After 12 years in business, I’ve learned there is a gentler way to approach running a business than I believed for the first 8-10 years.
For the longest time, I thought that being more productive, optimising my schedule and checking everything off my to-do list were the keys to feeling successful and fulfilled.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
My journey has not been a straight line (but then again, whose is?). I started with a wedding decor business in South Africa, then moved to the UK and built an online store for photographers. Now, I support overwhelmed creative business owners in reshaping their businesses to align with their natural energy.
Along the way, I’ve experienced the chaos of running a small business – the late nights, the customer service headaches, and the constant feeling of drowning under my to-do list. I have felt completely burnt out, questioning why my business made me so miserable.
This experience led me to create Root to Rise, my signature support package, but it has also completely redesigned my approach to business. I wanted to build something that honoured my need for spaciousness, worked with my neurodivergent brain rather than against it, and allowed me to be present with my daughter and enjoy a life beyond work.
The lessons I’m sharing in this blog post are insights (gained from my mistakes) that transformed my business from a chaotic structure that drained my energy into a nurturing foundation supporting my natural way of being in the world (without any productivity hacks ✨).
If you prefer to watch (or close your eyes and listen), you can check out my video – It took me 12 years of business to realise what I’ll tell you in just 20 minutes…
1. Design your business to evolve with you (and your life)
Over these 12 years, I’ve changed in so many beautiful ways. I got married, became a mother, moved countries, and discovered I’m autistic. Through it all, I learned that your business should be adaptable enough to grow and shift as you do.
If I were in any other career or job, it would be unheard of for me to stay in the same position forever. Yet sometimes, I can fall into the trap of designing my business as if it’s something I will do the same way forever.
In reality, we need our businesses to evolve and change with us. Sometimes, this might look like completely pivoting your focus or slightly tweaking your direction. Maybe you’re a photographer who’s always been in the wedding industry but now feels called to do brand photography. Perhaps you want to step away from being behind the camera altogether and try something new.
I think we can get really stuck in thinking “this is what I do” – and that mindset limits your creativity and where you could possibly go in the future. My biggest lesson in business is to always build your business to adapt and evolve over time.
Holding onto something just for the sake of it, just because it feels familiar and comfortable, can be one of the biggest traps in business. When you design your business with adaptability in mind from the beginning, you create space for your own growth while maintaining alignment with your core values.
This principle is at the heart of my Root to Rise approach. Just as nature adapts to changing seasons while staying rooted, your business can grow in new directions while remaining grounded in what truly matters to you.
2. Slow down and trust your intuition in your business
We’ve all ignored our gut feelings at some point, and usually (spoiler alert!), it ends in disaster.
Whether it’s that client who doesn’t feel like a good fit or that exciting but scary idea you’re hesitant to pursue – your intuition is trying to tell you something important.
My intuition was literally screaming at me for over a year to start sharing what I was experiencing and feeling on YouTube, but I ignored it because I didn’t feel “ready.” Looking back, I see how that hesitation held me back. Now I understand that the strongest guide in my business isn’t a spreadsheet or strategy – it’s that quiet knowing within.
I encourage you to listen to your intuition and let that be your strongest guide in business. My intuition is my strongest guide in life (and business). Sometimes, it’s very easy to miss what your intuition is trying to tell you.
This is why slowing down in your business is so essential.
Having time to recalibrate and reset helps you hear those subtle intuitive nudges that can guide your next steps. I believe that running a business is one of the quickest ways to transform yourself and learn about yourself. Learning to trust your intuition is one of the biggest skills you can develop as a business owner.
This is what I love about working in tune with the seasons – it gives you space to check in with yourself and your business often (not just once at the beginning of the year). This is why I don’t see my seasonal planning sessions as a way to be “more productive”, it’s an opportunity to tune into my inner knowing.
Working with the natural rhythm of seasons gives us permission to slow down and listen to our intuition before rushing into action. When we build this practice into our business cycles, intuitive decision-making becomes a natural strength rather than something we have to force.
3. Define business success on your own terms
This lesson took multiple painful attempts to learn. I designed my businesses around metrics I saw online – the six-figure revenue, the Royal Mail van filled with orders, the studio space – only to discover that achieving these “success markers” left me feeling empty and exhausted.
The reality of those achievements meant late nights, customer complaints, endless hours on customer service, and missing precious time with my family.
None of it felt like success because they weren’t MY metrics.
Sometimes we build our businesses around metrics that actually don’t mean anything to us. Once we reached those success metrics, they felt pretty empty because they were designed around somebody else’s definition of success – not the type of business you actually wanted to run.
In my case, I missed having one-on-one connection with clients. I felt really isolated. I had built metrics in my mind that didn’t mean anything to me, and I can think of so many examples where clients do this too. Whether it’s having that dreamy home studio (meanwhile it locks you in so you can never move houses), or being a destination photographer (when you don’t actually enjoy traveling).
This is why, when working with clients, our first season often involves rediscovering what success truly means to them and digging deeper to ensure that their business is designed around their values and lifestyle.
You need to strip away external expectations before reconnecting with your definition of a thriving business. Without this foundation-setting work, you risk building systems and setting intentions that look impressive but don’t align with the lifestyle you want to create.
4. Create a business that values “enough” over more
I’m not here trying to build a 7-figure empire (with staff and complicated sales funnels). I want a cosy business that gives me enough to sustain my lifestyle, work four days a week, spend time with my daughter, and have space in my schedule for walks, naps (yes midday naps aren’t just for little people hehe), and journaling.
I’m pretty happy living a simple life. If I’m honest, many of the things I love to do are possible regardless of my “success.” Sometimes, all I have to do is stop putting off my joy for another day and be present in the moment (a simple thing in theory, but something I often forget!).
I have to remind myself that my business’s income doesn’t define my success – what matters is whether my business provides what I need. That figure is different for everyone. Right now, I know exactly what I need to make to support my family’s current situation and the lifestyle we want to live.
Sometimes I feel embarrassed by my “small” numbers, but then I remind myself: what matters is that my business supports me, my family, and the lifestyle I want to live. That’s worth more than impressive revenue figures that would require sacrificing what’s important to me.
My business is very much designed on where I’m at this particular point in my life. While my numbers might not look flashy to other people, they are exactly right for me. It wouldn’t be worthwhile for me to earn an extra £20k a year if it meant working five days a week or needing to manage a team. For me, right now, earning a bit less but only working four days a week is extremely important as I recover from burnout and look after my family.
When I work with clients, we spend time defining their specific version of “enough” – helping them gain clarity around their numbers so they can make better decisions. Without this clarity, it’s easy to chase arbitrary benchmarks that might look impressive but don’t actually serve your life goals. Defining your “enough” creates both freedom and boundaries that make business decisions much simpler.
5. Align your business structure with your needs
It took me far too long to realise this simple truth: your business needs to provide all the benefits a regular job would. I know – I can’t believe it took me so long to realise this either!
There is so much talk about your business being in alignment with your values and purpose (and while I 100% agree), your business also needs to provide you with:
- A reliable monthly salary you can count on
- Paid time off and holiday
- Sick leave when you need it
- Regular breaks, including lunch hours
- A pension plan for your future – right now mine is still shockingly small. But I’m making sure I do a small contribution every month and this is one thing I am really prioritising right now.
Before, I would tend to spend freely in the good months and then have absolutely nothing in the bad months. That was a recipe for anxiety and often left me feeling really panicked about my business. Now, I have accepted that my business is seasonal, and even though my revenue isn’t constant, I can still find ways to ensure that my take-home pay is.
I make sure that if I have a really good month, I’m setting money aside for the quieter times to ensure I can still pay myself a consistent salary every month. I may give myself a bonus occasionally, but I need to make sure I can always cover my basic salary. Building a savings buffer took time, but has been so helpful for my mental health.
Another important change was deciding how much leave I want every year and making sure I take it. I would just work and work, stealing a day here or an afternoon there, but I never felt like I could truly switch off. Now I have planned time off in the summer, planned time off in December, and regular breaks throughout the year.
I’ve found that helping clients build these fundamental needs into their business structure is transformative. From figuring out how much you want to make every month to creating protected time off, we need systems that prioritise wellbeing. When your business serves your life rather than consuming it, you get the stability of employment benefits with the freedom of entrepreneurship – truly the best of both worlds.
PS. I am far from perfect! I want my salary and pension contributions to be slightly more than they are now. But I’m not letting that stop me from making this a practice—even if it’s only a small amount that I add to my pension pot every month. The point is that I am making this a regular practice, and it can grow in time.
6. Marketing in alignment with slow living business values
Most of your time in business will be dedicated to marketing, whether you like it or not. There’s simply no getting around this reality! I have tried to avoid this for a really long time, but there’s absolutely no escaping it. You need to sell. You need to be good at sales in your business, and that takes time to learn.
What tends to happen is that marketing becomes a task we put in the margins – something we do once our client work is finished or when everything else is done.
I used to find myself thinking – “Oh yeah, I should probably market my business.”
But actually, it should be the very first thing you prioritise before anything else. It’s vital to the health and wellbeing of your business.
When I’m determining my capacity and how many clients I can take on, I always factor in how much time marketing will require. Even with a client-based business where referrals help, I still spend at least one to two days a week on marketing because things take time. And unless you can outsource all those tasks (which doesn’t always work), you need to make space for it.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned is to not let marketing be a task that gets swept aside. It’s the most important task that I prioritise in my business – whether that’s getting out one email newsletter, creating a video, or writing a blog post.
When I work with clients, I focus on making marketing feel energising rather than draining. We explore different ways of expressing themselves that actually feel good – whether that’s writing, speaking, or visual content. The key is finding marketing methods that align with your natural strengths and energy patterns rather than forcing approaches that leave you depleted.
I also help clients create systems for repurposing content so they don’t constantly feel like they’re feeding the content machine. One piece of content can be transformed and adapted across multiple platforms, which reduces the pressure to always be creating something new. This approach makes marketing sustainable for the long term, especially for sensitive business owners who find constant content creation overwhelming.
7. Embrace cyclical growth in your business
Growth in nature is never linear, so why would we expect it to be in business? The biggest thing I’ve come to realise is that if you’ve been in business for multiple years, you will have slow seasons. You will have seasons where you are shedding and letting go of things, and you will have seasons where everything feels great, in complete alignment, and you’re growing and expanding.
Those growth periods feel wonderful – that time is amazing in your business. But it’s also important to recognise when you’re experiencing other seasons, like when growth is happening beneath the surface and isn’t visible to the outside world.
You are still growing, still learning, still building, even when it doesn’t look like it from the outside.
I think it can be so easy to get stuck in the “overnight success” story of business that it can feel really discouraging when your business doesn’t immediately grow and expand at an exponential rate. For most of us, growth happens really slowly – we take two steps forward and one step back.
This can be a really hard thing to recognise, but once you do, it becomes easier to move forward. It actually becomes easier to grow your business because you know these setbacks will happen, that you’ll feel like you’re starting from scratch again sometimes. While growth might look linear from the outside, it never really feels that way from the inside.
8. Replace rigid consistency with aligned rituals
Consistency is often praised as the holy grail of business success, but for many of us (especially neurodivergent business owners), consistency is not going to be something we are able to achieve.
Trying to force yourself into rigid routines often leads to shame and burnout.
Personally, I don’t try to have perfect consistency in my business. I’m totally okay if I have to leave something for another week. I think the trick is finding ways to come back to the things that are important to you, which is why rituals are so helpful rather than rigid routines.
Rituals anchor me in my weeks and help me stay a little bit more consistent. If I find myself avoiding something in my business, I try to dig a little deeper rather than forcing myself into creating a new system. Perhaps there’s a lesson there – either that thing isn’t important and I shouldn’t be doing it, or there’s a more fun and creative way I could approach it.
Every week my energy looks different. It’s unpredictable!
Add in being a mother, and let’s be honest, there is just no week that goes according to plan. Expecting myself to show up consistently is not possible. But if I have a weekly ritual, like writing a newsletter on a Tuesday, that becomes easier because I do it regularly. I light a candle, start the process, and before I know it, the newsletter is done!
I’ve seen this work wonders with my clients too. Rather than focusing on rigid routines, we create personal rituals that honour their natural energy patterns or neurodivergent traits. These rituals become touchstones throughout the different seasons, providing enough structure to keep moving forward while allowing flexibility when energy or circumstances change.
9. Simplicity: the heart of any business aligned with slow living values
My brain naturally gravitates toward complexity. If there’s a complicated way to do something, I’ll immediately go to the most complicated way to do things! It’s really important for me at most points in my process to think: “Is this the simplest way I could be doing things?” and to be okay with doing it the easy way.
I don’t know why I love to make things complicated. Perhaps it’s an ingrained belief that things need to be hard to be valuable or good or worthwhile. But this is a shift I’ve taken over the past few years, and it has completely changed my mindset.
I am totally okay doing things the laziest way possible. I don’t find any value in overcomplicating things anymore. It’s definitely a skill that you have to learn to cultivate within your business, but once you do, it’s a real game changer.
I often have to sit back, recalibrate, reassess, and strip things back as opposed to adding more in, which is my natural tendency. This is a business lesson I have to learn over and over again.
10. Design your business and systems around YOUR brain
Another lesson I’ve learned is to design your business and systems around your brain and not somebody else’s. This is a lesson I’ve had to learn the hard way.
I’ve paid so much for other people’s blueprints, systems, and ways of doing things, only to discover they just don’t work for me and my brain. This all comes back to knowing yourself and designing things to work for you instead of against you.
I used to feel like I needed to have these big elaborate plans – like I should be the type of person with a quarterly plan that I’d stick to religiously, with all these detailed steps. While there’s some value in having a future vision, I’ve learned that I’m a very intuitive worker.
I can have something that I’m working towards, but I know that sometimes I won’t be able to take action until I feel that intuitive nudge that “now is the right time.” When I try to force myself into rigid plans or ways of doing things, I simply can’t follow through.
But if I step back and allow things to happen in the moment while keeping a general direction, that works much better for me.
You might be completely different and actually need more structure to move things along. Again, it’s all about knowing yourself and what works for you so that you can build systems and processes around your unique brain and preferred way of working.
I see this pattern with clients too. We often spend time exploring their natural work patterns, discovering whether they need more structure or more flexibility, and designing systems that work with them rather than against them.
There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to force yourself into someone else’s system, only to feel like you’re failing when it doesn’t work for you. Again, it’s all about knowing yourself and what works for you so that you can build systems and processes around your preferred way of working.
11. Make rest a regular practice in your business
The importance of rest and having fun in your business might be the most important lesson I’ve learned in the last 12 years. If you take anything away from this post, let it be this: make time to rest and make time to play.
Rest is absolutely vital. Having gone through burnout myself, I can honestly say that pushing yourself to do more won’t get you there faster. The reality is that you’re most likely going to burn out, which leads to poorer decision-making and drained creativity. I don’t know about you, but I can’t come up with good, creative ideas when I’m always pushing beyond my energetic capacity.
If you need to see rest as something that makes you more productive, that’s fine – but honestly, rest is just a basic human need. If we built businesses around our need and desire for rest, it would transform the experience for so many business owners.
Rest doesn’t always look like lying down and doing nothing (though that works for me!). I understand that’s really hard for some people.
There is a reason why I said make rest a regular practice – because it isn’t always the easiest thing to do.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith identifies seven types of rest that we need: physical, mental, emotional, social, sensory, creative, and spiritual rest. I’ve found that incorporating these different forms of rest into my business rhythm has been transformative.
For me, rest means:
- Taking proper breaks during my workday
- Building in buffer time between client sessions
- Creating clear boundaries around my work hours
- Taking scheduled time off throughout the year
- Allowing myself to step away completely from my business
- Making space for creative rest where I can explore without pressure
As your business’s greatest asset, I would argue that rest is probably the most important thing you can prioritise. It’s certainly the most important lesson I’ve learned in the last 12 years of being in business.
12. Create more joy by playing and experimenting in your business
Learning how to play and experiment in your business is just as important as rest. This final lesson has been transformational for me, allowing me to design my business around my unique gifts rather than creating a carbon copy of what everyone else is doing.
I’ve learned to approach my business with an experimenter’s mindset – most often that looks like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks 🙃. This is the approach that has always helped me
- try new things
- following my curiosity
- and discover what works specifically for me and my clients.
It has helped me create a business that feels uniquely mine rather than following someone else’s blueprint.
When you make space for play and experimentation, you give yourself permission to step away from the “shoulds” and rigid expectations. You can design your business around what brings you joy and what feels energising rather than draining.
As I’ve discovered through my own business journey, this playful approach helps you create a business that showcases your unique gifts and what you have to share with the world – all while having fun in the process. It keeps your work fresh and allows your authentic self to shine through rather than trying to fit into someone else’s mould.
I encourage my clients to bring this same sense of playfulness and experimentation to their businesses. We explore what feels energising versus draining, what sparks creativity versus what stifles it, and how to create space for play even when running a “serious” business. When you approach business as a creative experiment rather than a rigid structure, it opens up possibilities you might never have considered.
Final thoughts on running a business aligned with slow living values
I believe that running a business aligned with slow living values is about rejecting the hustle culture that dominates so much of the online business world and instead steeping everything you do with meaning and intention.
Taking a slower more intentional approach doesn’t mean you can’t be successful – it simply means redefining success on your own terms. For me, success looks like a cosy lifestyle business that gives me the freedom to work four days a week, be present for my daughter, and have space for the things that nourish me.
I hope these lessons offer you permission to create a business that truly works for you – one that feels like wearing your favourite cosy jumper rather than a constant struggle. Because ultimately, I believe that’s what business success really means: creating something that supports the life you want to live, not the one you think you should want.
If you enjoyed this post and would like more thoughts delivered straight to your inbox, you can sign up for my email newsletter, Rituals and Remedies. I love to share my personal practice and rituals for running my business in alignment with the wheel of the year and the natural rhythms of life.
You can also learn more about working with me 1:1 – as I help you run your business more in tune with the seasons. So you can build a business that doesn’t leave you feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. Instead, run a cosy, seasonal business that supports you in harnessing your creativity and energy, making space for seasons of growth, reflection, action, AND REST!
