like you're in.
If you have any questions we are always so happy to talk to you.
We're on LinkedIn, we're on blue sky, you can reach out via email, it's in the show notes.
I'm rooting for you, I believe in you, the world needs what you do.
The more beauty, the more, the more serene homes, the more self-actualized people are, the better our world becomes.
Until next time.