Beyond Margins: Build a calmer business with comfortable margins

Sometimes, you just need a break. I know I did.
 
What was meant to be a quick breather turned into a transformative journey of two and a half years. The show (and my company) emerged with a new name, a new look, and a new perspective on what truly sustains a business—and a life.

I say that I took a break from my business. But the reality is that I broke. I realized that I was burnt out to the point where I was physically, psychologically, and emotionally impaired. 

In this episode, I share the whole story—the behind-the-scenes of what went wrong, what went right, and why I’m back. Today’s episode kicks off a series on, appropriately, taking a break.

Whether you need a break because of burnout like me, you or someone you love got sick, you're getting ready to have a kid and need to plan for parental leave, or you just want to take a sabbatical to refresh, big breaks are hard to prepare for.

How do you figure out how to pay yourself (and your team) during a break? What systems and procedures need to be in place to make sure things run smoothly? How do you handle managing and serving your clients while you're away? And, if the break is unexpected and unplanned, what then?

After all, running a business is a marathon—not a sprint. If we’re going to be in it for the whole 26.2 miles, we better learn how to rest. And that starts with making calm your KPI.

Listen to the full episode to hear:
  • The challenges of pausing work and the reality of burnout recovery
  • Why I made the counterintuitive decision to take a full-time job to rest
  • The importance of building a business with comfortable margins and a focus on sustainability rather than relentless growth
  • Why I’m using calm as a key performance indicator (KPI) in business and advocating for a model that values space, margin, and a personalized definition of success

Learn more about me, Susan Boles:

Learn more about Sean McMullin:


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: Build a calmer business with comfortable margins?

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.

Sean:

So hey. Hey. Hey. What's up?

Susan:

It's been a while.

Sean:

So my feeling is is that today in this conversation, we basically just have to update the listeners. Right?

Susan:

Gotta gotta give everybody the lowdown.

Sean:

Exactly. Give everyone the lowdown.

Susan:

Sometimes you just need a break. I know I did. Welcome to Beyond Margins, formerly called Break the Ceiling. I'll tell you more about that later in the episode. Whatever we're calling it, this is the show where we geek out about what it takes to build a calmer business with comfortable margins.

Susan:

I'm your host, Susan Boles, and, well, it's been a minute. Okay. It's been longer than a minute. It's been two and a half years. From time to time, everyone needs to take a little time off from their business.

Susan:

This whole business owning thing, it's a marathon, not a sprint, even if we frequently forget that and try to sprint the whole thing. Whether you need a break because of burnout, you or someone you love got sick, you're getting ready to have a kid and you need to plan for parental leave, or you just want to take a sabbatical to refresh. Those kinds of big breaks are hard to plan for. How do you figure out how to pay yourself and your team during a break? What systems and procedures need to be in place to make sure things run smoothly?

Susan:

How do you handle managing and serving your clients while you're away? And if the break is unexpected and unplanned, what then? This topic of breaks, leaves, sabbaticals, whatever you want to call them, it's really personal to me because I just came back from 1. Originally, it was going to be just a quick 6 months off but it ended up lasting two and a half years. It was something I didn't really plan for, didn't actually wanna take, but it happened and it changed everything.

Susan:

So I thought it was only fitting to kick off my return to this podcast by talking about leaves and sabbaticals, how to plan for them, and some different and maybe unconventional ways to approach thinking about them. So to kick off this theme, I'm taking you behind the scenes of my own sabbatical. My producer Sean interviewed me about what I've been doing for the last few years, how I handled taking an involuntary sabbatical, and how that leave fundamentally changed everything in my business including the name.

Sean:

It was the fall of 2021. You're going to take a short term hiatus from the podcast to focus on blah, blah, blah. That didn't happen. So I kinda like to talk with you about why, what happened instead, and then we'll go from there.

Susan:

Yeah. So when I think the last episode we recorded was us talking about maintenance mode and the last theme was really all around maintenance mode, which was something that I was really personally struggling with.

Sean:

Mhmm.

Susan:

So in 2021, what was happening is I was wearing a whole lot of hats. So when the pandemic happened, my son was in 2nd grade, which is not a great, like, virtual schooling age because he still wasn't, like, a strong reader and he so, like, you couldn't just send him to his room to zoo Zoom class, and he was a little too old to just hang out. Right? And so when the pandemic kicked off, originally, what had happened was there was my son and his best friend who lived like 2 doors down from us. Same age and we had 4 parents trying to figure out how to do virtual homeschooling.

Susan:

Sounds great. But between the kind of beginning of the pandemic, what had happened is that the like the second half of second grade was cool. All 4 parents were sharing the load of, like, co teaching. Right? So the best friend's family would teach for a couple of days.

Susan:

We would teach for a couple of days. So each parent could actually like teach one day a week and then work the other 4 days. So it worked really well. We were sharing the load. But what happened is we all decided that for 3rd grade, for the fall I guess that would have been the 2020 fall school season that we were gonna do hybrid school.

Susan:

We weren't gonna go all the way back to school because nobody was quite sure if it was safe or what was gonna happen. And so the kids were at school 2 days a week and then they were home 3 days week, which on the surface, if you're sharing 4 parent loads, that seems like, completely reasonable. But what happened is that the other family, they had, like, real, you know, actual jobs with a company, And the companies started making people come back to work. And so they stopped being able to teach. So it was just me and my partner, and we were trying to share the load and help them out with teaching both kids.

Susan:

And so, originally, it was like, Josh would teach half the week and I would teach half the week. And then Josh got a real job too. And so, I was the only parent left with any flexibility which meant I was teaching 4 days a week and still trying to put out the podcast and run my business and serve clients and market the things and all of the things. And what happened is that summer, you kept saying, hey, maybe we should take a break or hey, let's do replays or hey, things don't seem to be very, smooth on your end. And I was really, really resistant to that.

Susan:

And so the maintenance mode theme kind of came out of all of those things that I was trying to balance. And in the summer of 2021, it really came to a head. I ended up with, like, very, very serious burnout. And come to find out, I was actually very sick and didn't know about it. So every time I was trying to write, like, a script or do something creative, I kept having to send you scripts and say, is this English?

Susan:

Are this Yeah. Like, do these words make wording sense? Because they don't I, like, I can't I can't figure it out. And so when we decided to take a break, I genuinely believed because at this point, I didn't know I was burnt out. I didn't know I was sick.

Susan:

I just knew that I was really, really tired. And so when my son went back to school full time in the fall of 2021, I said, you know what? I need a breather. Like, I need to replenish myself. You know, my brain's not really working very well, which come to find out there was there were reasons for that, but I really was very much struggling.

Susan:

Every decision in the business felt like it was the most critical decision and also I my brain wasn't working well enough to actually make the decisions. So when we decided to take a break, I genuinely believed it was gonna be 6 months. I really thought we were gonna get come back in the I guess that would have been the, like, January of 2022. Like, I thought I just needed a breather.

Sean:

I think if it had been any one of those three things isolated, having to take care of your kid during a pandemic and the neighbor's kids or having to cope with burnout or just illness in general. If it had been any one of those isolated things, it still would have been too much.

Susan:

Absolute like, one 100% it would have been too much. No. Now that I've done, like, a lot more research, like, if you're really very seriously burnt out, the recovery period's like 3 to 5 years. Like, it's not 6 months. It is years years and most people have to drastically change their life and their circumstance to get out of the position that they were in.

Susan:

And I mean, to be a 100% honest, I am still not a 100% recovered. I am certainly better than I was, but I'm really at the beginning of that kind of recovery period. Like, it's been 2 and a half, 3 ish years of very sustained efforts at trying to recover in a lot of different ways. So what happened is we decided to put the podcast on hiatus and we talked about that but what I didn't really talk about in that episode is I put everything on pause. I paused my newsletter.

Susan:

I paused my podcast, and I paused any marketing effort for my company at all. Nothing, 0, nada. I didn't show up on social media. I didn't send out an email. I didn't do anything.

Susan:

And the only work I that I took was stuff that came in by referral. So only people that knew that I was still taking work sent me referrals and that's the only consulting work I did for the last few years. And what I actually did seems maybe a little counterintuitive, I think, but I basically paused everything, planned to rest, and I did take I think I took about 2 months completely off and didn't do anything. And then, I took a full time job which seems on the surface like it wasn't a rest. Right?

Susan:

Like, it seems counterintuitive to take a full time job as a rest. Yeah. But the thing that it did was, you know, when it when you are in your own business, you have to make so many decisions. You have to wear so many hats. And I was tired of doing that, and I didn't feel like health wise, I could really handle, like, still doing client work and marketing the business.

Susan:

All the things that you would need to bring in a full time revenue from your business. Right?

Sean:

Mhmm.

Susan:

And I really just wanted to put my head down and do things that I could do in my sleep. Right? Like, the job I took ended up being a COO role at a software and hardware company. So lots of, there were lots of moving pieces, but all I had to do was operations. I didn't have to do everything.

Susan:

I just had to do the one piece that quite frankly I could do in my sleep. It did not require brain power. It didn't require much effort. Like, it wasn't hard. It was an easy easy job with a lot of flexibility.

Susan:

It had unlimited time off and they legitimately meant that. It wasn't the, you know, bullshit that you normally hear about unlimited time off and nobody can take it. It was unlimited time off. Take as much time as you need. So while I was at the company, multiple people took month long sabbaticals.

Susan:

Like, that was actually part of one of the reasons why I took it. And I felt like I needed a rest where I didn't need to worry about money coming in. I didn't need to worry like, the job was something I could turn off at the end of the day and and something that was easy. So I was still doing a little bit of consulting on the side, whatever came in, but from a business perspective of my own business, I kinda just climbed into a hole and hibernated for a few years. And on the professional side, I had regular revenue.

Susan:

I have regular paycheck coming that I knew was a 100% gonna come even if I couldn't, if even if I wasn't performing at a 100%. Right? And so it was kind of a counterintuitive strategy to rest, but it took so much of the pressure off of my brain, of my body, and that was really key for me in terms of being able to rest because I could take that rest and I didn't need to worry about money, which, you know, when you're taking a sabbatical from your business, it's really hard to do that unplanned unless you have a big pile of cash sitting there and you have been preparing for a sabbatical. It's hard to just say, I'm not gonna market my business. I'm not gonna serve clients.

Susan:

I'm not gonna do any of the stuff that you have to do to keep a pipeline full and still have enough money to live. Like, unplanned sabbaticals are really, really difficult. And in this case, I didn't have a choice. It's not like I it's not like I saw this coming. I very much didn't.

Susan:

People around me did. You saw it coming. My partner saw it coming. You know, everybody else around me knew that this was happening, and I was so deep in it that I could not see that happening. I could not plan it.

Susan:

And when it happened, it was pretty much involuntary. At the point that I decided finally to like I say, I took a break but the reality is is I broke. Like, my body broke. I was so sick at that point that I was having neurological symptoms. I was literally falling down when I tried to walk and, I mean, it ended up being something super simple but we didn't find that out for a year.

Susan:

So basically for the first, I would say, year and a half, all I did was go to work, do my job, rest as much as I possibly could, learn a lot about burnout recovery

Sean:

Yeah.

Susan:

Learn a lot about how I need to work for it to be sustainable for like it to not push me into a burnout cycle where, like, my whole life I've had that kind of cycle. It's never been this bad, but I've always been somebody who I like to say I'm a potato or a tornado. I am always either going a 150% or I'm going at 0%. I don't have an in between and I don't have like a consistent level of effort that I can maintain. I can go really intensely or not at all.

Susan:

And learning that about myself during this time was really critical to me starting to think about how do I design my work whether it's for myself or for somebody else in a way that is actually sustainable for me to work to not cause burnout. So, you know, one of the things about burnout recovery that I was saying is that part of that is normally people have to change their lives. They have to change the circumstances but they also have to change how they are designing their own work to make it work for them. And so the 1st year and a half was me mostly working in a days, really. Like, I would go to work.

Susan:

I would do the things. And I don't remember much of that time, to be honest.

Sean:

You weren't in a position where you could make those significant big changes because you weren't even capable of really processing it for for at least a year after all of this.

Susan:

Yeah. I remember talking to my friend, Michelle Warner, who kinda went through a similar thing several years ago and she's talked about it. And she was like, I just watched Grey's Anatomy for 6 months after that. A little self awareness never hurt anybody. Like, she could not do anything else except watch one show essentially over and over for 6 months because you're just in a daze.

Susan:

You're just essentially staring off like a zombie into space. You can't process new information. You can't do new things. Existing is really hard and then on top of, you know, the burnout, I was still dealing with essentially an undiagnosed very serious chronic illness.

Sean:

Yeah.

Susan:

And so had zero energy. My brain neurologically was literally not working. And so I just sat there for about a year and a half doing the bare minimum, and a lot of it was just on the couch because I didn't have the energy to do anything.

Sean:

I think it's pretty incredible. Not everyone, I think, would have even even in those low moments where you weren't able to really give much of yourself to anything, even in those moments you had the self awareness enough to be able to say to identify what you needed then.

Susan:

That feels like more credit than I deserve.

Sean:

I But, like, the awareness

Susan:

The awareness to take a job was a huge that was it did seem very counterintuitive at the time, but I really just needed a break and that was a break.

Sean:

That is so classic that people it's hard to just fully take a, quote, unquote, break where you do often do who knows what. You know?

Susan:

Yeah. I mean, let's be real. We live in late stage capitalism. It like, everybody needs you need money to survive, like and if you don't have a giant pile of it, you don't necessarily have the privilege of just bailing for, you know, a year, which is what I would have done ideally, you know, had I had I had a pile of money to just sit and stare at the wall for 6 months, I probably could have recovered quite a bit faster.

Sean:

Well, I don't know. I don't know. And then then and let me just interject this because I'm what I'm thinking is is that by keeping your mind engaged on that work level professional level, if you hadn't done that, like, I'm imagining what my mind would have filled that time with of trying to find the solutions, trying you set yourself up so you literally didn't there are a whole bunch of things you didn't have to solve.

Susan:

That is fair. Actually, what had been happening that that spring was really I was wanting to change the direction of the company because I realized, you know, what I was doing wasn't working, and, you know, come to find out that was really more everything that was going on personally than everything that was going on professionally. I've always run a pretty calm consulting company. It's never really been, like, urgent or, you know, super busy. I really try have always tried to avoid that, but I was really struggling with what the next step should be because I couldn't see it clearly.

Susan:

I knew there needed to be a next step, but I didn't know what that should look like and it felt like every decision I should be making was like a really critical, like, pivotal point in the company. In reality, that's not true. To be to be honest, what I was thinking was not any kind of pivotal point but, you know, when you're really burnt out or you're really tired or you're in a bad place, or you're struggling physically or mentally, critical thinking is the first thing to go. We do not make good decisions in a when we're not in a good place. When we are panicking or when we're really upset or struggling, no one makes good decisions which is, you know, one of the reasons I'm always telling my clients like, let's work on getting you that big pile of money so if something happens, you do have a big pile of money so that you have time and space to relax, to think, to calm down so that you can then make good decisions.

Susan:

And I wasn't making good decisions and they felt really important. But it was literally impossible for me to think strategically, to think critically, or to, you know, really understand where I wanted to take the business, and I did need to step back. I needed to stop.

Sean:

And I think it's really awesome that you're setting yourself up so that solving those problems, where the business is going, what it's going to look like, you set things up so you there wasn't it that wasn't urgent because you set yourself up so that the your base needs financially were set. You're good to go. You could actually I would just wonder if you hadn't done that, if you would it it wouldn't it would have still felt really, really urgent.

Susan:

I don't think I would have legitimately taken a break. I think I would have just kept trying to push through, and taking a job allowed me to allow myself to take a break, where I think something that's really difficult for business owners, especially when you're at that point, is there's a little bit of a perception that, like, if you go back to take a full time job that you're a failure, which I vehemently disagree with. I actually have had a full time job the majority of the time I've owned businesses. So I've owned businesses since 2,006. Yeah.

Susan:

I think the amount of time I've been full time in my business is maybe 3, 4 years out of that because I didn't want that pressure. You know? So sometimes it was my partner was in the job full time and I had a job outside of it and I was doing the admin or the accounting or the back end, or, you know, since the consulting business has been the main focus, The way that I work with folks with the intensives, it's really easy to kinda scale up and scale back. But I I've never been somebody who thinks having a full time job makes you a failure or deciding to go in and out of consulting. I think there are seasons and that sometimes it is really, really beneficial.

Susan:

Like you were saying, 1, to give your your brain something to do when you're at a critical pivotal point. Our instinct, I think, as entrepreneurs is just to keep pushing. Just pivot and push and keep going and push through and it'll just be fine, but sometimes what you genuinely need is a break. You genuinely need to step away from the problem and marinate on it and then eventually the solution becomes apparent, but you would never have gotten there if you hadn't taken the space to think or to put the problem down and do something else. And so I I think you're right.

Susan:

I think had I not decided to take the job, that was like a clear breakpoint that gave me permission to put the business problems down even just for a little bit. Even if it was only 6 months, it ended up being longer because I kept going, well, I'm not ready. I'm not ready now. I'm still

Sean:

not ready. And I don't know that you would have been able to do that if you didn't have a job. There would have been some sort of time constraint. Agreed. It would have felt really it really it would have been really felt really urgent.

Sean:

There have been times when, and I don't know if you relate to this, there is the thing that I really, really want to be doing, but it sort of resembles work And some part of me says, well, you should be taking a break right now. So you should you don't just ignore but it's like, but but damn it. I really just wanna be doing the work. That's what I would really like to be doing right now.

Susan:

For me, that was actually a big part of recognizing something about how I like to work. So this is something that is heavily talked about in, like, neurodivergent communities, but I think sort of applies to anybody which is this idea of a special interest. So the idea of something that you are really intellectually interested in, you're really passionate about, like, you could talk about this thing anytime, anywhere to anybody for an hour. Right? And I think everybody has those.

Susan:

Like, it's more heavily talked about, obviously, with neurodivergences and that kinda thing, but I think everybody has that. Everybody has a passion, and I think that our view of work and passions, particularly for those of us who are, like, sort of close to the millennial ethos and generation, we have turned everything that is fun into something that has to be a side hustle or a job or it's work. And so I think our our view of like what we should do and shouldn't do has sort of gotten a little bit skewed.

Sean:

Yeah.

Susan:

And so, like, for me, you know, my special interest is businesses. Like, I could talk about the back end of people's businesses all day every day in so many different aspects and it makes me so excited. It actually does give me energy, and one of the things I kind of had to get over is this idea that I've always sort of felt like a workaholic.

Sean:

I've been called the workaholic.

Susan:

Like, because the thing that I would like to be doing is the work at the company that I have designed around the thing that I like doing. Right? But there's this idea that if you are quote unquote working all the time, that that's bad. You don't have you don't have good work life balance. You're a workaholic.

Susan:

Yada yada yada. And for the longest time, I thought that was true for me. But the truth is is that the kind of work that I do is both a creative pursuit. Like, I get a lot of creative juice from things like this podcast is one of my favorite things to do. I have missed having it in my life so much, but technically, if you look at it on the surface, it's work.

Susan:

Right? Like, that is how it's positioned. But the truth is is it's fun work. It's something I wanna be doing, and so I think we kind of have to give ourselves permission a little bit to blur the line of stuff that, like, especially those of us who have built companies or are running our own thing, most of us built that around our special interest. Like, if we're gonna be really real, we started our company so that we got to do the thing that we like doing all day every day.

Susan:

In reality, that's not what we end up doing a lot of the times because you accidentally then have to, like, run a business and do payroll and, you know, deal with all the logistics of it. But that's why most of us started was to do the thing that we like doing and so that then really blurs the line between what's work and what's fun and what counts as what and I think for me recognizing that was a big part of being able to come back. To be able to like really lean into parts of it that are most interesting and most fun and most energetic for me as part of my recovery. Like, that was actually a big part of me being able to come back from burnout was engaging with my special interest and what that looked like. And it looks a lot different than when I left but essentially I had to kinda give myself permission that like there isn't really a clear line between work and rest and work and life and that those are kind of blurry buckets and sometimes rest looks active.

Susan:

Sometimes rest looks creative. It's not always, you know, at the beginning it was sitting on the couch staring off into space basically because that's the kind of rest that I needed. But as I got closer and closer to like a little bit more sustainable, a little bit healthier, a little bit better recovery, that rest started to look a lot more active. It looked like being able to go for a walk. It looked like being able to do a creative project, whether I was sharing that publicly or just keeping it privately or talking to other creative friends about it.

Susan:

And so I think I do. I think we need to sort of give ourselves permission that, like, if something genuinely sounds really fun to do, do it. Whether it's quote unquote work or not, if it sounds fun, go do it.

Sean:

While making sure that you also acknowledge that the potential for even that, doing something that you enjoy can lead to burnout, can lead to Oh, for sure. And so structuring yourself, keeping those things in mind as you structure your business, for sure.

Susan:

Well, and for me, I need structure for everything. I must turn it into a routine. I must turn it into a system. Like, my brain is the happiest when that is true, and so, like, I need to just say, here's how many weeks I'm taking off. Here is on my calendar when they are happening.

Susan:

And I think being able to think about creating structures around your essentially your support needs. You know, what do you need to do in order to do your best work? And I think that looks different for everybody. It's gonna be different for everybody's brain and people like, you know, working in different ways and some people like batching and some people hate batching and really thinking critically about what works best for you and then creating a way to make sure that's happening which on the surface seems easy and in practice is not at all.

Sean:

So, Susan, you have sort of caught us up to where you are mostly.

Susan:

Mostly now. Yeah.

Sean:

Mostly. This is a you've talked about where you were, what's happened since the last time we talked. I know because I know behind the scenes a little bit, you've got some things planned for your business.

Susan:

I do. And I think I'm thinking about my business in a different way. You know, I've always been a fan of calmer things

Sean:

Mhmm.

Susan:

Of, you know, using technology and tool to give you more space, to give you more ease in your business, and that's always been true. I think it's looked differently in my business at different points in time. I mean, I think I just hit my 7 year anniversary with the current business. Mhmm. And so that's always been something that's important to me, but I don't think I had a good way to express that and I hadn't really thought very deeply about what that looks like in my business and also in other people's businesses.

Susan:

You know, I'd come at a place at it from a place of, like, efficiency, right, where, you know, Scalespark as a business started out as a software consulting firm. Scalespark was named Scalespark because it was about scaling and growth and helping people grow bigger businesses. And I think the thing that changed for me, over not just this time that I've been away but, you know, was starting a little bit as I was leaving was realizing that, like, those are all important tools. Right? And this was this was kinda the lesson behind maintenance mode as well was all those same techniques and tools can be used for a focus on productivity, a focus on efficiency, getting more, more, more, building more capacity, making sure every spare second is crammed, you know, you're getting every dollar and second out of the value of all of that, or you can use those same techniques and tools to create something that is more sustainable, that's calmer, that is more thoughtfully focused on supporting you, your team, your community, how you like to work.

Susan:

And so I think, you know, the the type of work that I do and the type of things that I talk to, clients about probably hasn't changed a lot, but the lens has. Now that I have a little bit of a vision of, like, what sustainable work might look like for me, What does that look like from a business standpoint? And for me, what I realized was that my favorite part of my business was my podcast. That was the that was the part that I loved. I loved talking to people and geeking out with them and hearing cool stories and being able to, like, just talk about the cool things that people are doing behind the scenes in their business.

Susan:

But that didn't necessarily always tie in to the services I was offering as a CFO. It wasn't necessarily a direct line. So when I started thinking about what what do I actually want coming back, it was actually me looking at here's the piece that I love the most about my business. How could I turn that into the actual business itself? What might that look like?

Susan:

And that was kinda the question that I started down the path of what could the business look like if that was the foundation, if that was the core, was the piece that is the most fun. How do I make every part of the business kind of circle around that? With the focus being this has to be sustainable. I have always aimed to work at like a 150% of like quote unquote everybody else. Right?

Susan:

Like that has been my worldview for my entire professional career. And one of the things I really had to unpack was realizing how unsustainable that is for me. Even that like, that's what leads to the burnout bus cycle. That what that's what led to this very serious 3 year recovery and I really didn't wanna do that again which meant that I had to figure out a way to work at 50 to 60% capacity on an average day. And by that, I don't necessarily mean that I'm showing up every day at 50%.

Susan:

For me, that means I work for a week at a 100 for a 150% and then I take a week off which, you know, still kind of averages out. I had to really start thinking about a much bigger lens for what I saw as consistency, for what I saw as capacity, for what I saw as like, my normal working sustainable level. Like, I am a big fan of, like, take action. Right? Like, so, like, if if you have an idea, go experiment, go try it.

Susan:

And that's what I was doing, honestly, on LinkedIn through 2023. I was testing and experimenting without actually the pressure to do anything about those ideas, which was really cool. And while I wouldn't recommend that for everybody, it was involuntary for me for the most part, it did allow me to come back with a very solid idea of what I wanted my business to stand for and that led me to decide that I wanted to rebrand the company. I realized that the outside of the company didn't actually reflect the inside or the stuff that I had been talking about for a while. Right?

Susan:

So Scalespark is was all about scaling and automation and efficiency and growth, profitability. You know, even for the last few years working with clients before I took a break, I was not talking about that. I was honestly most of the time actively asking clients to question whether or not that was something they wanted. Right? Because that is what we are told is the default goal we are all supposed to aim for.

Susan:

We are all supposed to aim for growth. That at the expense of everything else. If you think about like the culture of business, especially online business, everything is focused on growth. We talk about revenue figures, but nobody ever mentions whether they're profitable or not. They talk about team size, but they don't talk about whether or not that team is effective.

Susan:

So we're kind of sold this idea that growth is the default, and that is not the right goal for a lot of people. You can follow the path to growth and end up building a business that burns you out, that you wanna burn down, that you freaking hate. And because whatever your overriding priority is, you will build a business that reflects that. You will prioritize decisions that prioritize that goal. So if you are following kind of this default that we are told we're supposed to aim for, you will make choices for your business that prioritize growth over all other things.

Susan:

Over your own happiness, over your team's well-being, sometimes even over like your ethics. That's the example of every, almost every prominent business owner that we are like that we see in the media, they are prioritizing growth. VC companies prioritize growth at the detriment of profitability, at the detriment of sustainability. And I had already kind of rejected that default in what I was talking about with clients. Like, we weren't talking about growth.

Susan:

I wasn't talking about scaling and quite frankly I'm not sure that I ever actually did. I was selling into this idea that people are like, oh, if you wanna sell services you have to sell growth. You can't sell sustainability because nobody cares about that. So I had realized that what I had been talking about with clients for the most part was space. I was talking about building comfortable margins.

Susan:

I was talk and not just profit margins. Like, profit margins are important. I am never gonna say that they're not because I'm a CFO. Profit margins are important but they are not the only kind of margin that matters in your business. You need space in and margin in all different areas.

Susan:

You need energetic margins so that you are working in a way that's sustainable for you and that your brain likes. You need emotional margins because, honestly, for those of us who work with clients, that is emotionally taxing. And if and and you only have, like, you know, one bucket of these things, whether that's work or life or anything, you need to take all of that into consideration. You need to think about time margins. You know?

Susan:

You need to have margin in your capacity. And what I realized as I was thinking about like, hey, Scalespark doesn't fit anymore. What have I actually been talking to clients about? I'd been talking to clients about building margin. That was the thing that was, like, tying everybody together.

Susan:

I had called it operational capacity. I had called it, you know, time and space. I had talked about it as a way of, like, reducing overwhelm. But the truth is the thing that I was talking about was margin. And that kind of led me down the path of I really want my company to reflect.

Susan:

Like, I want the outside to reflect the inside. Which is how we ended up with Beyond Margins. As I really wanted to think about building a company beyond just the default, beyond profit margins, to encompass kind of a whole a whole picture of both the person who is running the company and the company as a whole. And when we are thinking about the default, when we build companies to the default, basically what we're doing is solving for a particular priority. Right?

Susan:

So if you are building a company where your top priority is growth, you will make decisions to solve for growth. But if you want to build a different kind of company, you have to solve for something different. And the conclusion that I came to is you have to solve for calm. The thing that builds a calm business, you have to design it from the ground up to be calm. You have to build it into your DNA.

Susan:

You have to solve for calm. And for me that means making it your top priority, measuring against it, making goals that reflect that your priority is calm. And so for me, that means, you know, I am a data person. I am a financial person and I work in key performance indicators. I work in KPIs because I think that what you're paying attention to, what you're overriding priority is, that's what you will, again, build your business around, make decisions focused on, and so I think we should prioritize calm in our businesses.

Susan:

I think we should make it our KPI. I think that that is the thing that then builds sustainability, I think, and to me that's important. You need a sustainable company, and that's what's gonna feel good, and I don't mean that calm is, like, a personality trait. I was on a call with somebody this week that I was talking. She was like, I don't I love what you're talking about, and it really resonates with me, but I am not a calm person.

Sean:

Just take it easy, man. I'm perfectly calm, dude. Will you just take it easy?

Susan:

And I think, you know, anybody who's ever met me, I am not a calm person either.

Sean:

No. No one would ever accuse

Susan:

you of

Sean:

being calm.

Susan:

No. I get intense, passionate, energetic most of the time, but very I I'm pretty sure nobody's ever described me as chill or calm. Oh, thank you for telling me. And I think you don't have to be a calm person to run a calm company. I think those things are 2 really different aspects and that what feels calm to one person is not going to feel calm to the other person.

Susan:

It's more about working with how you work, how your brain works, how your body works, how your company works the smoothest, and the foundation of that ethos of calm is really about caring for the people in in your company, whether that is employees, whether that's your customers, whether that's your team, whether that's the community that you are in and serving. I think you can't have something that feels calm without taking consideration of and and real, like, coming from a place of real care and empathy for the people in the company and I think that means being very aware that people work in different ways and they think in different ways and building and designing for that is what helps build a calmer company, but it's not about being a calm person because I have no chill.

Sean:

I'm really loving this because it's about establishing what your values are and building from your values up. So your values are

Susan:

For sure.

Sean:

As opposed to valuing something like growth as the foundational element that you grow that you build from, you choose other things to build from.

Susan:

It's not a hard and fast framework. It's not a you have to do this. It's about creating something that does genuinely reflect your values and your definition of success and not somebody else's, because, you know, when we build to the defaults, we end up with, you know, pretty, quite frankly, supremacist, enforced narratives because that's what we're being sold and it doesn't work for most people.

Sean:

I love that this that what you just said about how this gives you room to develop and build the business that you want as opposed to the pre the prescribed business that you should be building you're told you should be building. So Calm is the new KPI.

Susan:

Calm is the new KPI. Honestly, it's something I've been talking about for about the last year on LinkedIn. So, you know, if you wanna see more about it, that's the best place to kind of hang out with me, connect with me. Over on LinkedIn, I'm there a lot of the time now, because it's honestly been a really fun place to hang out and make friends and meet cool people. Like, if it feels like Facebook in the early days, like, back when it was just college kids.

Susan:

But I also am writing about it in my newsletter, that you can sign up for on beyondmargins.com. So I'm talking about a lot of this in a lot of the places, and, you know, I will definitely be talking about it more here on the podcast because I really believe, that it's the thing that kind of underpins better businesses. I think using Calm as the new KPI is always gonna be messy. It's always gonna be a little messy because we are all humans and businesses are made up of human beings. We tend to forget that but, like, that's the, you know human beings buy from businesses.

Susan:

They are in businesses. They're around businesses. They're supported by businesses, and the truth is is that business is about the humans that are involved in it. And so I think it is a it's a place to aim for. That's why that's why it should be a KPI.

Susan:

It should be something that you are aiming for. But the expectation isn't that it's always going to be calm or it's always going to be clean and chill and the truth is we're humans. Stuff happens. It's gonna be a little messy, but using that calm as kind of the guiding light, the touch point, the place that you are constantly trying to build towards is really what I'm trying to talk about. It's an idealistic point that nobody's ever actually going to, like, a 100% accomplish, but that's what we can be aiming for and that's what we can be building our businesses towards.

Sean:

I'm looking forward to hearing more about this. This is gonna be great.

Susan:

I'm looking forward to exploring it more. Planning for a break from your business doesn't have to look like just walking away for months at a time. There are lots of different ways to take a break from your business. You can pause and take a job like I did to give yourself some mental space and time to marinate and figure out your next move without major financial pressures. You can pivot your business to a different type of work, something I'll be talking about in the next episode.

Susan:

You can reinterpret what a sabbatical could look like entirely. When I was planning to come back to my business full time this year, I wanted to build in a significant amount of rest and take 12 weeks off. Originally, I thought that needed to be all in one chunk, but I've actually found it to be a lot more restful to take a week or so off every month. I'll still take 12 weeks off this year, but it's more spread out. Or maybe shifting to part time work feels restful to you.

Susan:

Don't just limit yourself to a traditional definition of a leave or Rest is important for you to be able to build something sustainable over the long term, so considering how to build it into your business is really important. You need to give yourself permission to think about what would feel most restful to you and consider how you could build that into your work moving forward. In the next few episodes, we'll be diving deeper into this topic of taking leaves and sabbaticals and breaks from your business, so make sure you hit subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the rest of our discussion. In the next episode, I'll be digging into parental leaves, different approaches to planning for them whether that's pausing services or having another provider come in and cover for you, and how to handle discussions with your business partners around leaves. In the meantime, if you found this useful, I'd really appreciate you leaving a review in Apple Podcasts or on Spotify or sharing it with a business owner you think could benefit from a listen.

Susan:

It really means a ton and helps me grow this show. And I always love hearing from listeners. So if you have an idea for a guest you'd like to see or a future content theme or you just wanna give me some feedback to help improve the show, you can leave me a message. Just click the link in the show notes.