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What you’ll learn in this episode:
What if the business you built for freedom is the very thing consuming all of your time, energy, and space?
In this final episode of the Summer Shorts Series, I’m talking about one of the most important realizations I’ve had after more than 250 episodes, hundreds of client conversations, and years of working with successful business owners:
Success is not the same as freedom.
So many entrepreneurs start their businesses because they want more freedom.
Freedom of time.
Freedom of choice.
Freedom of income.
Freedom to build a life on their own terms.
But somewhere along the way, many business owners create a business that looks successful on paper – the revenue is growing, the team is expanding, the offers are selling – but the life they thought they were building feels farther away than ever.
They have more success, but less space.
More revenue, but less peace.
More opportunity, but less freedom.
In this episode, I’m unpacking why growth itself is not the ultimate goal, why success on paper can hide exhaustion and over-dependence, and why the real measure of a thriving business is whether it supports the life you actually want.
Because the best businesses are not just profitable.
They are built for the person who owns them.
In this episode, you will learn to:
- Why external success and true freedom are not always the same thing.
- How business owners accidentally create companies that depend on them for everything.
- Why growth without clarity and intention can lead to more pressure, longer hours, and less personal freedom.
- How to reverse-engineer your business around the life you actually want to create.
- Why white space, creativity, and strategic thinking are essential for building a business that supports you instead of consuming you.
Mentioned in this episode:
Work/Connect with me:
Jessica Miller (00:00.952)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the It’s Your Offer Podcast. We are in episode number five and our final episode of the Summer Shorts series. This series is a collection of shorter, straight-to-the-point episodes designed to give you a quick sort of shot in the arm of clarity, perspective, and momentum as you move through your summer. For those of you that have been following along during this series, you know we’ve had a bunch of great episodes that have aired before this one. If you missed them, no worries, you’re in the right place at the right time.
Go back and check those out. I think you’re gonna really love them. And check out our 250th episode where I sort of distilled down all the things that I have learned about growing a business with ease and with joy and put that into that episode. And that really inspired the summer series. So it’s worth a listen. So if you happen to miss those, definitely go back and check them out. And don’t worry, there’s no particular order that you have to listen to them in. So you can listen to this one and then go back to that one, whatever works. But I think that they are worth a listen. So, on to our episode today for the summer shorts series. Today’s episode, I think, is really an important one. And I think something that was super surprising to me when I thought about business owners that were successful, that were growing, that had maybe arrived at the place that I was aspiring to be. We all have these ideas of what people are like or what businesses are like when they, you know, hit a magic revenue number or when they get to a certain size. You know, we have these preconceived ideas of what that looks like.
But the more business owners that I talked to, and especially more of the business owners that I talked to that were clients of mine that I was helping, I was starting to see this pattern that was really surprising. And the conversations that I was having with them were really surprising. And those conversations are really circled around this idea that, you know, these business owners had reached this level of success. They had hit the, you know, the revenue goals that they wanted to or built the business that they had always wanted to build.
But somehow they didn’t have the life that they thought they were going to create with this business. They had essentially been successful. They were making more money. They were growing. They had like done the things that they wanted to do, you know, on paper and by all these external measures, they were successful. They had like quote unquote done it. And yet they were exhausted and they had less freedom and less expansive time than they had ever expected.
Jessica Miller (02:26.377)
Their space was really being consumed by their business and they were thinking about it all the time. And, you know, what came out of these conversations was this idea that when we build a business, when we have goals, when we, you know, have these like bigger, better things that we want to do, that the growth in and of itself is not ultimately the goal. The goal of building the business that you want, getting to the revenue level that you want, or having the quote unquote success that you want is for the business to support the life you truly want. And I was seeing over and over that so often, somewhere along the way, the business owners that I was talking to were either forgetting that or it was getting lost in the process. And it really, like, caused me to pause because again, we have so many preconceived ideas of what life is like at the top. And wow, if I was that person and I had this thing or I was making that much money or, you know, I was doing this kind of work, like life would be awesome. I know for me, I’ve had that thought many times when I think about like when I started my career and especially in corporate and where I ended up before I left corporate, I could not have imagined that level of success.
And I definitely thought back in the day when I’d first started that, my gosh, if I could just make this amount of money, like I would be on Easy Street. And here I was on Easy Street feeling anything but easy. And I found the same thing to be true many, many times. And what I’ve discovered from this is this idea that success is not the same as freedom. It’s not the same as choice. And for many entrepreneurs, I hear freedom as the number one reason people start their own business. It’s definitely one of the number one reasons I hear why people leave corporate America and go into starting their own business. But it is not the same as success. And making sure that those things are architected in the right way is really important. So we start our businesses with this idea of creating freedom, and we want things like freedom of time. That’s a huge piece of it.
Jessica Miller (04:41.367)
We want to be able to do whatever we want, like we want freedom of choice. I remember visualizing what it would be like to sit at my desk and be able to do whatever I wanted for the whole day. You know, that was like this really important and what felt like very elusive thing. People want freedom of their income. I definitely wanted to be able to earn as much money as I wanted and not have this ceiling over my head and not be bound by my job description and what my boss thought. You know, that was a big thing.
And this overall sense of like building a life on your terms. Like you are in charge. You get to do whatever you want. The world is your oyster. That was why I started, and I hear this very often from business owners and especially successful ones. But often they’re comparing where they are to what they thought it would be and it not being in alignment. So what was happening, and what I have seen happen is that businesses grow, but they accidentally create a different reality than what they had initially set out to do. And the reality that they create is a business that is dependent on them for everything. They are the linchpin. They are often in the middle of it all and the bottleneck. And this becomes really, really problematic because although you have everything that you want, you end up working harder, being more chained, or not being able to put down this business that you’ve created in the name of freedom that actually is doing everything except give you that. And in the process of creating it, you are sacrificing all of the things that you created the business for. So you’re sacrificing all your time. You’re sacrificing all your mental energy. You’re sacrificing, many times, your money. We’re burning through cash. We’re burning through things like that.
So this success on paper can really hide these insidious things that are happening with these quote unquote successful business owners. Things like working long hours—they’re working dawn till dusk. I shared on another episode that I had met with someone who was actually doing some work in my house and he had just had a baby and he was telling me how he was working all the time. He’d work all day, come home for basically bedtime.
Jessica Miller (06:57.087)
Maybe dinner. And then after that, he’d get back on his computer and do all this other stuff till like two o’clock in the morning. It was just robbing him of all these things. So it camouflages these long hours, the constant stress that feels like a monkey on your back. You like cannot get away from it. Blowing through boundaries and a lack of boundaries. Like, especially for us that work at home, I bet many of you have experienced this. Like there’s no boundary. We’re not like leaving the office. There’s no commute home.
It’s like our desk is in the next room, and therefore there’s no distinction between work and the rest of your life. You sacrifice relationships, you sacrifice your health, and you actually have very little personal freedom because the business and you and your personal life just become one intertwined entity that you never put down. And this is something that I, you know, talked about in the last episode of the series—just this idea of
You know, you’re always amped up. Your body and your neurological system is always on. And that is the opposite of freedom, right? You’re really owned by this. So the businesses that you build to create freedom should not be the thing consuming all of your time and energy and your money. That’s not what the issue is. And we think that the problem is growth. Like, we hear this a lot. Like, this is just a byproduct of growth. And I’m not here to suggest that.
Sometimes it is a byproduct of growth because as you’re evolving, it’s a different playing field. And so you’re learning how to optimize that new playing field that you’re on. But I actually think the bigger issue is not the growth part. It’s the growth without clarity and intention of what it is you want to build in your life that the business is becoming the most powerful asset for. We’re not reverse-engineering from, like, this is the life we want, this is the way we want to spend our days.
And how do we create the business that supports that? And if freedom is the thing, what does freedom look like for you? Right. How do you create days that encompass a lot of freedom—mental freedom, financial freedom, all of those things? Like, what does that look like, reverse-engineered into a business of your own? That is actually the problem. We don’t start with that end in mind and actually think that life through.
Jessica Miller (09:12.545)
And this is something that I’ve seen both in growth in general and in the offers work that I do. It’s like, okay, if you want this kind of a life, if you want this kind of a cadence, if maybe there’s this revenue goal, if we take this offer that you created, pretend that makes you, like, travel five days a week and you never see your family and you’re like gone for, you know, 50-plus percent of the time, like, is that going to give you this life that you want? And the answer is no. And that doesn’t mean you have to let go of your dream of the offer or the job or the success that you want. But it’s like, how do we get creative and create something that actually is in alignment with this life and this freedom that you want? What does this look like? And, you know, we are such a huge part of our business as founders and business owners, but sometimes we forget that we’re creating for everything else, for the things on paper, for the line items, for the revenue line, for all the things that we forget that like we are the most important customer. And so
If we design the business first and hope for it to work out, you know, for our life in the back end, we often get stuck. The people that I have seen do this best, and what I have found to be most powerful in my business, start by envisioning what they want. You do the work of going deep and envisioning this life, this ideal situation, and you work backwards from that.
One of my mentors, one of the first people I ever got certified with, was Martha Beck. And she talked about this ideal day exercise. And I have to tell you, like I could have sat there for like hours almost like meditating and envisioning what my ideal day looks like. It was, like, part logistical, part meditative. You basically visualize from the moment that you wake up in the morning to the moment that you go to bed at night, what does this look like? And you could do it like over, you know, several weeks in your mind as well.
Down to like, where are you? What are you wearing? What are you doing with your day? If you have a business, what does that business look like? What kind of clients are you working with? It was so powerful. And when I started with this, you know, that vision and asked questions like, what do I want my life to look like? How do I want to spend my time? What matters most to me? What kind of work really energizes me? And what boundaries and guardrails and structure do I need to fit around that in order to make that work?
Jessica Miller (11:36.096)
Everything changed. And the business owners that I know that are the most successful in creating a life of freedom from a business that is really successful are the ones that design the business around the life that they are clear on and answer those questions that I just mentioned to you. So growth really does become much more powerful when you’re clear about things like your values, your priorities, your definition of success. When that internal work and that clarity really drives what you create in your business. And I think somewhere along the way, again, even like with modern mainstream media or just the internet of what we hear about what it takes to grow a business, you do not have to sacrifice your life for growth. I think that’s been one of the most difficult things and actually some of the stickiest things about the work that I do is helping people really understand that you can grow with ease, that you can do the next best thing in your business really well. And the fact that doing that is actually going to have a huge return on investment for that time and a hugely better outcome bends people’s brains because we are so used to hearing that it has to be hard that we don’t quite believe that that’s true.
You know, and it takes a lot of unearthing for people, like, what does that mean for them, or maybe even listening to a lot of these episodes before it starts to like sink into their brain logically that this could be possible, or even more so, like this could be possible for me. We are not conditioned to that. So people just kind of get shot out of the gate, they’re very driven, there’s like a lot of, you know, momentum and muscling through, and then we get to this place where we’re like, shoot, like where am I?
I’ve been running in this direction and I don’t know if I want to be here. So what we do when we get to this place is that we come to a point where it’s not about like building more or adding more. It’s actually the skill and the superpower of letting go of the things that no longer belong in our business in order to make it line up with the life that we want. And when I say letting go,
Jessica Miller (13:59.178)
I mean looking at the business holistically and understanding what actually is not moving the needle and infusing space to see that and to let in what I think creates the most growth, which is white space. We cannot be packed and be in the doing constantly all the time if we want to come up with our next million dollar idea, if we want to come up with the plan that actually makes, you know, makes it evident and makes sure that we are going to create the business that’s actually in alignment with what we want. So we have to step out of this place where we’re thinking that productivity is the answer. And productivity means filling every available moment in our calendar. Because when we allow for this white space and this expansion, what seeps right into that vacuum are things like our strategic thinking.
Our ability to make better decisions because there’s spaciousness. When we are marinating in this white space, we also dial up our creativity. I don’t know if anyone’s ever had this experience where they’re like walking or running or on vacation, and it just feels like divine downloads, like one after the other. That is the white space. That is the creativity and the ingeniousness and you connecting all the dots between what you’re doing in the moment and what you’re wanting in the moment and connecting those things together.
It also provides flex, like there’s flex in that white space. And it allows you to be present in that moment with the thoughts that are coming into your brain, which I do think are these sort of divine downloads. It’s allowing your intuition to have the mic. And I think that is really important. So for me personally, I absolutely went through this. And I realized how much faster I was growing when I was quote unquote doing nothing.
I would intentionally have these times where I could just receive information, sometimes from myself, sometimes from specific places. And when I would receive this information, the decisions and the clarity and the growth that I created in that space was huge. It was absolutely huge. And so I started to allow for that time intentionally. I started to think about what I wanted in it and what it would take.
Jessica Miller (16:23.809)
for me to get the things that I wanted in my personal life and then what I wanted in my business to connect in those spaces. And I started to get a lot more clear and a lot more creative and frankly, a lot more brave because I could see what I wanted so clearly, like they were fitting together so powerfully that I was able to let go of the other stuff with confidence and go after it in a way that felt led rather than pushing, if that makes sense.
And so some of the things that came out of that is I started moving away from chasing like revenue numbers just for revenue’s sake. I mean, first of all, we’ve talked on this podcast and even in the summer short series about like the difference between revenue and profit. They are very different. And it’s great to have revenue goals. Everybody should have them. But revenue for the sake of what? Like what is that giving you? So it allowed me to move away from just chasing these numbers. And some of them are vanity numbers. Like everybody wants to make a million dollars, right? You know, like things like that that just had no meaning.
It also allowed me to become a lot more intentional with my time and to change my mindset around what I was telling myself about that time. I used to deliberate around, am I gonna do work, quote unquote, do work, or am I gonna like go for a run? It was like, am I gonna like take care of myself or am I gonna, you know, go and sit at my desk? And finally I just decided like, you know what? Some of the best work, quote unquote, I create is on my runs.
You know what I mean? So I just started changing the mindset around that. I had huge swaths of time in my calendar. I would manipulate my calendar depending on the season of my life that I was in. Many of you have listened to the episode that I’ve put in this podcast series around time. And you’ve probably also—and if you haven’t, we can put it in the show notes—but there is another episode around what I do around my summers and how I maneuver my schedule to fit with my lifestyle and what creates my best work. Like being in hamster mode and trying to fight against the grain of a change in routine in summer was not the answer to doing good work. And I figured that out. But I had to get over this whole idea of like, what? You’re not gonna see clients on Mondays? Like, you know, all that stuff. So
Jessica Miller (18:42.101)
you know, being much more intentional with my time from a place of power and confidence, learning what to say no to. Like I am very, very, very particular about what I say yes to. It is only the things that are the most important and it’s only the things that I can commit to. And recognizing that doing more wasn’t actually creating results. Like when I got clear on what is moving the needle for me and what I want and what I need to do to create that, that is when everything changed. And so now, I have very, very specific days that I do client-facing work. I have very specific times that I will do deep work. I make sure that my days are not packed with face time eight to five, like for three days in a row. I mean, that does not work for me. And every quarter, there is a chunk of time where it is like deep white space. It is using all of those internal tools to bring to the surface all of my best, most creative ideas.
And that stuff is really the power behind the business growth. So I used to very much think success was about doing. And I think I even said it in this podcast episode that I love being productive. I love creating things. However, when I really got down to it, I learned that the being is equally as important as the doing. And that balance of energy and that balance of intention and the getting very clear about where I am going to put my focus, how that links to the life that I want, and how that then feeds back into my business—huge. And mentally, one of the most important things that I have uncovered, and I think many of my most successful clients have as well, is that white space is not wasted time. It is not quote unquote doing nothing. It is what allows you to create and lead and grow well. It is ultimately what differentiates success for the sake of success or success with a life intentionally that you want to be leading and a business that you want to be leading.
So when we boil all that down, like freedom is really the real success metric. And that is the thing that I want all of you to walk away from this podcast really understanding is that what freedom looks like for you, the way you architect that, the way that you create it is uniquely yours. But that feeling of expansiveness, of looking at your life and feeling grateful for what it is and loving what you see and it being in alignment with who you are.
Jessica Miller (21:09.121)
That is the measure of success. And I know some leaders who are making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars that are in that place. And then there’s people that are making multiple millions of dollars that are not. It is not tied to the number that you’re making. It’s tied to the intention for you of what you create and what it looks like for you. So as people mature, as businesses mature, they
realize that those goals are not simply revenue. They’re something deeply personal and that they are linked to their freedom. And that freedom is really centered around owning their time, protecting their energy, being present with the people that they love, working on what matters most, what is most enriching and impactful, and creating that impact without sacrificing themselves and everything else that they have essentially built the business to protect becomes like the thing that gets, like, shoved off the cliff first. It’s not that. Most business owners that I’ve seen, they actually aren’t necessarily the biggest. They are the most aligned. They are the most on point. And they know what matters and they’ve built intentionally around that. And that is really the most important piece. And so that true success metric is really freedom and it has been for me too. So I want to leave you with this idea of what does freedom actually look like for you? That would be the question. Like, that ideal day, what does that look like? What are you trying to create? Getting really clear on that. And then is the business that you have now actually supporting that? And this isn’t a judgment. It’s just looking at the data. So what do you want? Is what you’re doing now actually in service of that or not? And what is one thing that you can change over the next, let’s say, for the summer, the next three months that would create more of that true success of freedom?
Just one thing. I’m a big fan of, like, change one thing, optimize, measure, then change something else. So write down that, you know, definition of success, not anyone else’s, not the internet’s, not, you know, whatever industry you’re in, like yours. And then ask yourself, is my business really helping me to create that? And if the answer is no or maybe, or it could do better, like what would you want to change? One thing.
Jessica Miller (23:32.598)
You’re the boss. You get to do it. That’s the beauty of being an entrepreneur. All the guts and all the glory. It’s all you, which is awesome. So, as I mentioned, after, you know, 250 episodes, hundreds of clients, thousands of conversations, you know, this one thing has become, you know, incredibly clear that, you know, the best businesses aren’t just profitable. They’re built for you. They’re built for the founder and the owner. They support them.
They support the people who built them, the people around them. They create true freedom. And that freedom comes in the form of choice. It comes in the form of joy. It comes in the form of leading in a way that feels deeply personal and deeply impactful. So that the success that they’re actually having in their real life and in their business is as good as what it could look like on paper. Because at the end of the day, that goal isn’t simply to build a bigger business. It’s not simply to hit a revenue number. It’s to build a business that gives you the life that you truly want. And every one of you listening to this podcast, you can have whatever you want. I think the goal is just to make sure that we know exactly what that is and we take the time to pause and we create the white space to make sure that the business that we’re building is in service to that thing and that we’re protecting ourselves—frankly, the most important asset that there is.
I hope this Summer Shorts series is really like getting straight to your core. Listen to these on repeat. If you need that shot in the arm, if you need a reminder, that’s what we’re here for. But I’m here to say you got this. And as entrepreneurs, we really are a rare and incredible group of individuals. Make no mistake that if you have taken this journey, regardless of how long you’ve been in it, you are somebody special. You’re here to do big things in the world.
It does not have to be hard. We do not need to hustle. You have everything you need inside of you and in your business to optimize and grow easily and have the life that you want. And we’re here to cheer you on and share with you all of the things we’ve learned and our best practices so that you can learn from those things and hopefully shortcut some of the things that maybe we did along the way that we wouldn’t do again. So, to all of you, have a beautiful week and I cannot wait to see you next week.
