The Solopreneur Revolution of 2026: A Working Mother’s Playbook for Fractional Work, Portfolio Careers & Purposeful Freedom
My Guest Today: Anna Lundberg
Solopreneur Business Coach | Host of Reimagining Success Podcast
Website: onestepoutside.com
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Today’s conversation is for women who are quietly questioning the way they work, especially after becoming mothers, because so much changes when we become a mom.
My guest today, Anna Lundberg, helps women redesign work around who they are now, not who they were before motherhood or a burnout or a major life shift. Anna is a solopreneur business coach and the host of the Reimagining Success podcast.
After leaving corporate over a decade ago, she’s built a business with sustainable rhythms, prioritizing energy differently and what the future of work in 2026 and beyond looks like for women who refuse to hustle and buy into all that performance-driven productivity.
So this is a very grounded conversation, a very honest conversation about designing work that fits your life and not the other way around.
The Future of Work for Mothers: Where 2026 Is Taking Us
Anna is joining me for a conversation about where 2026 is taking the work, the future of work for women, solopreneurs and for mothers in particular. There’s a lot changing in the way we work. And there’s a lot of shifts in the corporate space and how women are designing their work life going forward. And I think you’re the perfect person to speak to about how we could prepare better for what’s ahead of us.
Anna: I opted out and started designing my work more intentionally quite a long time ago now, but it’s still always evolving and things are happening in the world too. So excited to get stuck in and look at what’s ahead.
What a Solopreneur Business Coach Actually Does
Anna, just to introduce you a little bit to the listeners, you’re a solopreneur business coach, is that right?
Anna: As many solopreneurs, I wear lots of different hats. The core of my work is very much working with people like me who’ve left corporate and are setting up or rather managing a business around their life really. So it is a lot of mothers, parents, but it could also be just people who don’t want to work the nine to five Monday to Friday and do work that they don’t enjoy and hustle their whole life.
So it’s really building a business that allows you to do meaningful work, make an impact within part-time hours, but still earn a good living.
I do also do work with companies in terms of trying to redesign the workspace from the inside. And so that’s really looking at without quitting the 9 to 5, how can we reimagine the system itself so that we, in particular women, don’t have to opt out of that system.
KEY LEARNING: Tackling the System From Both Sides
That sounds so interesting because I feel we need to tackle the system from both sides. We need to, on one side as a woman, as a mom, start designing a work life around our life rather than trying to fit into a system that was never really built for us. And this is a lot of the work that you help women do particularly.
But also from the other side as companies, I think they are starting to realize and react to the shifts on our side, as employees. We are looking for different ways of working and helping them and consulting on a corporate side to help them understand where the upside for them is in this whole scenario.
Anna: That’s it. It is a system that was designed 100 plus years ago. It was designed for a male employee and women at home taking care of domestic life. So it wasn’t designed for our knowledge economy, our work that we do today. It wasn’t designed for dual career families. And there’s so many things about it that just aren’t fit for purpose anymore.
There are glimmers of hope in the four day work week experiment, for example, some companies are flexible and working around core hours and so on. But I feel like it’s experimenting just at the limits, it’s marginal tweaks here and there. And this bigger questioning is quite dramatic.
But it’s also empowering to know that we can, we do have more agency than perhaps we realize as individuals and we can choose to work and live differently.
Where Do I Even Start? The Working Mother’s Dilemma & Ditching Corporate
How do you help women, particularly working mothers now? The struggle I often hear is women not being able to fit into that corporate system anymore. They just can’t make it work. And it’s like this race trying to make something work that just doesn’t work for us.
So it doesn’t matter if you’re in Germany or you’re in Spain or you’re in Switzerland. You have 40 hours that you have to fill. And if I am now a woman that goes, okay, I’ve recognized that. I don’t want to be doing that anymore. Where do I start? What do I do? Ditch Corporate? I’ve never worked in a freelance capacity or as a solopreneur, I’ve never had a business before, but I’m starting to realize this system just, I don’t want this anymore. And there’s a lot of movement in the world. Where do I start? What do I do?
Anna: Sometimes it’s a dramatic, either a health crisis or a redundancy or something that forces you into it, in which case you’re forced to scramble and we’re seeing that happening. So people are suddenly, oh, okay, I need to do this very quickly.
But if you are in the somewhat comfortable position that you do have your job and you can keep that going, obviously, the good news is you don’t have to change from one day to the next. You don’t have to go in and say, I quit tomorrow and then try to build something quickly.
So if you do have the luxury of having the job, then I’d recommend really spending time on getting clear on what it is you want.
KEY LEARNING: Get Clear on Your Criteria First
So one of my first ever bosses in corporate told me when we were changing role, you need to get clear on your criteria. You can’t ask for promotion and the brand you want to work on and move to New York and then need to be okay. Non-negotiable is that I don’t want to work evenings or I don’t want to commute to more than X. Important criteria are these. I need to be earning this much or I want to be earning that much and so on. And then personal preferences as well.
And you need to be really clear on what would success look like. If this works out exactly as you want it to, what does that look like?
And then once you have that vision of what you want, then we can get into the tangible, okay, what business model would support that because you could consider fractional work as something that’s growing quite a bit, which gives you a really nice combination of stability and team with more flexibility, or you can be more of an independent expert, a coach, a consultant, you can have an online business, there are lots of different models.
And I think one of the issues is that so many gurus are telling us that we need to do X, Y, Z. And the first step that we have to do before that is go, okay, what do I want and then choose and design the business model to support that.
Fractional Work: What It Actually Means
So you mentioned fractional work. What is that? For someone that hasn’t heard this term before, working fractional, what does that mean?
Anna: Like with all these words, there’s so much debate as to what exactly it means. It’s like coaching, what’s a coach, what’s mentor and so on. And to some extent, we can get caught up in the semantics of it. In a way, it’s sort of consulting, freelance, part-time work, you can call lots of things.
But the really nice thing about fractional is it means that you’re coming in then. You’re basically doing that role, but fractionally, literally mathematically, for not five out of five, but one fifth over here, maybe two fifths over there, whatever that looks like.
And it means that you’re directly applying your skills from your professional experience. And you still have a bit more of that stability because you’re working on projects over months, hopefully. So you’re not every day trying to scramble for clients. And you get still a really nice element of being part of those deeper projects and team collaborations as well.
So whether you want to argue about whether it’s new or it’s been around before, it’s certainly something that’s growing. It’s bigger in the US at the moment, but it is coming more and more to Europe in terms of waking up to how companies can have access to your expertise, but at a fractional time and cost of a full-time employee.
KEY LEARNING: How to Find Fractional Work (Especially in Europe)
I think that’s really interesting for anyone that’s in corporate right now and looking to step out of this world. What do I do to start planning ahead? And especially oftentimes in Europe, you don’t see these kinds of roles yet. How do I approach that? What do I do? If I want that kind of role and I’m saying, okay, I do want to work part time, supporting a startup, for example, or supporting in a company like a corporate space, and I don’t see these roles anywhere, how would I go about making that happen for me?
Anna: I think to some extent it’s like any job. Although I have never been a pure career coach helping people get a job, I’ve always said, look, especially now with 500 applicants for jobs, all AI written resumes that are then also read by AI, et cetera, et cetera, that’s sort of a game you can’t win.
And so relationships are so, so important to even secure full-time roles. The ones that aren’t advertised is even more so. It’s, I’m working with this startup over here and their marketing that I now know, no, they actually need someone who’s going to work on the HR side of things or the sales or whatever it is. I know people in my network.
So often it’s tricky because it means you need to be on the inside of those networks, but that is what it’s about, it’s relationships. And whether it’s fractional or any kind of work now, the actual conversations with people with your network are what’s going to get you your initial clients.
But before that, it’s really a lot of the marketing stuff, your positioning and being super clear on the value you bring in your credibility and so on. And on the confidence side and pricing yourself and all these things, it’s such a shift from full-time corporate.
They’re doing super well, they’re hiring lots of people, they’re profitable, and that’s a really nice place to come in then. They have budget and they are ready for that next level of, okay, we’ve kind of been just, let’s say, marketing quite tactically. Now we want someone to come in to actually do the proper brand strategy or the marketing campaign and so on. So that’s quite nice.
But thinking, of course, the classic marketing things, who you’re going to work with, what value and how are you going to do that.
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The Positioning Problem: Why Showing Everything Hurts You
I see women particularly, well, anyone that steps out of the corporate space, out of the fixed, this is my role and this is what I do, into let’s say a freelance role. And then coming up with an idea, how do I actually position myself?
And I’ve seen that quite often. I’ve worked on an interim recruiting side in the past two years as well to see that often senior leaders when they go out into that space, their resume shows everything that they’ve basically done in the past. And that’s a problem. That’s a problem particularly when you go as fractional freelance because you need to market yourself to a company in a certain way.
What is your recommendation for people like that? If I want to do that, do I need to address a specific problem? Do I need to pick a specific niche? How do I position myself?
KEY LEARNING: The Long-Term vs. Short-Term Positioning Strategy
Anna: I think you can almost divide it into the long-term intentional build and then the short-term, pragmatic, practical.
A short-term pragmatic thing is finding, over the years I’ve often had associate roles, there are interim roles, as you said, talking to recruiters and being a bit just scrappy about it, I suppose, not worrying too much about if it’s the perfect fit, but at least just get something so that you’re not just sitting at home worrying about it. And obviously with a caveat that you still need to have the time and energy to build the thing you actually want to build.
But realistically, those kinds of partnering with existing experts, there are agencies now who have fractionals there, for example. Could you sign up with one of those? And it just means they do, hopefully, the business development and marketing and so on, and you just show up and do the thing. So the short-term answer is do what you need to do to get something, I suppose.
But then in terms of intentionally building it, it’s much more thinking about exactly as you said. I always say look you don’t have to choose this forever but at least for the next I’d say 90 days really one type of client, one type of message, just stick with that and then you can always add layers on.
And as I said, I do the B2C and B2B, that’s fine, but I can’t talk to both at the same time on the same channel, that just gets confusing. So you can have a carousel of projects over time. When you’re first starting I’d really recommend, and that’s a hit the ground running solution. And then you can start shifting and applying for or networking with other more interesting areas if you want to.
But in the short term, at least again, it comes back to where do you have the network, the relationships and the credibility already.
Reimagining Success: Anna’s Personal Journey
When it comes to reimagining success and work life for working mothers and women, how does that look for you particularly? How did you build that for you in a way where, and maybe it’s not always like that, I’d be interested to hear how did you find that for yourself and where did you arrive?
Anna: So it’s a long journey with lots of twists and turns. When I first left, I left my corporate job in 2013. So I took a sabbatical, I traveled in South America and then halfway through I handed in my resignation because I knew if I came back, I would just get back into my comfort zone and stay there.
And to some extent I opted out quite early, which is a shame, but it means I never quite got to that super, super senior, high pressure role, I suppose.
At the time, I started doing some coaching. I did exercise around my values, so I had things like freedom and authenticity and these things that really guided me. But it really, in the first couple of years, I wasn’t doing it very intentionally.
So I landed very pragmatically again in digital marketing consulting, because that’s what I’ve been doing. So that was an easy transition out. Then I discovered coaching and I went through what I called my hippie phase when I was travelling and living my best life but not earning so much money.
And then the next stage was okay, how do I come to terms with, full disclosure, I was single. I had no mortgage. I had nothing. So that was the luxury, I suppose, of being very slow to come round to what actually it looked like.
But the amazing thing about it is that I designed something that was super flexible and actually worked as my definition of success evolved.
KEY LEARNING: How Success Evolves Through Different Life Seasons
So I now have a five-year-old and a six-year-old and live down here by the sea with the big house. And it just means that I’ve been able to adapt and evolve the business model as I’ve gone.
Even having children, when I had a newborn, I was able to do 5am calls because my partner had the baby or late night. Now I’m far too tired to do that. I can’t do that anymore. When I had a newborn and a toddler, that was different. When I had a toddler and a preschooler, and now, 12 years after quitting my job, I have two kids at school. And actually they’re sleeping better. They’re both at school.
So now for me, success is term time working. It’s four hours a day, give or take. Some days are longer. Some might be shorter. It’s basically 20 hours a week, if you want to at that, term time in the UK is 40 weeks a year.
So it’s the classic, can we have it all? But it’s very much, I do believe that I can pursue my ambitions and have an impact and grow and have that authority and challenging work. And I want to be present, especially everyone tells me it goes so quickly. So we want to be present for those moments while they’re still cute and cuddly. And then, see how that evolves again.
So for me, it’s a very personal definition, but it’s also a living and breathing one that can evolve. A couple of years ago, it probably looked different from what it looks like now. And I’m sure it’ll change again in a few years time.
So it’s giving yourself permission to redefine even what success was according to you, past you. You don’t have to hold on to just because you said something back in the day, it doesn’t mean you have to now stick with it the rest of your life.
And hopefully that’s both empowering and a little bit scary because it means there’s no blueprint to follow, but it means you get to make it up as you go along.
Working Mothers: Giving Ourselves Permission to Change
Is that something that women particularly and especially mothers struggle with a lot, like giving ourselves that permission to change direction and to change our idea of what we expect from a meaningful, impactful work life?
Anna: I think so. I keep using the metaphor, or wonderfully, I should say, in the last week, I’ve had two women come to me saying that they’re having what they would call a bit of a midlife crisis, I suppose, but they’re both trying to find their way back to who they are.
So one is having been in banking for two decades, retraining to go into the medical profession. And another is going on a charity walk on the Great Wall of China next year and hoping to shift into some more meaningful work as well. And it’s so exciting to see.
So I think, yes, it is or a better solution and not just resigning yourself to, oh, this is how it has to be.
So probably listening to podcasts, going to events, talking to other people outside a little bubble, and just hearing those success stories of other women who are making smaller shifts or slightly bigger role company changes or even more dramatically, perhaps, starting up on their own. But it just makes it so much more possible when you’re surrounded by women who are doing that rather than if your circle of friends is all in that, well, the extreme now from Silicon Valley is 9-96, if you’ve heard of that, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days a week, which of course is completely impossible if you’re a mother.
So I don’t know what crazy person came up with that. But it’s rebelling against that narrative and working out what’s going to work for you.
I think we’re still, we need to actively work against that system. And it’s great to see more and more voices actively talking about a new way to work and a different way to work and that we have a choice and we can build it in a different way.
Planning Your Transition: Not a Side Hustle, A Strategic Way To Build Your Business
So Anna and I are talking and I ask her: If I’m not a working mother right now that is struggling with burnout or redundancy or something like that, and I want to plan ahead properly to rebuild that for me – how do I approach it in a strategic way to build my business as a working mum. Let’s say I want to create my own business. And I especially don’t call it a side hustle because I don’t like the word hustle and all the performance-driven business building that comes with it. How do I approach that?
KEY LEARNING: Start With Curiosity and Patience
Anna: It’s such a good question. I think it starts with both curiosity and patience. It’s looking at, rather than worrying, oh, how will I make it work financially? Let’s look at the finances, black and white, see what your saving situation is like, what income you actually need. Where can you cut costs and so on. It’s looking at what the reality is.
Hopefully you’ll be reassured when you see the reality and it might not be as bad as you think, or you’ll go actually now is not the right time because of X, Y, Z and that’s okay too, but at least you’ve looked at it.
So looking at the finances and then looking at your capacity in terms of time, if you’re in at the extreme, a toxic, long hour, 80 hour weeks, you don’t have time and energy and so on, then realistically your energy then to come up with something else is going to be quite limited.
So there it might be, if you can go part-time or perhaps change a role as an interim, as much as I’m such a believer that you can, and almost dare I say it should work for yourself because it’s so empowering and that’s when you really have the autonomy over your time and the work you do, it might be that as a means to an end, you shift just to carve out more time and energy.
I have clients who have maybe one day a week when they can work on their business and maybe two, and that’s amazing. But again, if you’ve got four, five, six hours, if you’re thinking, first of all, all the strategy of positioning and thinking all that through, but then the actual marketing, sales, business development, admin accounting, you can only get so far with a day a week or working evenings here and there.
So if you’re in it for the long haul, there’s no need to be in a rush. And I definitely start tentatively, again, listen to podcasts, start just with a notebook and pen and start journaling and thinking about it, talking to people.
Obviously, working with a coach can really help you do some of that particularly earlier positioning work and so on. So you save time rather than fumbling in the dark if you’re not quite sure what you’re doing.
And then coming up with a plan, really, and it might be longer than you think, or it might be shorter.
KEY LEARNING: Your Timeline Might Surprise You
One of my favorite examples, it was a friend, actually, years ago. I did some coaching with her. And she said, oh, my long-term, like, 10-year plan is to get a horse and to have a business related to horses. And then within a few sessions, we realized, no, actually, she could afford to get a horse now. And she started an equestrian consultancy business.
So it was just sometimes we go, oh, maybe in the future, in 10 years’ time, I might do this thing and actually go, okay, hang on, maybe, but could that be more feasible now?
So again, it just comes back to painting a picture of what you want and then seeing what might be the steps to get there. There’s no magical, I mean, people say you need six months of expenses, ideally a year of savings, I’d say.
But it just depends on your financial situation, your energy, your capacity, how flexible your partner is and so on. So it really has to be tailored to you. And that’s what I think a lot of the advice is missing. It’s like, oh, this is what you do. Just follow this blueprint and then, ta-da, it’s going to work. And it’s so dependent on, as I said, your energy, your family situation, your finances.
Does Business Model Matter? B2C vs. B2B Timelines
Does it depend on the type of business I’m building as well? So do you feel that building a business to consumer where I might be building like a course, one is faster than the other, and one needs more patience and more capability, more learning, more structuring than the other?
KEY LEARNING: Understanding Different Buying Cycles
Anna: I’ll say there’s a few dimensions to it. One is the buying cycle. The reality is that corporate is really slow. We see again and again, you might have a conversation. I did one off-site last year, and it took five, six different calls with a general manager and the HR, and it’s all budgets are changing and this, that and the other, and that can be quite a long lead time. But then the big corporate contracts obviously can be pretty lucrative, so that’s worth it.
On the other hand, if you want to work with me as your coach, you go, yes, pay, boom, done. It’s one person, maybe you talk to your partner or you have a think about it. So buying decisions can be faster with B2C.
Something like being a coach, it’s not actually regulated. So I could literally say, hey, I’m a coach and start charging you today. Most of us want to do training and ethically know what we’re doing and so on before we do something. So that, of course, it’s something to consider.
But really, you don’t need any infrastructure. You don’t, as much as we love doing branding and websites and so on, you could just start saying to people that you know, hey, I’m coaching X type of women who are looking to do Y, do you know someone and you could relatively quickly get a couple of clients.
And again we’ve talked about the fractional, maybe fractional roles not so much but certainly some interim work, maternity cover, something that could be relatively quick to get.
If you want to build an online course, sort of passive income where you’ve got all this software and systems and so, obviously that takes longer. You need to build the audience, you need to work out the messaging and the problem you’re solving and you need to record the stuff and sell the stuff.
But there are certainly choices you can make in terms of hitting the ground running. For me one-to-one coaching is an easier one to do than to have a group program let’s say because one-to-one again you just need one person to say yes and then you’re off.
So definitely thinking about the different options on the table. And again, being pragmatic in the short term, even if the vision for the longer term is a bit more nuanced and complicated. And you can build that as you go.
The Future of Work for Mothers 2026: Predictions
Where Are We Heading and the Solopreneur Revolution of 2026
One interesting question, I think, is with all the change that is happening right now in the world, in the corporate space, I mean, so many people are talking about redundancies, being replaced, but also working mothers intentionally stepping out of corporate spaces and redesigning their work life. Where do you think, when we look at the future of work, so to speak, where is it going? What do you see? What kind of trends do you see now? And how is work, work life changing for us?
KEY LEARNING: The Polarization of Work Culture
Anna: So it’s interesting from a macro perspective. If you go back, I’d quite like to look at the history of things. But again, the 9 to 5 is relatively recent, but still the assumption that’s sort of the natural thing, the factory work. And then you had the Second World War where women came into the workforce. You had digital coming in. Of course, COVID sped things up. We were actually able to see that we can work remotely and flexibly and so on. And then you have a bit of the backlash now with the return to office mandates and things.
So there are macro trends happening. I think without getting political, a bit like politics is quite polarized. So you’ve got, if we’re going to be stereotypical about it, sort of old white CEOs who are saying you’ve got to come to the office, you’ve got to work these hours, all about corporate and capitalism and the hustle culture of Silicon Valley, you’ve got that end of the spectrum, the Elon Musk quite toxic work culture, I would say, with a bit of bias.
And then you’ve got, in my space, I’m in a bit of a bubble because I see so much of it because that’s the work I do. On LinkedIn, all I see is wonderful people trying to change things. So whether it’s making workplaces more accessible for neurodivergent individuals, there’s a big, amazing campaign in the UK run by someone called Elliot, who it’s called parenting out loud. So it’s particularly about dads actually, but saying, hey, I’m going to pick up my kids now, not pretending and covering and hiding that.
So I interviewed a guy on a podcast recently, Nigel Kilpatrick, who’s all around compassionate leadership. He comes from quite a toxic tech kind of culture, and he’s repositioning.
So there’s so many people working at this end of the spectrum where we’re trying to shift things, as we said from the beginning, both systemically inside and then, unfortunately, to some extent, by opting out.
Unfortunately, there is also this other side, the pendulum swings both ways. But what I would say as an individual, again, you get to choose. Just know that that’s not all there is, this Elon Musk 996 world.
There are, even if you don’t want to work for yourself, there are companies, and I see them talk about it a lot on LinkedIn. They have parental leave, not just maternity leave, and they have two proper weeks off for Christmas, and they have Fridays off, there are things like that, the four day work week again.
So it’s again getting clear on what you want and then looking for the best match for you and there are more and more solutions.
AI and Technology: The Real Story for Solopreneurs
It’s tough to predict, obviously AI has the potential in a way to free us up to do more interesting work and to do less work but at the moment it’s just making us do more, do more. So technology always promises wonderful things, but unless we change how we show up and behave, it just becomes more of the hamster wheel, just more busy work rather than, as we’re hoping, reducing that and doing more of what really matters.
Well, and I love now how you spoke about AI and technology in a positive way for change because often what I see these days is actually choose to work differently and I always feel like even companies when they do a lot of optimization through AI there’s just as many companies I think that say oh I don’t want that actually I want to stay in touch with humans and I want to have customer service that is different and there will always be a different route to choose from would you agree?
KEY LEARNING: How AI Changes the Game to kick-start the Solopreneur Revolution of 2026
Anna: By the way, as a real entrepreneur as well, I have to say AI is a game changer. The amount, if I take my podcast, for a while I had an assistant doing it. I think back in the day, I was doing my own transcriptions, which blows my mind. That was absurd that I even did that. But then I was doing a lot of different tools and it took me hours. And now I’ve created a custom GPT. I press, I say, give me all the assets, boom. I did 10 episodes up on Monday, no problem.
Things now, actually as much as I’ve been really virtual and remote, meeting people in real life is just such a nice way to connect the dots to have that interaction anyway but also to build trust with them. So you’re not just a flat person they’re reading online but they’re actually, I’m getting people saying oh yeah I’ve been following your podcast and now we’ve had this personal interaction it’s so nice.
And so certainly as an individual solopreneur it means you could have essentially a team without having to almost pay anything at all, which is hugely exciting. And if you’re inside a company, again, there’s ways to, in fact, I have a client who now helps women leaders use AI to not be scared of it, which is great.
So there’s definitely lots of possibilities. It’s so uncertain and nobody really knows on the macro scale again. So all I can say is continue to be curious and learn and so on.
And ultimately whether you’re going to work in a company or for yourself taking ownership of your own career I think making sure you’re upskilling, building a network.
My worst thing is when I see on LinkedIn people who have no picture on LinkedIn or their whole identity is just senior VP at this company and that’s all they are and it’s just unfortunately you’re really putting yourself at risk there.
You are more than just that job title. And realistically, we’re not going to be like our grandparents working at the same company, our whole life, until we retire.
And so again, even if you’re not urgently now considering going out on your own or changing, it’s far better to put the pieces in place before you need them. So if you can now build your personal brand, talk to people, make sure everything is up-to-date, again, learn new skills, make sure you’re staying on top of things.
And then when you do lose that role and that job and that company, it’s like a big part crumbling.
How Anna Helps Women Rebuild Their Next Chapter and Meaningful Work
Before we say goodbye now, I want to ask you as well in what kind of capacity, what’s your sort of the way you help women rebuild their next chapter. How do you do that particularly, as one-on-one coaching you said, but is it also the systems that you help them set up or do you have a focus area where you say this is how I help them tackle X, Y, Z that if they were to work with you?
KEY LEARNING: The Solopreneur Operating System
Anna: Absolutely. So it’s really now looking at what I’m calling the Solopreneur Operating System. So it’s looking how you design the business, how you create demand, and then how you make your delivery sustainable.
And so it’s looking at designing intentionally your business model, making sure you have the marketing and sales system in place, and you’re not constantly on that awful content hamster wheel where you’re chasing the algorithm and so on, which a lot of people I see have.
And then, of course, making sure that the delivery, actually running the business as well as delivering the work, is then sustainable for you and your family.
And that was one of the biggest changes for me when I went to an event back 12, 13 years ago, being surrounded by others who felt the same as me. They felt, oh, there must be something more than this. I feel like I could do something. And that was so reassuring to me that there are others.
Just like in the conversation we’re having now, there are others who don’t want to work late into the night after the kids have gone to bed and have the kids in wraparound childcare just so that you can stay a bit longer in a meeting or do a PowerPoint presentation or whatever. I don’t want to trivialize the work you’re doing, but there is a different way to work.
So I’m excited to see that both again with individuals and also then hopefully in broader economic and business terms as well.
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