Results from my wife's 2 year business experiment

Hypothesis: What if you grew a business by just being more you?

When my wife started her business 24 months ago, we decided to toss out a lot of what we’d learned about business from decades of making our living as self-employed people, and instead try something completely new.

The old ways weren’t gonna work this time

Zoe’s previous business (as an artist [painter]) and my business were both remnants of a time before kids.

Now, with a newborn and another pre-school aged child, neither of us had the energy to go all out into a new business.

Zoe was pretty clear for her new business that she didn’t want to:

• Work 40+ hours per week

• Spend a ton of time on social media

• Work both mornings AND evenings

What she did want for her business was to:

• Be flexible around our family schedule

• Allow her to work as many or as little hours as she desired

• Pay for continued study

• Make enough to contribute meaningfully to the household

This might just work…

With our previous businesses we’d always had plenty of time and energy to get some momentum going at the start. To say yes to every client. To work at strange hours. To spend hours doing overly repetitive tasks.

But Zoe didn’t have that luxury this time.

She needed to be efficient with her energy. She needed another way.

So, as an experiment we had the idea to try building her business by letting go of noise out there around how to build a business these days and instead focusing on trusting herself and what makes her unique.

She used Human Design as a lens to help identify her strengths and not compare herself to others.

It did work!

Now, 2 years later, the results are in. And they’re impressive.

Perhaps not impressive in the way you might be used to from people writing about business these days. No, she’s not making 7-figures per month. But in an industry were most professionals last less than 12-months, her business continues to grow consistently each quarter, while only working a handful of hours per week.

Here are some of the decisions she made and how they panned out:

Allowing time for momentum and recognition to build

With her limited available hours of work and being a Projector (her energy comes and goes) we knew that growing her business wasn’t going to be a sprint to the finish line. She needed a sustainable way to work from day one.

Because Zoe’s style of personal training is different to the status quo, we knew it would take time for people to ‘get it’. She needed sustainable ways to keep showing up in our local community until people started seeing the magic in what she does.

One way she does this is through a face-to-face workshop teaching about the pelvic floor and how to correctly activate, strengthen and use this group of muscles. Being a one-off event, this means she can promote it and run it only when she has the energy for it.

Learning new things as a productive business building activity

I’m the type of person who will read half a book about something and then just give it a go. I’ll fill in the missing gaps as I go along. And this is often my approach to business.

So naturally, when Zoe joined me in working for herself years ago, I gave her the same advice. ‘You don’t need more info, just put some stuff out there,’ I’d say.

But this was actually terrible advice for her.

With a 1 in her Profile, Zoe is meant to do her own research on things. She’s meant to dive down rabbit holes. She’s meant to absorb a LOT of information. Where as I would get overwhelmed and stuck if I tried her approach, she deepens her craft, see’s new patterns and becomes a formidable expert.

So this time around, instead of ‘winging it’ she decided that spending time learning was a form of marketing for her. The more of an expert she became, the more evident it became in her sessions, social media content and workshops.

Trusting her intuition

Zoe’s best way of making decisions is through her intuitive knowing.

She often knows what she needs to do right away, but then feels like she needs to justify it or ignore it to please those around her. That’s not how she’s meant to operate.

By practicing trusting that inner knowing, even when it didn’t make sense, she was able to avoid getting stuck in analysis paralysis when it came to the many decisions a new business owner needs to make.

A year of aligned invitations

The overall strategy for a Projector when it comes to business and relationships is to wait for recognition of your gifts and then be invited in by that person to help them.

It can be an incredibly frustrating thing for us (I’m also a Projector) because we can usually see how to help most people with their problems, but unless we’re invited for our opinion, we can just come off as annoying.

So we knew that for Zoe to get her best clients, clients who would pay what she’s worth and help spread the word, that she needed the recognition and the invitation.

But when you’re starting out, building that recognition can be a really slow process.

This year though, something clicked and she’s received aligned invitation after invitation with very little effort on her part.

Here are some of them:

• An invitation to run her workshop which then sold out overnight (she didn’t have to sell a single ticket herself)

• An invitation to become a paid mentor for other trainers, physios and therapists undergoing the same training she’s been through

• And an invitation by another business owner to create a new movement space together for our local community

She didn’t hustle for these. She didn’t have to spend hours connecting on social media. Instead, she trusted in her natural gifts and Human Design was the tool that gave her permission to do so.

I’m so incredibly proud of her. It takes immense courage to start a business and to ride the highs and lows that come with it.

It’s also really cool to have this business that’s part of our lives, that really helps a lot of women and also allows us to be present parents.

Human Design continues to blow me away.

There is a part of my brain that still says ‘this shouldn’t work’ and yet even if it is just a bunch of hocus pocus, it’s been incredibly helpful hocus pocus.

I asked Zoe if, looking back, she thinks she could have gotten to this point in her business without knowing her Human Design and she said:

‘It probably would have been a lot harder and more frustrating.’

---

Thanks for reading! If you’re curious about Human Design and how it can make business more ease-ful and less frustrating, I do offer a 90-minute HD coaching session where we can dive into how you best work.

Also, if this resonated in some small way, please leave me a comment to let me know.