Why I keep my business small (and what it makes room for)

A close friend got married in Vancouver a few years ago. I grew up there. She was one of my people. And I didn’t go.

I had too many offers launching that year. The thought of flying from Bali, landing jet-lagged, trying to be fully present for a week I didn’t have the space for, and I told myself that was just the cost of running a successful business. That was the deal.

Then it became a deal I didn’t want to make anymore. I burnt out. I didn’t want to show up for any of it. There was a stretch where I honestly wanted to close the whole thing down. And that was the wake-up call, the one that made me stop and actually ask the question I’d been avoiding. Do I get to have a life with this business, or is it just going to keep asking me to give things up?

A lot changed after that. The business looks different now. This year I’m building a house from the ground up. I’m flying to Penang regularly to spend time with my aunt, who raised me. I’m in perimenopause, which has meant resting more, protecting my energy, moving through the week differently. And I’ve had the room for all of it.

So I want to talk about why I keep my business small on purpose, and what it actually looks like to build something that can hold your real life. The life happening now, and whatever’s coming next.

Not sure what size your business actually wants to be?

There’s a short quiz that names the kind of tiny business that actually suits how you work and what you want your life to hold. It’s the same question I keep coming back to in my own. Takes twominutes.

TAKE THE QUIZ

What the bigger version actually cost

When I talk about running a bigger business, I don’t mean revenue. I mean complexity. And the complexity is what wore me down.

I had eight offers to launch in a single year, which sounds ridiculous to say out loud now. I had courses, group programs, retreats, one on ones, all running at once. Every month was a launch month, and every month was exhausting. The way I described it back then was that I was building the plane while flying it. Constantly.

I had two full-time staff, which meant meetings, coordination, people depending on me to be available and on. And I figured out something uncomfortable in the middle of it. I really didn’t like managing people, even though I loved working with people. The structure I’d built wasn’t aligned with me at all.

The business needed feeding all the time. If I stopped creating, stopped posting, stopped launching, the whole thing felt like it would slow to a halt. At one point I realized I’d hired a bigger team mostly to feed the social media machine, which, when I sat with it honestly, was not how I wanted to spend my weeks. I came into this to be a coach. My actual day to day had turned me into a marketer. That was most of my time. Not the work I cared about.

What making it smaller actually changed

So I stripped it back. Fewer offers. No staff. Lean contractors for specific things only. And what I got out of that wasn’t just a simpler calendar.

It was options. Real ones. The kind where I get to choose how I run this thing based on the life I want, instead of the life the business had quietly decided for me.

The business stopped needing a specific version of me, running at a specific speed, just to stay upright. That created spaciousness. Not the “I’ll rest after this launch” kind that never actually arrives. The built-in kind. And here’s the part I didn’t understand at the time. I didn’t know what I’d need that spaciousness for. I just knew I needed it there.

What the spaciousness made room for

Life started asking things of me. And for the first time, I had the room to say yes.

My aunt in Penang is 93 and she raised me. She was diagnosed with cancer last year, and being able to fly there and actually stay, not squeeze a visit between two launches, is only possible because of how the business is structured now. Perimenopause has meant resting when I need to rest and shaping the week around what my body is asking for, rather than white-knuckling through because the schedule said so.

And then the smaller things. Like cooking on a Tuesday. Visiting friends who just had a baby. They sound minor but they’re not as minor as you think.

None of it came with a warning because it just showed up. And because the room was already there, I could respond instead of scrambling to rearrange everything, or saying no by default because every gap was already full.

I want to be clear that I didn’t plan for any of this specifically. I didn’t make my business smaller knowing I’d be building a house, or that my aunt would need me, or that perimenopause would change what a productive day even looks like. You can’t plan for those things. The room was there because I’d stopped filling every gap with more work.

The people I work with who are in their forties and fifties are in the same place. Life is asking more of them now, and different things than it asked at thirty-five. A business designed for a younger version of you will fight the season you’re actually in. At some point I stopped asking how do I grow this and started asking is this enough, does this actually work for how I want to live. That question changed everything that came after it.