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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’m giving you a kind of behind the scenes as well as advice on what it looks like to be a mother running a multi six figure business, but also being a mother who was stubborn as hell about creating quality time with her children. And I’ll give you a little backstory to that to understand the how and the why behind all of this. So essentially, when my children were one and a half and three and a half, I left a very unhealthy marriage and moved to a different country, back to the UK, where I, you know, grew up to Brighton, and my children, like I say, were one and a half and three and a half at the time, so they both went immediately into a nursery, and so essentially I came over. I’d not been fully working for a few years because I’d been just focusing on being a parent to my small babies at the time, and I was in a new country, and I had two children to care for alone. So I went down the inevitable path that many women in that position do, which was to go onto universal credit, so that I had financial support while I gradually got contracts supporting startups with marketing as a way to make money and still be present for my children. But one thing I was really clear on from the get go was I didn’t leave their dad and move countries with them for them to never see me again because I was so busy earning money to raise them that I wasn’t available for them. It was never a kind of possibility to me. I knew that I totally was a good candidate for you know six figure plus contract in a marketing firm somewhere. I didn’t imagine I’d land it overnight, but I totally knew that could be my trajectory. Like I, I know I’m. You can imagine I’m capable. I’ve managed to grow and build my own business to really successful levels. So, you know, I knew that was all inside of me, and at the same time, I also knew what would come alongside that. I knew that that would require overtime, asking for holidays, asking to be able to go to my children’s assembly, and I just didn’t believe, as someone who at that point imagined I’d be spending the rest of my life alone, because that’s what you tend to do when you’ve left a really unhappy marriage. You know, I imagined it would just be me, and so that that’s where I was at. Okay. So here’s one of the benefits that came from that constraint. There’s actually two. One of them was that I had lived at my rock bottom. My rock bottom was my situation, which was raising my children alone in a tiny flat, which I knew we’d grow out of because it was too small for all of us already. You know, doing jobs that I-they weren’t great jobs. These contracting jobs, you know, and it was hard. You know, I was basically. You know, it’s not surprising, as many of you know, my story led on to me burning out because it was really hard to raise children, to keep a house clean, to feed them. You know, again, I’ve got really high standards for myself. I wasn’t just going to give them. You know, I wanted to give them balanced, unprocessed, healthy meals. I really made life hard for myself. So I was doing all of the things, and it was draining. It was draining, and I quickly found myself in a position where I was getting very physically ill from it. And I knew that things could only really get worse if I didn’t get myself better. So that kind of was my rock bottom. And the advantage that has given me since is that I got there, and you know what? When I look at my camera roll, I see laughter. I see us dancing in front of the TV.

04:08

I see us spending happy times in the park together. I realize that there were still so many pockets of joy among the challenges that I was facing at the time, and you know beyond that, I I got through it. I came back. So fear, like the things that used to scare me, it takes something much bigger now to put fear in me than it did a few years ago. It’s toughened me up, and that’s really supported me on the entrepreneurial journey. And I think for those who’ve never got anywhere close to the rock bottom, they often feel like a they’re a lot closer to it than they actually are, and B, they don’t realize how resilient they are. They haven’t had a taste of their own resiliency, and when you have, it really makes things a lot easier. I don’t find it surprising that so often when we sit watching somebody on a stage, they have a story that’s not dissimilar to my own because I know what that does to somebody. You come out the. Side made of tougher stuff, but the really useful thing that it also did that I don’t touch on as often that is hyper relevant to you is that it really taught me that when you only have tiny pockets of time, you need to know what to do with them. So I’m not talking about color coded calendars or productivity hacks. It’s about truly recognizing, and I hate to use the word needle mover because it’s such a NAF term I never heard of before I went into this space. But it’s really understanding, you know, when we know Paritos, Paritos is that even how you pronounce it? Principle that you know, like 20% of what we do is productive, and the other 80% is a waste of time. The better acquainted you can be with what that 20% is. You can prioritize that 20% and when you let that 80% go, or you hold it more loosely, and you recognize your business is still growing, it’s still thriving, you’re still getting to where you want to be. You prioritize better moving forward. Okay, and it’s actually what’s culminated in what I’ve designed since, which is a cushy COO AI tool. Shout out to the tool, but that essentially is the exercise I do with myself. I don’t even necessarily do it with a pen and paper because it’s so ingrained in me now. 

But to begin with, that was the exercise I would do at the beginning of each week, so that I could ensure that I got to the end of the week, not feeling like, oh my god, there’s still so much more to do. Oh my God, I never got to X, Y, Z. Oh my goodness, I’ve still not done that visibility piece I should have done. Oh, I didn’t make as many invitations or work on the sales side of my business as much as I could have done. Kind of talk that I used to give myself, because I now look at the week ahead. I look at the limited amounts of time I have and what I’m going to do with them, and I make sure that I use them well. Now, don’t get me wrong; I am ADHD, undiagnosed. I am unmedicated. So, do I always get it right? Of course, I don’t. I have days where I feel like absolute crap. I have days where I just want to sit down and watch reality TV because I’m so tired. Let’s say I’ve had a really hard parenting weekend, and my brain just doesn’t have capacity for it, and I really want to normalize that those things can happen, and my whole business doesn’t fall apart as a result because I’ve designed it to hold my my humanness in all of this, and the rest of the time where I’m prioritizing things the right way round means that I can afford to have those wobbles. You know, I don’t think we should have wobble-free businesses. That’s not how humans human. Okay, and we’re running the business. So if a human is running your business, you’ve got to allow for humanness. Okay, so let’s get into the lessons I really learned from all of this that I would love for you to learn too.

07:32

Because if you are in the thick of the summer holidays right now, you know I am in the predicament that because my ex-husband lives in another country, my children actually spend close to four weeks of the summer holidays over there with him this this year. I think it’s three and a half weeks, but still, I appreciate that I don’t have those same constraints later on in the summer, but I have them right now, so I’m experiencing it firsthand, and I can share with you how it doesn’t throw me as much as it does for my other clients because of these lessons that I have learned, so the first one is one that I’ve kind of already touched on, which is constraints create clarity, not just stress. I know it can feel like stress, but if you allow them to, they can create clarity for you. Okay, you and I’ve never had unlimited time, and so in all of this, I’ve always asked myself the question: What actually moves the business forward? What is the 20% that allows me to prioritize marketing, selling, and delivering? I will share with you because I’ve already talked about this a lot, so I’m not going to go much deeper in on this lesson. But I will share with you the number one mistake I see my clients making when it comes to running their businesses. Oh, I say my clients-the ones who aren’t moving forward as fast as they desire to-the one thing they all have in common is that they haven’t allowed themselves to minimize the amount that their business requires them to be in client delivery. Which means they so often get to the end of the day and think, “I don’t have energy for anything that, like marketing or visibility. I don’t remember who I need to be following up with, who I had that sales conversation with last week, or what if it’s late in the day? They kind of overthink things. They don’t do the thing. They over deliver for clients with the belief that they keep on over delivering. They’re going to tell their friends how brilliant they are, which they probably are, and then they’ll attract even more clients who expect them to over deliver, and they get stuck in a very pretty, very shiny hamster wheel. Okay, so you know, having a business model that allows less client delivery and profit margins and big amounts of revenue-that is going to be the thing that enables you to be really streamlined with what that 20% is. You know, that’s exactly what I support my clients with inside the accelerator. Lesson number two, kind of obvious, but feel like I need to touch on it, which is stop trying to do everything yourself. I told you it was obvious, but I’m touching on it because I also know people who choose to be entrepreneurs. You, you guys are made of grit. Okay, you are. Likely hyper independent. You are likely the problem solver. You are likely the person who says, “I’ll do it. As you see people faffing around, that’s why you’re a leader. That’s why you’re doing this work because you believe in yourself enough. You’re willing to challenge yourself. You’re willing to do it. And the challenge with that is we can also struggle to then ask for help. You know, and childcare, outsourcing, partner support, and in some cases, just lowering standards where appropriate. You know, no, you cannot be fully present for your children and run a business in the day, but you can choose to say, like I am this morning. I’m going to spend two to three hours this morning. I know, wake up early, get an hour done before they’re up, do a couple of hours while they’re awake, letting them have a bit of screen time, a bit of TV, a bit of playing in the garden, and then I’m going to be taking them out with their friends and giving them a brilliant day, and that will be their memory of today. Their memory of today will not be the three hours that I was working; it will be everything I did with them afterwards.

10:53

And I can then spend the rest of the day feeling really good about being present for them, and also know that there’s not a whole load of things that need to doing in my business to doing to do. I mean, as you can tell, I’m that tired that I’m saying things like to doing. But I, you know, I I can make it all work. Okay, so sometimes lowering your expectations is being like, no, I haven’t got five hours to work today. But what do I? What can I do in the two or three that I have available? And similarly, you know, do I need to be with my children all day today, or is there a neighbor who’s happy to have them for a couple of hours this morning? Can I ask my partner to take a day off this week so I have some pressure off myself? Like the other thing that I’d say that often comes up for a lot of us business owners, right, is that if you’re not that really independent, strong leader, which you can also be both here, it might also be that your ADHD and your ADHD multi-passionate creative brain is why you are also an entrepreneur. Very often we are a mix of all of these things, right? And we can pay the ADHD tax. We often don’t think about things until it arrives to us on the day. Ask me how I know, okay? And one of the things I’ve learned with school holidays is that we almost need a level of like military position with like organizing shit, but also then holding those plans loosely on the other side for the inevitable inevitableness of what happens in summer holidays with children getting poorly, someone having to cancel, all the rest, right? But you know, understanding that you know, looking at the week ahead, looking at what’s going on, so that you can say to that friend, how about I have your kids over this morning, so you can have mine. Again, I’m not going to go too much into it because this stuff is kind of obvious, and it felt worth touching on because I can’t tell you the amount of times in the past I’ve got caught out because I just don’t think about it until it’s already happening to me. Lesson number three: design your business around your life, not your life around your business, and that takes into consideration as well the fact that you have various school holidays to manage in a year. You know, I’ve got some clients who only do client delivery during term time, and it works. No, this couldn’t work for every business in every industry, but she has made it work for herself and has made it work for her clients, and they’re more than happy with it. So, you know it’s really really important to kind of think about your business model. Really important to think about communication and setting expectations. 

One thing that happens inside my accelerator is I do no calls in August. That is communicated well ahead of time. People understand it. They know they can still check in with one another inside the community. They know I still pop in there over that time as well, but it just gives a bit of breathing space for them and for me, and they don’t-they’re not bothered by it because it’s something I communicate year round. I constantly talk about how I take August off, and often that’s an ambition that they share. So yeah, you know, that’s what I want you to know, and just trying to see. I feel like I’ve actually mishmashed, as typical ADHD style a few these lessons together because one of my other lessons was design your business around your life, not your life. No, that’s one I’ve really just done. Planning for flexibility, not perfection, but I’ve just touched on that one. And then success isn’t just measured in revenue. This one feels important, actually. Yeah, you’re not gonna be on your deathbed being like, I’m so glad I sent 50 emails over the summer, but you will look back on the summer and think, I’m so grateful for those movie nights I shared with the kids. I’m so grateful for the time we spent crafting in the garden.

14:12

I’m so grateful for the fact that I was able to have time out with my husband during that time. So do remember what we’re doing this all for is the important thing I want to share with you here because it’s so easy to forget what we’re doing it for. Now, don’t get me wrong; I have had those moments with my kids where they’re like, “Do you have to work? I’m like, “Well, yes, someone’s got to pay for the ice creams. So, don’t get me wrong; I’m not totally in rose-tinted glasses saying just abandon it all and just spend your week, you know, weeks on the beach. I appreciate there needs to be balanced, but that sense of perspective shift, where we remember what we’re doing this all for, is an important one. Because, believe me, I remember when I felt like to survive, my laptop needed to be permanently attached to me. We then went through a weird little period where I used to talk about taking my laptop out. For a walk, because I’d take it with me, almost feeling like I was being irresponsible if I didn’t have my laptop near me. And then I think it took hearing someone say, “You know, Polly, you don’t do brain surgery, for me to recognize that I didn’t need to be on call 24/7, available to my laptop. Particularly since the majority of occasions I wasn’t even pulling said laptop out, and nowadays I’m doing brave things like going on holiday without my laptop, and it feels brilliant. Okay, so you know you’ve got to be building a business that feels good. I’m not going to pretend. I always talk about the push before the push. You know, building that core offer, generating the demand for it, getting those funnels in place. Like yes, they take trial and error, they take work. I’m not going to pretend they don’t. However, once they are there and they’re doing their thing, don’t be that person that keeps on adding to your plate. Don’t be that person that keeps on complicating things for yourself. Allow yourself to lean back into the ease that you’ve created for yourself. You know, if you want to do more, do more, sure. But you know, if you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you’ll know I had my this is my no year moment earlier this year, and admittedly, it only lasted till about May. 

But I’m grateful for that breathing space I gave myself because now I feel energized to think about writing that book. I feel energized to think about talking on stages again. But I needed to give myself that that permission slip for a short time to be in that place again. So I guess it’s another thing to remember in all of this is everything is so seasonal. The needs my children have now are so much less than they had. Well, I say less. They can now do more things independently of me, and a lot of the time want to be with their friends more than they want to be spending time with me, and that has taken a lot of pressure off me. And I can see as the years move forward, that’s only going to become increasingly the case that I just become the place to come back to to eat and maybe watch a film with me if I’m lucky. So you know, there are so many seasons of parenting where we feel like, oh my goodness, I’m in the trenches and it’s never going to get easier. A lot of people say it doesn’t get easier; it just changes. But I would say, as someone running a business, yes, I will definitely say it feels a lot easier. So I want you to know that there are seasons for everything. If you feel like you’re not getting on stages as much as other people, if you feel like you’ve not just published your third book and you’d like to be, just take the pressure off yourself. Know that you know if you’re in this for the long game, you’ve got time to do all of those things.

17:19

Focus on the right things in the right time, and that is how you can have a day where, with only two, three hours a day, you can still be running a six-figure plus business without it all being feeling like it’s close to combusting. Okay, funnels and core offers obviously help all of that, but you know me, you know my spiel by now. If you want to know more about the business model that supports that, you can dive into the rest of my podcast where I break that down forensically, but for now, the main thing is to say is you know have the business model that supports the life you want, and obviously that’s the one I I teach and preach and support. So yeah, this is what I want you to know. There there are going to be weeks, you know, there are weeks in my world where I don’t get everything done. There are days, sometimes months where I don’t get everything done. There are days where my plans go completely out the window because the kids need me, and that’s not failure, right? That’s real life. The goal isn’t to become the parent who never drops a ball. It’s to build a business where dropping the occasional ball doesn’t bring the whole thing crashing down. That’s what I want for you. So I really want you to know if you have moments where you think I can never make this work, people don’t understand because I’m a mum. Be compassionate with yourself, be kind to yourself, and then be curious. Where is that story keeping me safe? Where is there opportunity I’m not allowing myself to access? Where could I be keep making this more simple for myself. Where can I be creating pockets of joy, both within my business and with my family? If I only had two to three hours to work today, what are the things that will truly move me move me forward? Let’s ignore the to-do list, or if I’m looking at the to-do list, look at the ones that really matter and cross everything else off, or move it to another day. That’s my advice. Stay safe, stay strong in the summer. You’ve got this. I am in your corner, and as always, if you want any other bits of advice, now is a good time to dive into my podcast, where I share so much around building a business that loves you back. All right, I’ll be in your ears next week. Yeah, that’s all I have to say. Big love.