00:00

Welcome to Make More Money Without Selling Your Soul. The podcast for bold entrepreneurs ready to simplify scale and reclaim their time. I’m Polly Lavarello, Evergreen scaling strategist and cushy business pioneer. Join me and my occasional guests as we explore the themes of wealth, selling and well-being, because building a business that works for you changes everything. Let’s dive in.

00:36

Hello and welcome to the show. Today, I want to talk about how I take the entirety of August off. I’ve done it now, I think for definitely two years. Think three years I was going to say successfully, but, you know, the show’s candid, not always entirely successfully, but there have been learnings, and I’m going for a clean run this year. And as we are heading into May. The sun is shining. Everything is feeling, you know, like we’re starting to get a flavor of what’s to come. People are already getting outside, doing more, enjoying this brilliant weather. And so, you know, if you are a service provider, if you are a wellness practitioner, if you are a coach, or any of those things, you’re probably already thinking about how you’re going to balance things. As a parent, I can tell you, Oh my goodness, July always hits me sideways between end of term, end of year sports day, it’s kind of like December in terms of the amount of things you need to do, so that you know if your parent also might be crossing your mind. Throw on top of that school holidays, which, for me personally, don’t impact me a huge amount, because I only have my children two weeks of that. You know of the school holidays, but you know that there’s a lot going on right as we approach the summer. And on top of that, where you are working with individuals, I mean, let’s say, I mean, I know, for my corporate days, it’s not to say I wasn’t impacted there either. But certainly, when you’re working with individuals, you may also be balancing the fact that various people might be coming back to you saying, Can I come back to you after the summer holidays? So there can be that sense of like, well, if that’s what everyone else is doing, how do I need to be approaching the summer. And the question I feel I have been receiving the most recently is, how have I structured my business to take August off? And before we dive into that, I actually just want to talk about the why for a moment, because this is very timely. But at the moment, Emma greed is, you know, has gone viral. Her PR team are slaying it, and there is a lot of talk about her three hour parenting, or three parenting out whatever, whatever it’s referred to, something along those lines, right? And the fact that, essentially, she shares that she kind of makes core memories in three hours on a weekend with her kids so that she has time to do things for herself. And as you can imagine it, imagine the Internet has gone crazy, both on both sides the whole, can a woman not be successful? Can a woman not act like a man would incorporate? You know, can it? Can if he can go for his golf weekends, can she not also take care of herself and not need to be present for her children the whole time. And of course, the opposite side of those who are outraged that anyone would think to have children who’d only want to spend three hours with them. I mean, as is always the way, I just believe there is probably some messy middle in all of that, in terms of where my thoughts and beliefs are. But there is one thing I think is really important for every one of us as business owners, and that is one know what freedom is to you know what your priorities are? Because they’re going to look different for everybody, and everyone’s going to have slightly different circumstances, right? Like recently, my husband has gone back to working three full days, where previously, like a few years ago, he was only working a half day a week, which meant he was really available to help me a lot around the house with making lunches and picking up the kids. And that gave me a lot of freedom and flexibility within my own business, which fortunately now I’ve created the infrastructure to support that freedom and flexibility without needing him to be the person who did that. And people did quite rightly at the time say, Polly, I haven’t got that support system in place that you have. Having said that that was a strategic decision that he and I made because we believed the payoff would be worth it. But again, that was something that was very personal to him, that he was fine with, and quite understandably and quite rightly, not every husband or partner would want to do that. They may be equally ambitious as you, right anyway.

04:56

So the most important piece here is know what your deaf. Definition of freedom is, understand what your capacity is, understand what your desires are. Because i Far too often speak to people who will often say to me, I still don’t like this. I still don’t like that. This thing isn’t working out for me whenever I move somewhere, this is the situation that occurs whenever I have a relationship with somebody, this is the thing that goes down, and it’s kind of removing any responsibility from oneself and constantly projecting outwards as to why things aren’t going your way, which I’m not a big fan of you can probably imagine by now. So you know the really important piece, and the reason why I believe that that so often happens to the human condition, you know, reason why so many of us are picking up self development books to understand why? How do I get more control over my life? Is down to one very simple principle, which is not enough of us actually take the time to understand what actually makes us happy, what true freedom is, and also to check in with that right? Because, for example, my children are now going to be 10 and 12 this year. You know, spending time with them and being a proactive parent to them now looks very different to what it did five years ago. So it’s constantly checking in with yourself to understand what is this next evolution, similar in you know, your romantic relationships, your friendships, your business, your creative life, like everything is going to evolve. So it’s not like a one and done situation. It’s something we should be coming back to and assessing so if you don’t know what you want, of course, you’re regularly going to be disappointed, because you’re going to keep on finding evidence of the things that you don’t like without really fully understanding when you’re where you’re already receiving and where there are opportunities to receive more of what you do like. So I just wanted to speak to that really, really briefly, a bit of an auntie Polly moment to be like, Look, if you aren’t entirely happy with your situation, please, for the love of God, don’t try and think about being realistic. Just write down the money you want, what it’s going to allow you to have get Uber Duba specific. I know this is what all the manifesting people talk about, but for me, I’ve seen time and time again my clients who come to me with crazy levels of specificity about what they want to be earning, how they want to be earning it, what it’s going to feel like, what it’s going to look like. For them, they’re often the very same people who achieve it and achieve it a lot sooner. They’re also the more resilient people who can bounce back when things don’t immediately go their way, because they have a clear end goal. It’s like they’ve got their GPS tracker locked in and, oh, we came up against some traffic, or, you know, we’re being detoured. But they are happy and excited because they know the destination is going to be worth it if we haven’t allowed ourselves to truly be clear on what the destination is, if we’re following a whole lot of shoulds, I should be doing this because I should be this, because this person thinks I should Na, and this is very much connected to August, right? Because you might listen to this and go, I don’t want August off. Here’s what I want instead. So please, because what I’m about to say can apply to pretty much anything you desire. So that’s the first piece. Okay, so firstly, think about that. I guess the next piece to say is, like, Why? Why do I so? Because you might want to know, like, before you’re like, you know, like, is it just a flex? Is it just so I can record podcasts like this and say, Oh, actually, Google stuff. Or is it because I like getting a nice turn on the sun bed?

08:45

Let me share with you why, why things have gone this way. And I say this because I have seen so many. You know, a lot of my one to ones come to me and they’re not doing too little, they’re doing too much. They don’t have too few offers. They have too many. They’re not working too few hours. They’re working too much. There’s a lot of untangling very often that happens in our time working together, and it’s entirely avoidable. I mean, this is why I run my accelerator. It’s helping people create the foundations that avoid them ending up spinning all the plates and ending up in a call with me where you’re confessing to the fact that you feel borderline burnt out like you want to throw in the towel already, because it’s already feeling too much when it never had to go that way, but it just has ended up that way because those foundations weren’t strong, weren’t in place, and so you’ve been Like, it’s like when you’re on in the wrong gear on your bicycle and you’re spinning your legs around totally unnecessarily. Okay, so the foundations are really important, and the reason why I managed to understand what these foundations were really early on and build my successful, profitable business. Was because of a few factors which had nothing to do with flexing or a love of sun beds. It was to do with this. So if you don’t know my backstory, I won’t go too deep into it, because I know I’ve touched on it a few times, but this is perhaps an angle you might not have heard before. So in 2019, before I’d started launching as a personal brand, when I was just a contractor, I hired my first ever coach. She was a burnout coach because I identified through what she was sharing that I had IBS, migraines, skin breakouts, really toxic productivity habits where I’d be up till 11 o’clock, Midnight after putting my preschooler to bed, and that I could I could sense my body was already telling me, Polly, watch the F out you are. You know, I was scared. I heard her story about how she was hospitalized. I at that point, didn’t understand that burnout could hospitalize you. And I was a single parent of two small children, both under the age of, I think, four or five at that stage, so I really couldn’t afford to have that happen to me. And I was actually, genuinely scared, like, you know, like that would be, I mean, I just couldn’t imagine it. So I hired her, and I remember when she asked me what I wanted, and I burst into tears because I’d been in survival mode for so long I hadn’t paused long enough to really think about what I wanted. I was too busy making breakfast, putting on the laundry, getting the kids to nursery, coming back, looking after clients, doing my little bit of promotional content that was required, or even then, obviously, I guess wasn’t doing promotional because I was contracting, but doing the work, responding to the emails, collecting the kids, doing the laundry, feeding them, putting them to bed, doing more work, and repeat. And then on the weekends, they’d go to their like dad or like every other weekend, I would spend most of those weekends working to catch up, because I always felt like I was falling behind, because I always felt like a charlatan, because I was balancing all the pieces, and everyone proper in work were working longer hours than me, so I hired Imogen. I almost cried when I thought about what I wanted, and I remember actually her sharing with me that success was a feeling, and what were those three feelings I wanted? And I remember saying confident, clear and calm, because I didn’t feel any of those things. And I’m so grateful to Imogen, because she’s probably the reason why I’ve never, kind of got too distracted by the noise and silliness of the online industry with private jets and Hermes bags, because my goal has always been a feeling rather than a flex.

12:50

I just said that a feeling, not a flex. So that was that. But anyone who has been borderline burnt out or burnt out, will know it’s one thing to know it and to start changing your habits. However, sometimes we start doing these things too late, and that is what happened for me, unfortunately, because March 2020, we all know what happened. Then I actually live on the same street as one of the first people, I think the first person in Britain to get covid, lives on my street. Apparently, they have people at their door in hazmat suits at like 4am I didn’t know this at the time. I don’t think, I think they’ve but I’ve been told it since, and I equally came down with it. Well, not equally, but I came down with it very, very early on, right at the beginning. So I was already self isolating before lockdown had even begun. Because I was already getting poorly. I assumed I wouldn’t get that Ill because I was young and fit and healthy. You know, I was a size 10. I was always on my feet, rushing around after the kids. I felt, you know, I wasn’t working out by any means, but I looked like a healthy specimen, but you know, the context, I was borderline burnt out. So what did covid do to me? It wiped me out. I spent six weeks on bed rest. There was one night where my husband watched me all night. He was then, then my boyfriend watched me all night because he was afraid I wouldn’t make it through to the morning because my breathing was so slow and quiet and labored. I did go to hospital at one point, but fortunately, wasn’t so bad that they needed to put me on any machines, and it was all very scary. And again, because I got it so early on, I remember going to the doctor saying, you know, I’m so exhausted, I can’t walk up my stairs without getting out of breath. I was so I felt like it’s suddenly become 60 years old and and they said, Oh, well, that was, there’s this thing that’s being talked about at the moment, long, covid. It sounds like you might have it. They did a whole long x ray. There was nothing to be seen there. So that was it. Packed me up. I was on my way. Which is also, by the way, one of the reasons why I am a huge fan of nutritional therapists. Because, honestly, it was the support of some brilliant nutritional therapists who helped me with an anti inflammatory diet and a kind of supplement protocol to start feeling human again. Thank goodness. But it took a really long time. Now you might be thinking, okay, Polly, but why are you telling me all of this? I’m telling you all of this because we, you know, we were living in this tiny flat during covid. There was no garden, so I was feeling immense anger at every single post of someone going, Oh, another barbecue in our garden. Thinking, you have no idea how lucky you have it. But in July 2020, after I’d launched my first group program, despite being really poorly. I mean, talk about someone not learning quickly about what not to do when burnt out, we moved into this house, which I’m still living in now. We got my cat, which was like the biggest blessing ever. And anyone who’s a cat person will get it, and things were good for a moment or two. I mean, health wise, they weren’t good. I really had to learn how to do a lot in a few hours. So that was kind of the first lesson. The first lesson was like, Okay, so my energy, I can just about summon it between the hours of nine and one. But from then onwards, you know, if I just finished a coaching call, I would then need to lie down and sleep for two or three hours. Like it was really, really bad. Yet at the same time, we just moved into this house where I was going to be the main earner. And of course, I wasn’t hugely public about the struggles I was going through, because I didn’t want to repel any clients. I don’t them thinking, God, we can’t hire her. She’s chronically ill, so at the time, I was relatively quiet about what was going on for me, and that’s also why my husband went down to working half a day a week so he could support me. He was like, you don’t have to think about cooking. You don’t have to think about cleaning. Just run the business and then take care of yourself. That’s all you need to do. And obviously, be there for the kids and, you know, but isn’t be there for the kids, for making actual memories, not the boring admin stuff, like, I mean, I still had to do the boring admin stuff around advocacy and, you know, forms and neurodiversity, but everything else he could manage he did. So that was what was going on then. So that already started showing me, actually how much I was doing in my business previously, that was entirely unnecessary. 

But then, oh, it’s really hard to say this. But then in October of 2020, I lost my uncle. Suddenly, he was 60. He was a lawyer. He worked incredibly hard. He was one of my most favorite human beings in the entire planet, and losing him really, he was so excited to be retired. He had this whole bucket list, all these places he wanted to go to, even though he traveled a lot in his life because he was so hard working, he was just one of those people that just didn’t switch off. And in many ways, he couldn’t switch off because they just needed him so often. And so he was delighted to finally have time for himself and time to travel and time to just really enjoy things, and it was cut off so horribly fast. And weirdly enough, one of the last things he said to me really early on, when I shared with him that I hadn’t been able to get employment, so I was going self employed, he just said, Remember, Polly, there’s only one of you. You know, you’ve got the kids to think about as well. If something happens to you, like, what are you going to do to create security for yourself? And nobody else has said that to me, and it was a scary thing to hear at the time, because I was thinking, I don’t have many options right now. But he was right. This is like the longest introduction ever. I will not go too deeply into the many things I’ve set up to take August off, because to be honest with you, listen to the whole freaking podcast. 

They talk about it all the time, about having a group program, about having a scalable business model, about having clear boundaries. But I am going to share a few pieces, okay, as to like how I go about doing it. But that’s my why. Okay, my Why is, I will not make that same decision to work my ass off until I’m 60, with the belief that I get to have time on the other side, the only day I know I’m guaranteed, the only moment I know I’m guaranteed is the one I’m living in right now. Can’t even say day I’m guaranteed. The only moment I’m guaranteed is the moment I’m speaking to you right now. We nothing in life is guaranteed, and I’m sure anyone else who’s hit their midlife will already have lost friends and understand the value of it. So yeah, I’m between the fact that I was poorly, I only had a few hours to work with, and I still managed to go past six figures and then scale to multi six figures. Within those two years, dealing with a chronic illness, dealing with grief, raising additional needs kids really proved to me that you do get to design your business strategically so that you don’t need to be on all the time and that nobody loses. I’m not talking about like just not giving a shit about your clients on the other side, like we make sure they have a brilliant experience, are totally taken care of, and you get to take care of yourself too. And I’m really mother effing passionate about this. And August, I will share with you where it went wrong so August in the past. So let me tell you how it works. In August, I will tell, well, all my one to ones when they sign up to me in the contract, it clearly stipulates Polly does not run calls in August, so you know, you will not be charged for this month. You’re if you’re a 12 month contract, to be a 13 month contract, if you’re a three month contract, it’s a four month contract where obviously August is within it, and obviously it’s only four months, because in that month, they’re not going to be receiving any additional support. So that is always clearly articulated to anyone who’s going to be impacted during that time. Similarly, in my group programs, it’s also in all of my contracts, it’s something that I remind my clients of closer to the time. And the reason why it doesn’t negatively impact them is when they come to work with me, they have a clear roadmap to work with. They have resources they can work with in their own time. And guess what? It’s actually really healthy to encourage your clients that, hey, maybe you might want to take this as a break too, so that your brain can decompress, so that you can go and be present, not be permanently glued to your phone, and actually just go and live and enjoy life and come back refreshed, re energized, and most likely, re inspired to come back to your desk where you’ll be delighted to be back at it again. You know, like taking breaks, you know, rest is a strategy. 

You know, I’m gonna say that again, rest is a strategy. Okay, so that’s how it’s managed in that when people know, if I’ve said, here’s what we’re doing over the next year, here’s what we’re doing over the next three months, they’re not incapacitated from working on that in their own time. The question I’d like to ask you, if you’re thinking about, Oh God, I don’t know how I’d make this work for me, is, are you an emergency service provider? Are you a brain surgeon? Is somebody going to die if you don’t get back to them in the next 24 hours, is somebody going to die if they don’t have access to you for a month? If they are not then this is a route I really highly encourage you to explore, and maybe your August will be January, maybe some other time of the year. But you know, you are your own boss. You know. Don’t ever forget that you get to decide what you give yourself, and you get to design your business around that. And I guess it comes back to the point I made at the very beginning, which is, if you don’t know what you want, you may be saying, Oh, God, I’m having to work late again. Oh, you go out for a walk. I’ll catch up with you next time I can’t do this night out. I’ve got to catch up. Do you do you have to do those things? Or where Have there been gaps in how you have designed your business model that is allowing you to be your own worst boss? And, you know, the brilliant thing is, do we get to get there overnight? You know, last night, someone DM me and said, Polly, you being so vocal about having a spacious business. I am getting there, and I would like to be so vocal about it too. But my fear is always like, will other people judge me? And also, can we promise that to people who are just starting out? And I think that’s such a brilliant question, because I was like, No, the thing that is required is a personal brand, a strong personal brand with strong positioning, which is what we do inside the accelerator. It’s having a strong business model that supports that, again, which I support my clients with. And you know, it’s having those two pieces, and then eventually having the ads and the passive model working in the background. And that is how you can truly be seeing payment notifications coming through. And, you know, have happy clients, brilliant client case studies, and enough money so that it can cushion you. I mean, I still make money throughout August. August is still a month where, you know, I have my many ads running, so I’m making sales throughout August, warming my audience up for the launch I always do in September. So it’s bloody brilliant.

24:26

It’s really nice. I’m still seeing, you know, sales, notifications. I’m not, you know, am I entirely off Instagram? No, I stay on there. I still share stories. The one mistake I made last year was I really missed my community inside the accelerator. So I dip in and dip out and respond to the odd question. And that left some confusion for my accelerator clients in terms of like, is Polly available? Is she not available? And rather than people being like, woo hoo, Polly’s dipped in and sharing something, people kind of more went the way of like, oh, Polly’s being inconsistent as to whether she’s replying to stuff or not. So this year, I’m just not did. In at all. I’m literally walking the walk and talking the talk, so that, hopefully they can do the same thing for their businesses too. I will say that actually, in many ways, August often, sometimes ends up being one of my most profitable months, because I’m not distracted by all of those things. So when someone does reach out to my team and wants to work with me, they’ve got no other distraction aside from just following up with that and getting things locked in. So yeah, now when I say team, I’ve got a VA, I’ve got a Podcast Producer. 

The Podcast Producer will receive episodes to edit during that time so that they can be still working in August, if they want to. My VA will be still responding to things in August, so that, you know, nothing is missed. But there is a 24 hour kind of message, they know, like a kind of automatic reply that people get saying, you know, bear with us for 24 hours so that she’s not feeling the need to respond immediately. And I’ve got a social media manager, which means social media content still going out during August. But before I had a social media manager, I would have simply scheduled my content to go out over August. So, you know, you don’t need to have, you know, having a VA, I will definitely say, feels like a non negotiable in this scenario, because you do want to have your inbox monitored while you’re away, and it’s very hard to kind of get around that. But having an equally, you know, for clients reaching out saying they can’t access something, or a password suddenly broken, and they’re looking for a response. You want somebody there to respond to that, to make sure no one is ever prohibited from getting on and accessing resources in the meantime. Or, you know if your ads are running and part of your funnel is broken and someone needs to respond to that, having a VA is so important, I think I’d say one of the kind of less obvious things that has really benefited me is that my VA has now worked with me for over four years. So she knows my business inside out, which really, really does allow me to switch off a lot better. So it really does pay to hire well. So yeah, I’ve got my social media going on, my podcast going on in that time. I’ve got my VA supporting and I think that’s pretty I feel like I’m missing someone on my team, but I don’t think I am. I think that’s pretty much it like. So my business is still there. It’s still present. It’s still moving. But I get the kind of joy of not having to kind of manage calls for a month, and that just is epic. But yes, it does require systems, frameworks, SOPs, and they’re not that complicated, and you can build them bit by bit, and you can have your first hire as a VA doing a few out and you can build and build and build on that. And it becomes much easier. You’ll much sooner have that spacious, profitable business when you lead with a group program, first business model, oh, there’s so much more to it. 

In fact, you know what? I’ve decided to create a free guide around how to create a spacious, profitable business, a cushy business. I was so inspired by all the thoughts I’ve been having recently that I was like, You know what? I’m just going to whack it into a guide. So go check out the show notes. It’s going to be in there. And I’m even creating an AI tool to support you with as your cushy assistant, so that you can have some of those systems and processes set up already to allow you to have that spacious business and have your AI VA supporting you out if you’re in the interim, whether you have a VA or not. Actually, I have a VA, and I’m still using it, but if I didn’t, this would be a brilliant, more affordable way to be supporting yourself in having the framework for flow, because you can have the right strategy, you can have the right mindset, but if you’re not focusing in the right areas, you can really, really be slowing down your growth. You can be working way more hours than you need to. And I decided, when thinking about this, that it was time that I put everything I know, into a guide so that you can make a lot of impact, make a lot of money, make brilliant experiences for your clients, and do it in as few hours as possible. So check it out. The show notes, I’ll be in yours next week with a guest episode where we will be talking about retreats. Really looking forward to it being here as then bye