Intuiting the pressure to scale at the right time // Pressurized Soulpreneur series: pt 5 of 6

In this episode, we will be discussing what is the fourth major inflection point in the journey of a soulpreneur- scaling your business at the right time for you and for your business itself and how to navigate that pressure that you'll face at this point in your journey.

This is the fifth episode of a six-episode podcast series that I'm calling "The Pressurized Soulpreneur." And in this series, I'm going to be discussing and contemplating the impact that your human design pressure centers can have at different stages in your soulpreneur journey, from your initial business idea to now, when we're at the fourth inflection point of scaling your business.

If you haven't listened to the previous episodes already, go back and listen to the first episode, which is the Pressurized Soulpreneur series episode #46, “How your human design pressure centers impact your business”, and then go forward from there. If you're all caught up, then let's dive in.

I have a client who is an educational consultant. She works with colleges for relatively long periods of time - months or years even. In 2019 and 2020 especially, she felt the pressure to scale her business

She was bombarded with a lot of the common ads & messaging of the time: “Create some courses for passive income!” and “Just run some FB ads to your funnel to grow your list & scale your business!”

She bought into this relentless pressure and decided to make the leap to build a passive income business that could scale. She decided to transform her business from this point into a relatively small but very successful and profitable consultancy to a course-centric business complete with a huge email list. She grew her email list in a relatively short amount of time.

She invested thousands of dollars in this business transformation so that she could scale her business. She was very successful as a consultant, so it felt very natural that if she was able to scale her knowledge and her assets, then that would be successful too.

This was all before I started working with her when the bubble finally burst for her. She realized the magic of her gifts, strengths, and passion had almost vanished because —

She missed working with one-on-one clients.

She realized that there's no such thing as truly passive income.

Despite “scaling her business”, her revenue and profit margin had decreased from her profitable consulting engagements

She was truly exhausted from that content merry-go-round that she needed to do to continue building her list.

Because when she gets a client, it's usually a very intensive client that she works with for at least a year at a minimum. So she doesn't necessarily need to have a huge email list because it's all about quality over quantity. The number of your email list doesn't matter. It's about who is coming onto your email list.

So, in many ways, everything that she had been told she needed to do to scale her business didn't work for her business in the right way.

She went down the wrong path and things needed to change because she had lost the spark in her business. In the eighteen months since we've been working together, I've been helping her come back to her passion and purpose in her business, which is also making her business revenue and profit margins healthier than they have ever been.

Why didn't “scaling her business” dream work for her? To get the answer, I think to take a step back and understand what scaling your business actually means.

What does it actually mean to scale? It's a specific terminology that we were talking about but here when we're talking to entrepreneurs and online business owners, scaling is used in all sorts of ways.

Scaling a business is taking something that is already working and making it both more energy efficient and/or more visible as a means of increasing revenue while maintaining your profit margin.

Scaling is about optimizing all of the pieces of your business in concert, like conducting an orchestra — it’s a holistic view and approach to business growth.

Scaling your business is NOT changing fundamental pieces of your business to chase the myth of passive income and online fame.

This client, unfortunately, had to learn this lesson the hard and expensive way. Luckily for her, her business is still afloat and more profitable than ever with the work we’ve done together to "rehab" it, pedal back some of those big changes, and bring it back to life.

There is so much pressure to scale your business when you are getting into it and when you have that foundation of something that's working. There's always that pressure to scale. In fact, it's often a common promise of many offers and existing containers out there; making you feel that there is no way you can reach your goals and be successful unless you try to scale your business.

Here’s a truth bomb that you don’t hear from those business experts - scaling EFFECTIVELY and INTENTIONALLY is actually a continuous process AND a process that is completely unique & personalized to you & your business. It’s not a one-size-fits-all answer or solution.

The decisions that you make to scale your business and to invest in scaling is a textbook example of these human design pressure centers.

Root Center- The pressure to invest in your business to scale as you hear that all the time even before you are ready. The root center is pressure to grow, evolve, and find success faster. You've also been told that you have to build your team or you have to hire people in order to scale.

Everyone wants to build a million-dollar business, but that's not always true. One of the realizations that this client had was that she thought she wanted a million-dollar business. But when she sat down and realized what lit the fire underneath her, what she felt passionate about versus what she was dredging about.

She wants a business that helps her meet all of her financial and life goals but that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a million-dollar business. It can be a very healthy six-figure business for her, and that works well for her as well.

Have you ever considered it and given it more than a passing thought? Like I want a lot of money or financial health. What do you actually want out of this business?

Head center- It's the pressure to figure out what you actually want and what you're told you want. What you actually want is another very common mistake here. You have been told that you need to create a passive income because the only way to be successful in your business is to scale to create passive income, but the real question is, how do you actually like to serve others? Pressure to create passive income comes from your head center.

Also, it's the head center pressure to have your entire offer value ladder figured out before you even start selling. There's a lot of noise out there telling you that you need to figure it all out before you even start selling.

Another very common pressure that comes at this stage, at this inflection point, is that you're being told to level up to that. That you need to become a CEO or a boss babe.

Honestly, if you're actually still more in the early business experimental phase, where maybe you're trying different offers or you're trying different messaging frameworks, scaling is likely not the right thing for you to do even though you’re told that as a “boss babe” and that you need to hire someone or you need to build your team.

All of that is also head center pressure. It's that pressure that you need to plan 10 steps ahead and you have to leap before you're ready.

As a side note, if you're a solopreneur or one-person show, this early stage is a very precious time for your business to be agile and nimble. The bigger your business gets the less flexibility you have to experiment, try new things, and pivot. So cherish it before you get pressured into becoming a "CEO of a 7-figure business."

As a service provider to entrepreneurs, the biggest misstep that online entrepreneurs make when it comes to scaling up their business is thinking that you can outsource the brand, strategy, and direction, or the heart, of your business.

You might think that you can outsource the heart of your business. That the core of your business, like your brand strategy, your overall strategy, and the direction and the way your business offers might be better decided by an “actual expert.”


But those are the things that absolutely cannot be outsourced; that MUST come from you. So, until you figure that out and feel really clear about it, it makes no sense to scale your business. And that is totally ok.

And I say this even though it is detrimental to my own business and sales when I say it:

Don't hire that fancy consultant or invest in that big program to scale your business or that mastermind to skill your business. Until you're crystal clear on these points:

1. The mission, vision, and purpose of your magic & body of work,

2. What your gifts are, how you best activate them, and your favorite way to share them.

3. Who you want to help and tactically how you want to work with them,

4. Your boundaries with your clients AND with the energetic entity of your business

5. Having an offer or container that is “proven” - meaning what you do, how you do it, and how you talk about it resonates with the souls who would be ideal clients.

If you feel like you're ready to scale your business, There are programs and containers that help you solidify the answers to these questions, but that’s a different story. My program Radiant on Purpose is actually one of those containers that helps you get clear on these foundational pillars of your business through the lens of your human design and gene keys.


I've seen other entrepreneurs invest in scaling their business before they're ready. Not just this client I mentioned earlier, but just others that I know and worked with. Their foundation wasn't ready because they don't have that solidified yet. There are two things that typically happen:

Issue #1- They build a business that is out of alignment with what they actually want and desire.

Issue #2- They try to scale a business that is built on a foundation of debt. Yes, often financial debt, but also emotional, mental, spiritual, etc. because they are outsourcing their authority to someone or something else outside of themselves in order to build their business.

Both of these things were true for that client I talked about earlier.

So here are some considerations if you're feeling the pressure to invest in scaling your business and how to intuitively know that it's the right time for you.

First- Are you clear on the strategic foundation and direction of your business?

a) Do you know what success looks like for you?

b) Are you being honest with yourself about what you TRULY want?

c) Do you know how to build your business to support that?

d) Do you understand the difference between what your soul mate clients want and need and how your magic, gifts, and talents can be packaged up to align with that?

Second- Get clear on the difference between outsourcing authority or looking for strategic support that fills in some of your skill/knowledge gaps (as I mentioned, there’s a big difference between these two).

Third- Get clear on what type and level of investment you are comfortable making. That doesn’t put you in a stressful situation.

Fourth- Don’t rush into these big decisions. Take your time. Wait till you feel the pull. If someone is pressuring you to make a decision, then it is often not the right decision for you.

a) Your intuition is stronger and more decisive than you will ever know

b) Your primary job is to clear the space needed for it to speak to you and for you to hear it.

c), and a big part of that is bringing awareness to the pressures you experience to think and act, so you can move through those pressures with grace as you build, grow, and scale your business.

I've talked about it for each of these five weeks now about how to bring awareness to these pressures at these different points, to understand the difference between this mental pressure and this root center pressure, and just to be aware of these pressures that you experience to think and to act so that you can move through these pressures with grace as you build and grow. And eventually, do scale your business because you have that foundation in place.