Bubble baths won’t save your business
But fixing your business' backend might
In this edition of The Loophole:
The CRM I bought for a team of fifty (I had three clients)
Why your anxiety is louder than you think
The business structure move you keep calling “not urgent”
The version of self-care nobody’s selling
There’s a version of self-care that gets sold to tired business owners, and it looks like bubble baths and nature walks and coming home to yourself on a yoga mat. I do all of it, a lot.
But the most significant shift in how I take care of myself has nothing to do with any of that, and everything to do with the afternoon I cancelled a software subscription and felt my shoulders drop two inches.
Let me back up.
The fifty-person CRM I bought for three clients
A year ago, I decided I was ready to get serious about client management, which, for me, meant doing what I always do when I want to feel serious: I bought the most sophisticated tool I could find. A CRM built for teams of fifty. I had three clients.
But, as my futuristic parts told me, I wasn’t buying for who I was; I was buying for who I was performing. I bought it as a founder who had it together, who was thinking ten steps ahead, who was not, under any circumstances, small.
For about three weeks it worked beautifully as a confidence prop. Then I started dreading logging in. Every time I opened it I was confronted with the fifty-person operation I hadn’t built yet, all those empty fields and unused features sitting there like evidence.
So I did what you do when something makes you feel behind: I avoided it. And because my client management lived inside it, I started avoiding my work too, in that low-grade, hard-to-name way where you’re technically working but nothing is actually moving.
A colleague told me about a platform built for solo service providers. A tenth of the cost, none of the features I wasn’t ready for. I switched on a Tuesday afternoon, and by Wednesday I had followed up with two clients I’d been ghosting for a week.
The monthly cost dropped. The calm went up. My clients got better work from me because I wasn’t performing competence every time I opened my laptop; I was just doing the work.
My lesson: having peace of mind does not require a complex system. The reverse is actually true. The simpler your system, the more peace of mind you have.
Your are running a program you didn’t install
One of my clients said something recently that I keep turning over. She’d just come through a significant transition in her business and she wrote to tell me she felt calmer, more confident, actually ready.
“Sonya! Thank you so much for helping me through this and getting my legal stuff worked out. I can’t tell you how much more confident and calm I feel as I go into this agreement. It’s such a relief knowing that I’ve been taken care of.”
“Confident”? “Calm”? “Taken care of”?
Those aren’t words people usually associate with the backend of a business. They’re words people associate with a spa.
But that’s exactly what happens when you stop ignoring the important work. When you face the things you need to do to build your foundation, you realize it’s much simpler than you thought. Take it from me, the Queen of Thinking Things Need to be Complicated.
Your incorporation status. Your client agreements. Your corporate minute book sitting untouched since the year you signed it.
None of these things is complicated. The more we complicate them in our minds, the more we avoid them, and in the meantime, it just hums.
Low-grade. Constant.
The procrastination, the avoidance, the inexplicable urge to reorganize your desk instead of opening the thing you’ve been avoiding.
That background program is running whether you acknowledge it or not, and the more you avoid it, the more it affects your work.
Simple is not the same as small
The overcomplicated foundation is almost never about practicality. It’s about legitimacy. We incorporate before we understand what incorporation actually protects. We sign agreements we haven’t read because we don’t want to look untrustworthy or unsure. We buy the fifty-person CRM because simple feels small, and we are terrified of being small.
The business structure mistakes I see most often aren’t from people who did nothing. They’re from people who did too much, too soon, in the wrong order, without the right foundation underneath any of it.
Simple done well is a structure. Complex done early is expensive anxiety dressed up as ambition, and it costs you more than the subscription fee.
How do you practice self-care in your business?
The nature walks are still happening. Lately, bubble baths look like skinny-dipping under waterfalls or floating around in my sister-in-law’s hot tub, and I’m starting to notice how much more peaceful they are now that I’m not avoiding my inbox the whole time.
Reply and tell me the one thing you’ve consciously done as a business owner to practice self-care that might not look like self-care to the rest of the world. I read every reply.
Need more self-care in your business?
Try this prompt with your AI chatbot of choice:
You are an insightful, investigative interviewer and a savvy business coach. I want to practice better self-care in my business, and I'm not talking about bubble baths. I want to identify the one backend task that's creating the most low-grade anxiety in my business right now. Ask me five questions about my business, one at a time, to help me figure out what that is. Then tell me whether the solution is something I can handle myself, or whether I need a professional, and what kind: an accountant, a lawyer, a strategic coach, a marketing advisor, or a financial planner. Be specific about why.
As always, your chatbot will get you to the door. A professional will get you through it.
Build smart,
Sonya
P.S. If you’re short on time, here’s my point: Radical self-care and solid business structure are not mutually exclusive.
Shiny new tools are always such a temptation!