Are You Building a Business You’ll Secretly Grow to Hate?
We all start our businesses the same way. Full of gusto, excited to get going, and if we’re being honest, absolutely no idea what we;re doing. There’s a ton of help out there though, so we follow it. We follow the advice, we do what we’re told is right, and we work really bloody hard. And you know what? It is hard. Those early days are a grind and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. I don’t believe a word of this “I woke up with an idea and three days later I was booked out” nonsense. It takes tenacity, a solid work ethic, and a willingness to keep going when it feels like nothing is working.
But the good thing about those early days is there is a clear path and absolutely loads of help. And if you’ve got the drive, you get yourself to the point where you’re creating a living. That might look different for everyone, I’m not saying six figures comes easily to all of us, but getting from ground zero to actually earning, in the grand scheme of things, that’s the straightforward part.
Then you arrive at whatever success feels like for you. You sit there for a bit, ride the crest of the wave, and it feels wonderful. People know who you are, your name starts getting mentioned, recommendations come in and you live at that level for a while and then, because you’re human, you start wanting whatever’s next.
The Cage You Built Without Noticing
What’s changed now is that you’ve created a bit of a cage for yourself and suddenly what felt good starts to feel like a lot. How are you supposed to do the actual work, promote the business, go to networking events, be someone people talk about, and balance all of that with your actual life at the same time? The money that once felt unbelievable suddenly doesn’t feel like quite enough for everything it costs you to earn it. Because scaling a business brings a whole new set of problems nobody warned you about. More visibility, more decisions, more balls in the air. You’ve probably got an accountant by now, maybe a VA, but it still feels like you are carrying an awful lot on your own.
This is a bit of a generalisation but actually, I am confident that it’s widespread enough to mention, us, women specifically are never going to be okay with a business that swallows our life whole. We are never going to be the ones who can fully sacrifice everything, our family, our friends, the things that make us us, at the altar of building something bigger. And that’s actually the whole point. We started our businesses to have more freedom, more choice, more life. So when the business starts taking all of that away instead of giving it, something changes in how we feel about our business. We might not be able to name it straight away, but we feel it.
And then there’s something that happens which I think is one of the most isolating parts of the whole experience. You’re suddenly in a space where there’s less advice, fewer people who understand what you’re actually navigating, and loads of people telling you that you’re smashing it, which makes it feel even worse. Because inside you’re thinking, holy shit, I’m not smashing it. I’m working every hour God sends and I’m not actually sure what I’m supposed to be doing next.
The Networking Moment
I’ve been in many a room, looking every inch the part, and had someone stand in front of me and say “you are absolutely smashing it, look at you go.” And I could see on their face that they genuinely meant it. Maybe they were rooting for me, maybe I’d given them hope about where they were going, maybe they just really liked me. Either way I smiled and said thank you so much, it’s been a brilliant year.
Then I went back to my hotel room and thought, why couldn’t I just tell them the truth? That I was earning the same as twelve months ago despite working triple the hours, that I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing next, that I was tired in a way a good night’s sleep wasn’t fixing.
Because it would have shattered the image. Because I didn’t want to disillusion them. And honestly, I wouldn’t have known where to start.
This is how you end up building a business you secretly grow to hate. It doesn’t happen all at once, it’s not a dramatic “Oh my God, I hate it all”. It’s a slow realisation that you’ve stopped recognising what you’re working for, the joy goes quiet, the stress levels rise and because everyone around you is telling you how well you’re doing, you can’t even say it out loud.
The Spiral That Looks Like Trying
When we hit that wall, when the growth stalls and the overwhelm creeps in, we start looking sideways. And there is always someone who looks like they’ve cracked it. Someone whose content is everywhere, whose brand is immaculate, whose whole presence just seems to be captivating all of LiLi Land, my new name for LinkedIn, which I thought of approximately 0.5 seconds ago, and inevitably, that person starts teaching other people how to do what they’re doing.
You’ll know the type of trend I mean without me having to name it. A particular aesthetic takes hold, a certain style, a specific way of presenting yourself, and suddenly you can spot from a mile off everyone who bought the same £37 masterclass. Women I know to be warm, funny, completely themselves, suddenly showing up with a different tone, different photography, a different persona altogether. And then I get on a call with those same women and they say, “I don’t know what’s gone wrong, I’m not signing clients.”
At the time I didn’t have the answer for them. Mainly because I was doing my own version of exactly the same thing. No preaching from an ivory tower here.
This change of approach often comes with a pretty heavy investment too. And look, your personal brand absolutely matters. But spending on photographers, brand consultants and a whole new aesthetic when what’s actually not working is the strategy underneath it is solving the wrong problem. That IS a business strategy problem, and no amount of good lighting fixes it.
You Are Enough, Exactly The Way You Are
What breaks my heart is women thinking they are not enough exactly the way they are.
I’m not saying we all get to pitch up online as the version of ourselves that’s six episodes deep into a Netflix binge on a Wednesday night. Of course there are parts of us we keep for ourselves, and of course we curate what we share, that’s just being a human. But there is a massive difference between curating and falsifying and every single person I have watched falsify a version of themselves has struggled. Every single one. The content feels hollow, the sales dry up, the enthusiasm disappears and the really painful part is that the business they had before, the one built on just being themselves, was often working perfectly well.
There are women out there running perfectly successful businesses who suddenly decide they need a bigger name, more followers, more of a presence, and in chasing that they completely derail the thing that was actually working.
Of course we can and should strive to evolve but being known by more people for a version of yourself you don't recognise isn’t success.
I Did This Too, More Recently Than I’d Like To Admit
Let me be completely transparent with you, because I lived this. Last October I rebranded, became a limited company, went VAT registered, and then spent the best part of seven months in a complete spiral. I just didn’t know what to do, so I did all of it. I looked elsewhere for my tone of voice, I tried to be punchier, I tried to be spicier. I packaged up VA services in a hundred different ways and spent the whole time fighting against the one thing I actually knew I was good at, which was working as a strategic business consultant for women who’d already built something brilliant.
I was outsourcing my own self belief to other people. And the more opinions I gathered, the less I trusted anything I knew about myself. Someone told me, with genuine good intentions, that to be taken seriously at a higher level I needed to stop being so friendly, approachable, and girl next door and for a while, I actually tried to do that. I gave up my own magic because somebody else told me it wasn't enough for the level I was aiming for.
I was even told that there was no way I could successfully keep the VA arm of the business and be a consultant at the same time, which genuinely baffled me.
Just because I didn't want to do VA work myself anymore didn't mean I wanted to let go of my whole team, it didn't mean I wanted to abandon the agency I'd spent years building, it didn't mean I'd stopped being proud of what that team does. I just wanted to step into a different role within it. And actually, still running the agency makes me a better consultant, because I'm living it. I'm not advising from the outside, I'm building from the inside alongside the women I work with.
What an enormous waste of time all that second-guessing was.
What Actually Needs To Change
At some point every woman building a real business hits a ceiling. Not a ceiling of effort, she’s already giving everything she’s got but a ceiling of perspective. You cannot strategise your way out of a blind spot by yourself. As my good friend Sophie Lee says, “you can’t see the label from inside the jar.” And that is exactly what makes it a blind spot.
The answer isn’t a new course, a rebrand, a louder voice, or a different aesthetic. I mean actually, it might be, but all of those should be something considered properly, not done in a spray and pray method because you feel like you should. The answer is someone who isn’t in the weeds with you. Someone who can look at the whole picture, the business and the human running it, and help you work out what actually needs to change and in what order.
One of my clients came to me as a six figure business owner who was already known as the best in her industry. Impressive on paper, and genuinely impressive in person, but she knew something needed to change. She knew that to get to multi six figures, she needed a business consultant in her corner, not just a team around her. In the time we’ve worked together, she’s earned more in a single quarter than she did across the whole of the previous year. She;s spoken on stage multiple times, won multiple awards, and tripled her LinkedIn reach. She didn’t just stay at the top of her industry. She’s now being recognised as one of the top businesswomen full stop, not just in her niche.
And we did all of that while making sure the business fits around her life, not the other way round. Because that’s always the actual goal, isn’t it? A business that fits the life you want, not one that swallows it.
Why I Do This Work
I have been the woman at that networking event, smiling and nodding and carrying it all home. I know what it feels like to build something you’re proud of on the outside and exhausted by on the inside. And I know it doesn’t have to stay that way.
That’s why I am so passionate about helping female founders and female entrepreneurs get through that exact stage.
Every woman I work with deserves a business that actually fits her life. One that lets her be completely herself, creates wealth, and leaves enough of her over for the people and things she loves. That’s not too much to ask for, it’s the whole point.
The version of you that got you here is brilliant. She’s just taken you as far as she can on her own.
The question isn’t whether you can carry on going it alone for a bit longer. You probably can. The real question is whether you actually want to.
Lois Bates—Stubbs is a strategic consultant and founder of Mavenly, a VA and EA agency based in Manchester. She works with women in business who are ready to stop carrying everything alone.