Top 3 Mistakes That Kept This Sensitive Mama Entrepreneur in Get-My-Biz-Off-The-Ground-Mode for 7 Flippin’ Years

Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending a lot of time in memory lane, looking over the choices and actions I’ve chosen to take as a sensitive mama business owner, and more importantly, the beliefs and thinking patterns that underpinned them. 

Now that I’m FINALLY making a consistent salary, through a scalable business model and watching my revenue expand, without expanding my 20 hour work week, I want to get crystal clear on what I was doing for the first 7 years of business, that kept me stuck at the $1.5K/ month mark.

A bit of backdrop.

Long story short (and you can read the full version here), I decided to start my business 10 years ago while on maternity leave with baby #3. 

I’d been struggling to be a present mama (understatement) for my 2 first kiddos while working part time for an HIV/AIDS organization. Coaching felt easy and right — my true calling. And I was super excited to have the freedom and flexibility that would allow me to be there for school pick-up along with those other precious  moments I’d already missed out on.

That first year of biz, I made a super cool $20K. And I seriously thought there was nowhere to go but up. 

I was wrong. 

Instead of steadily increasing my revenue, I ended up circling around and around and around this $1.5k/ month mark for 7 flippin years.

Wasted years, they were not. 

This is where I have to say that despite the financial stagnation, many other beautiful experiences and lessons unfolded. 

I celebrate the amazing coaches who held my hand along the way. I celebrate all the lessons learned, including those from top notch courses in Creating & Optimizing Facebook Ads, Writing Copy that Sells, Creating Instagram Reels, Facilitating Facebook Groups, Creating Tiny Offers, Growing Email Lists,, Leading Online Memberships (and the list goes on).

What I don’t celebrate is having unconsciously become a VIP member (mascot?) for the Expensive Business Hobby for Moms Club .

Never heard of it? 

The Expensive Business Hobby for Moms Club is an exclusive club for mother entrepreneurs who find themselves at the helm of financially unsustainable businesses that never quite reach a solid revenue goal, from which they can pay themselves a salary that they’re worthy of, or manage to scale up towards profitability and growth. 

If anyone (yourself included) has ever suggested that your biz is nothing but an expensive hobby, you’re likely a member. 

Here’s the good news…I’m on a mission to shut this club’s doors for good. 

To this end,  I’m spilling the beans on the top 3 mistakes I made that kept me there so that no other sensitive mama entrepreneur has to circle around inside the walls of this club for quite as long as I did.

Mistake #1. Rushing towards the Unaligned

This mistake is all about me looking for answers to grow my business in all the wrong places in a rush.

First of all, I was looking for answers outside myself which, I’ve come to learn, undermines my biggest business asset (especially as a sensitive soul) — my intuition (but more on that later).

Second of all, I was looking for answers from folks who had started their business at a different time (on-line biz explosion time, to be clear), under very different circumstances and with very different intentions. 

Like I said, I started my business as a highly sensitive mom of 3 young kids, married to a man who traveled a lot. I was also a woman who started my own coaching practice, not to make a billion bucks, but to have the freedom and flexibility that would allow me to be present for my kiddos while doing something I loved that contributed to our family’s bank account.

Blinded in the busy rush that is early motherhood and the lack of experience as a business owner, I looked to successful 6- and 7-figure business owners to lead the way. Surely, they knew what growing a business was all about. 

And of course, they did. And they do. They offered me all these shiny solutions that would help me build a successful and profitable business! 

From the outside, my buying their courses looked like me investing in myself and my business. 

But from the inside, what was actually happening was me investing in the next shiny solution from a place of inappropriate and unaligned comparison and not-enoughitis. 

By this I mean that I was making these investment decisions from a place of “this is the missing link” that will take me to the next level which, I was told, was leaping from a “measly” $20K to a 6-figure year. 

I’m not sure why I never questioned the size of the leap from 20K to 100K, but the experts never seemed to talk about anything less than 6-figures, so I followed blindly assuming that the next obvious revenue goal was over 4x where I was already at.

In retrospect, I now see that I was indeed buying missing links…but that they were the missing links of a very complex 6- or 7-figure business model, with an audience over 10x the size of my own, and a business team to support it! 

There I was, just starting up while feeling as though I was drowning in complexity, even though I was still in the shallow, slow moving waters where I’d launched my canoe.  

At the same time, by rushing from one course or shiny object to the next, I was not allowing myself time to process and integrate the courses I was investing in. I wasn’t optimizing them. I’d use them once for one program, then when they didn’t generate the 5-figure launch I’d expected, I’d move onto another.  

Meanwhile I was spending all the money I was making on these courses, and not paying myself.  

The underpinning belief here was that the 6- and 7-figure experts knew the best way forward and that I did not. I didn’t know enough, and both myself and my business were always lacking that one shiny solution that would make us whole. (Remind you of the capitalist consumption culture, anyone?)

(If this sounds familiar to you, click here to join my zero cost training for sensitive mums ready to reach consistent $2.5K months in their soul-led business, without missing pickup or school plays.) 

Mistake #2. Falling for the Toxic Myth of Perpetual Bloom

The Toxic Myth of Perpetual Bloom normalizes and celebrates constant production and visibility. It tells us that taking things slowly and resting regularly makes us lazy. 

It tells us that the outwards looking, growing and blooming phases of any business project cycle, is of greater value than the introspective phases that invite discernment, learning, releasing, intuiting, analyzing, integration and rest. 

It is a myth that disconnects us from the wisdom of nature’s cycle when, truth be told, we are nature. And just as we shouldn’t expect a flower to stay in perpetual growth and bloom, nor should we expect that of ourselves or of our business projects. Plus, it feeds our addictions to busy and rush. And it suggests that being “out there” 24/7 is the norm. 

The truth is that to live life in perpetual growth & bloom is not only exhausting and unsustainable, it also keeps our brains in overdrive, disconnecting us from our feelings and intuitive wisdom. It stops us from accessing the wealth of data and knowledge offered through regular reflection and rest — especially critical in early phases of our business growth AND our own growth as entrepreneurs. 

This way of starting a business is both ego driven and founded on the “hustle model” which tells us that the more you do, the longer hours you work, the more beads of sweat drip, the more likely your success.  

I was socialized to believe (we all were, really…) to believe that the more I did, the more likely I’d be to succeed and therefore the safer I’d be.  And related, pushing my way through the fog and fatigue, even if it feels unnatural or counter-intuitive, was the way to go.

And remember, all the while I was comparing my grow-the-biz to do list with those of established 6- and 7-figure business owners many of whom didn’t have any family responsibilities, and who had a large team to delegate to.

This hustle model being modeled by those I sought to follow involved long hours, high learning curves, high investment, stress, frustration, irritability. I ended up approaching everything — including motherhood — from a place of drained physical, emotional and cognitive energy.  

And so, instead of being the woman who lived out her free and flexible business owner dream, while also being fully present for my beloved family, I role modeled frazzle, stress and overwhelm.

Combined with my sensitivity and perfectionism, this downward spiral resulted in the unconscious following of, and comparing myself with the 6- and 7-figure experts  

Ultimately, this led to a dive in self-esteem stemming from beliefs like:

This is taking me so long because I’m a bad business woman.

I’m failing because I’m too soft and sensitive.  

Maybe my dream is unrealistic…maybe I can’t have it all.

Now I know, from the other end of this adventure, that none of these beliefs were true.

The truth, in fact, is that sensitivity is my superpower..

Not only does it heighten my intuition, when used correctly, it also helped my connect with my emotional and hormonal compass.  And from here, cyclical planning and living comes easily.

Harnessing Nature’s Inherent Wisdom to Manage Time & Energy in a New Way

5 or so years into my business adventure, I learned an alternative to the perpetually-in-bloom hustle model way of managing (or not managing!) my energy and time. 

This new way acknowledged the way my woman’s body cycled and taught me to apply nature’s 4-phase cycle into the way I organized my life. Each and every project I worked with was seen to have a Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, just as my body did.

Synching where my body was at with these project phases boosted my productivity, efficiency and effectiveness in a way I never imagined possible. Result: I could produce more while doing less! (Click here to learn more about cyclical living).

Ok, so let’s take a moment to pause and summarize. Coming from a place of “the answers are outside of me”, stemming from misaligned and inappropriate comparisons, and a sense of not-enoughitis, I was adopting a hustle mentality that ultimately fueled self-doubt and squashed my self-esteem. This is where mistake #3 comes in.

Mistake #3. Ignoring the Inner Work

Within this context, as a sensitive mum who felt all the feels, saw my mistakes as failures, didn’t take time to learn from them, and took things personally, I kept telling myself that I didn’t have what it took. And the perpetual shiny object syndrome consumption pattern continued. 

What I wasn’t doing was addressing the root of the problem — a mindset and energetics dominated by my ego, rooted in lack and insecurity. 

Why? Why would I ignore this?

Disclaimer: I didn't know.

I didn't know how fundamental the inner work was in allowing me to step into the version of myself that would take me to the next level (which wasn't 6-figures, by the way).

I didn't know that owning a soul-led business meant, merged my soul's growth with the growth of my business. 

But now I do.

And now I also know that our ego's job is to keep us safe. And what is the safest thing of all? Staying the same.

This means that having a mindset and energetics dominated by my ego, means having a mindset and energetic unconsciously designed to keep me safe and the same.

$1.5K months was that safe and same place.

Staying here helped me to avoid any real threat of success i.e.,  the demands I feared business expansion would have on my capacity to be emotionally present for my kiddos.

Circling around guaranteed no real threat of the responsibility I’d have over money, clients and increased visibility, if I actually succeeded. 

By learning and, over time, mastering what I’ve come to call the Uncomfortable Art of Soulpreneurial Expansion I'm delighted to say that I know how to face the ego-driven fear and do it anyway.

When I learned how to be in the discomfort of growth, showing up with confidence began to happen. And when the energetics changed inside of me, I resonated differently for those receiving my message.

I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but as my resonance rose, I became more magnetic to those I sought to attract. 

Oh and another beautiful thing: The Uncomfortable Art of Soulpreneurial Expansion also replaces the hustle model that is all about doing MORE. It’s based on the premise that who we are — the being —goes first. 

Cancelling My Membership

Today, in 20hours/ week (often less), I continue to grow my thriving business.

It’s founded on a super simple (and excitingly scaleable) business model.

I'm making more than $2.5K/ month consistently, beginning to hire support and have a growing audience by 1000s thanks to my super fun podcast, WitchHunt. 

I look to my intuition for guidance and work with business coaches who “get” my sensitive nature and my be-present mama values and priorities. I manage my energy and time in a way that honors my emotional, physical and spiritual desires (as all Witches and Priestesses must do) and in so doing, live according to a spacious calendar and schedule. 

Oh! And my biggest priority is practicing that Uncomfortable Art of Soulpreneurial Expansion. 

Beautiful, if you're a sensitive Mama soul-led business owner and want to leave the Expensive Business Hobby for Moms Club once and for all, so that you can start/ grow your business to consistent $2.5k months, using a scalable business model — without missing out on those precious mum moments, join my zero cost training today. You can click here to join.

The world needs you to honor your purpose and potential. 

And your kids need to watch you do it!  

xx

Alex