Simply listing out the upsides and downsides of a possibility that comes your way tends to reflect your biases and current mood. Here’s a process that gets to the heart of what matters most to you, so you can say yes — or no — with more clarity.

Most people I know have a lot of things on the go.

Some are consultants, with a bunch of client projects jostling for attention. Others are business owners whose focus needs to shift constantly between managing people, products, customers, and the business itself. There are caregivers juggling work, school, and family commitments; artists squeezing their creative practice in amidst everything else; and on, and on, and on.

When you have a full and multifaceted life, there’s an ongoing need to take stock of all the projects you’re focused on, and determine how to prioritize them all. Often, you’re stretched too thin, and need to find some breathing room by saying no to a thing or two.

The trouble with pro/con lists

If you find yourself wrestling with having too many things on the go, or looking for a way to make room for something new, you might be inclined to make a list of pros and cons for each project or priority — but I’m not convinced that’s an effective tool for the job. The problem with pros and cons lists is threefold:

1. We tend to write them stream of consciousness in a single sitting, thereby falling prey to a variety of cognitive biases — from over-emphasizing the qualities that society tells us should matter most (e.g. $$$), to exaggerating the value of sunk costs.
2. There’s no weighting system, so there’s a tendency to assign more value to the column with the most bullet points, regardless of how significant the points are.
3. Our emotional state when writing the list can have an outsized impact on what we include. (Okay, this is really just another form of cognitive bias, but I feel like it merits emphasis.)

The good news: there’s a better way — and it’s no more time-consuming than writing out a pro/con list.

How to use the questions that follow

Over the course of many years of being my own boss, and supporting other business owners and leaders in identifying their priorities, I’ve developed a series of questions you can use to assess a project’s importance to you. You can use these questions on a case-by-case basis, as new opportunities present themselves, or take stock of everything you’re currently working on.

I even had one client use these questions to build a spreadsheet that he used to decide what projects to step away from in order to make more time for his partner and family. He answered each question on a scale from 1–5, weighted them according to his personal values, and used the resulting scores to make some tough choices.

Now, that’s probably a bit too geekalicious for some of you, but I usually go through the list and assign it a value along a spectrum of terrible/not great/neutral/decent/fantastic (so could be a scale of 1–5, or colours from red to green — whatever works for you).

It’s important to add that some of these questions will feel more or less important to you — and that’s entirely OK. Pay attention to which ones seem most critical, and make sure you highlight them in some way so you can compare your options along the axes that matter most to you. That’s the whole point of this exercise: to help you figure out what qualities are most important in your life so you can prioritize accordingly.

Getting to yes… or no

Here are the nine factors I use for myself and with my clients when weighing projects and opportunities. Feel free to adapt them to suit your own values, language, and process.

1. Wonder
   How much wide-eyed possibility does this project crack you open to? What possibilities might unfold as a result of your pursuing this project sooner than later?
2. Skills, Strength
   What opportunities does this project provide to build or hone your skills and strengths?
3. Horizon Potential
   How does this project get me or my team closer to my desired horizon (future vision)?
4. Impact, Legacy
   What difference will this project make in the lives of an audience, a person, and/or future generations?
5. Reputation
   How effectively does it build reputational capital?
6. Revenue Potential
   What direct and residual financial return might this project bring?
7. Sustainable Resource Allocation
   How effectively & efficiently does this project make use of your time & resources?
8. Time Urgency/Pressure
   Is there a time pressure that makes this project’s execution and completion urgent?
9. Heart/Gut Sense
   What does your heart/gut tell you about how badly you want to do this? Does your heart sing when you think about it? Does it simply feel like a gut-level YES*?

(* With apologies to my esteemed friend and colleague Randi Buckley.)

What have I missed?

I’m fairly positive there are facets I haven’t considered here, and I’d love to hear what they are. What qualities help you discern the right mix of projects for you? What helps you get clear on your “yes” and your “no”?

Let’s help each other get better at making the right choices.

Hustling for the sake of hustling, for example.

“Me first” self-promotion.

Greed-driven strategies.

You know, the grossest, lowest common denominator, makes-your-skin-crawl kind of stuff.

It bothers me a lot that while there are lots (and lots and lots) of entrepreneurs doing things differently, the top ten lists for business books and podcasts are mostly unfettered, greed- and scarcity-driven bullshit all the way down.

Bothers is putting it mildly. It makes me rage. In a don’t-get-me-started-or-we’ll-be-here-all-day kind of way.

Because here’s the thing: business doesn’t have to be like that.

We don’t have to take those approaches to build successful businesses. You don’t have to prey on people’s insecurities to sell them things. You don’t have to pretend you know everything to be taken seriously. You don’t have to throw people under the bus to get ahead.

You don’t need to exploit or harm anyone (including yourself) to make your business thrive.

You know this, because the moment you think about the places and people you love to spend your money with — your favourite restaurants, service providers, grocers, artists, and so on — certain feelings come to mind: fair exchange, respect and care for customers and colleagues, devotion to quality, contribution to community. Those businesses (to borrow a favourite turn of phrase from Tim O’Reilly) contribute more value than they capture, in tangible and intangible ways.

However, there’s a whole industry, and broader cultural forces, working to make you believe that making your business successful is inevitably in tension with, you know, wacky shit like cooperation, respectful relationships, having healthy lives outside of work, shared status and power, and generally leaving the world a better place than you found it.

And so we continue to accept as a given that businesses should extract more value than they create, which quite literally impoverishes the world — while the rest of us entrepreneurs feel like weirdos for doing things differently.

But you’re not interested in building yet another extraction-oriented business, are you?

Nah. Because you know there’s another way. Or in fact, many other ways.

Let’s talk possibility models for small biz

There are many, many other possibility models for businesses that generate healthy financial returns and contribute in other ways.

Every day, I talk to people who started their businesses because they care about craft, contribution, autonomy, purpose, and people. They weigh these five factors alongside every business decision they make, whether they’re conscious of it or not. Every time they take pains to ensure their work is of the highest quality, make the people they work with feel valued, or share knowledge with their peers, they are choosing to do business in a way that isn’t solely about maximizing profits.

And while money is absolutely a critical piece of the puzzle, these entrepreneurs’ financial ambitions aren’t unchecked: they want enough to live a comfortable life, look after their loved ones, hire the people they want to work with at good wages, and give back to the communities where they live.

This isn’t a radical thing, really — it’s not new, or “innovative,” or “social enterprise,” or whatever other buzzword you want to throw at it. These are the things that have always driven people to launch businesses, long before capitalism or globalization became things. And they continue to fuel small businesses everywhere.

But in their way, these qualities are radical, because they fly in the face of cultural messages that screech, “More! Bigger! Scale! Status!”

And because, honestly? If all businesses were focused on those five factors, our economies and our world would look very, very different.

So let’s talk about them.

Change these five things, and we change the (business) world

I think it’s fascinating that while the vast majority of entrepreneurs I’ve met, from biotech CEOs and marketing consultants to interior designers and farmers, are as clear as day that their businesses serve a purpose beyond accumulating personal wealth, the dominant narrative about business focuses on things that are diametrically opposed to the five factors I listed above.

• Craft vs Monopoly: Where most of us want to build a legacy that lives beyond us and that others can build upon, the dominant narrative tells us we ought to build monopolies and wipe out the competition.
• Contribution vs Extraction: Where most of us want to find ways to contribute more value than we capture, the dominant narrative says business is about extracting value from our customers, and from the supply chain.
• Autonomy vs Power-Over: Where most of us want the freedom to make our own choices, and for others to enjoy the same, the dominant narrative says business is about status and dominance, and maintaining status quo power relationships.
• Purpose vs Unfettered Growth: Where most of us want meaningful growth, the dominant narrative says business success looks like unlimited, accelerated scale.
• People vs Wealth Concentration: Where most of us want to give back to our communities, and do business in ways that benefit all the stakeholders we’re connected to, the dominant narrative tells us that business is about maximizing shareholder returns, and leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.

As I’ve been collecting my thoughts on this subject, several things have dawned on me.

First, these five factors have real and crucial consequences for small businesses. While most small business owners care about craft, contribution, autonomy, purpose, and people, the businesses that are focused on monopoly, extraction, power-over, unfettered growth, and wealth concentration are making life hard for the rest of us. Just look at what Amazon did to independent booksellers (and now the rest of retail), or how Monsanto has bullied farmers.

Second, there are micro and macro levels to each of these five factors. Or to put it another way, there’s a “feel-good” factor to each — in much the same way it feels great to buy your eggs from someone you know takes good care of their hens— but there are also real rewards to be reaped from them. These include both benefits to your business, like higher customer retention and profit margins, as well as collective ones, like better economic opportunities for all and ecological sustainability. (Unfettered growth, for example, is incompatible with keeping the Earth a safe place to live. And yet we persist in using it as a primary measure of economic health.)

Third, and perhaps most nerve-wracking for me to say aloud, because it feels so radical: the way most of us small business owners do business is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism as it’s currently practiced, or what I’ve started calling unfettered capitalism. Because that dominant narrative I keep talking about? And those five oppositional points to the things we care about? They are quite literally part of the definition of capitalism.

More on that another time, though, because that’s a whole can of worms, and then some.

A brief sidebar about B corps, etc.

I know I’m not the first to write about this, by the way. There are the B Corp people, the BALLE folks, the Zebras, the green economy people and so on and so forth. I love them and what they’re doing, and yet for various reasons I’ve never felt quite like my own businesses fit squarely in those categories.

For instance, my first business was a straight-up, for-profit, privately held web design studio, but we had a values-driven approach and worked almost exclusively with nonprofit organizations. Were we a social enterprise? Nope. Did we pursue B Corp certification? Again, no. We weren’t a Zebra, because we weren’t a startup per se. We definitely weren’t “green,” because how do you make a web design studio green? (OK, eco-friendly server farms, sure, but we didn’t sell hosting.) And our clients were global, so focusing on local economies didn’t seem like an obvious fit, even though we were very active in our local community.

But to be honest, I‘ve just never been much for joining things. My companies have both been small, and designed to stay that way, and certification processes tended not to rise up high enough on my priority list unless they were legally required.

What’s always mattered to me far more than a piece of paper, or a logo I can put on my website, is learning, and sharing knowledge. And I think we all have a lot to learn from each other about this stuff — way beyond the conversations that are happening among the folx who find these various identities and umbrellas meaningful.

So, back to my point:

Now, almost twenty years after launching my first business, I remain obsessed with the question of how small businesses can redefine — and are redefining — business as usual. And I don’t just mean businesses like Patagonia and Eileen Fisher, fascinating as those companies are.

I’m interested in small businesses in particular: in part because 89% (or 98%, depending on how you crunch the numbers) of businesses in the US have fewer than 20 employees, but also because to use a well-worn metaphor, it is easier to change the course of a small boat than of a huge vessel. Small organizations are typically more agile and open to doing things differently than large ones.

I think small-scale entrepreneurs are leading the way on redefining business, but because of our size, we don’t hear enough about the awesome stuff we’re doing.

I want to hear about…

• Solopreneurs who are testing out more inclusive pricing models;
• Creators who are designing businesses around their craft, and finding innovative ways to finance their art;
• Service providers who have put cooperation at the centre of their model;
• Co-ops and collectives that are wrestling with the nitty-gritty of inclusion, equality, and shared power;
• Product designers that have gone beyond the “buy one, give one” model to build deeper collaborations and mutuality with their suppliers and stakeholders;
• Entrepreneurs who are redefining growth and scale to take “enough-ness” into account;
• Business owners who have built things slooooooooowly rather than, y’know, moving fast and breaking things;
• People working to create value at every step of the supply chain;
• Leaders who are working on being more transparent, values-driven, and accountable in the workplace;
• Companies that are leading the way on people-first workplaces and figuring out better approaches to diversity and inclusion, physical and psychological wellbeing, etc.; and
• Different ways to measure success and contribution.

And that’s just for starters.

What I would really love is to hear what you get excited about when you think about the way you’re doing business. And I want to hear your rants: the stuff about the business world that makes you squirrelly, and drives you to do things differently.

Oh, and I want to hear who else you think of as entrepreneurial possibility models.

Are you in? Let’s talk.

I’m all about curiosity and asking good questions, so if this has sparked something for you, I’d love to hear about it.

Here are three possibilities:

1. Treat this as a curiosity experiment. Ask yourself the questions above (what excites you about how you’re doing business; your rant about the business world; and your fave possibility models) — and if you want to share your answers with me, drop me a line. (I’m lb at laurenbacon dot com.)
2. Talk to me 1:1. I’m setting aside several hours a week to have one-on-one conversations with business owners who are curious about the questions I’ve raised here. No sales pitch, no cost, no agenda — just a 30-minute phone/video chat to hear what’s on your mind, share ideas, and perhaps even address a challenge or two in your business.
3. Record an interview. Maybe you’ve got a business model you want to share with others, or an idea you want to spread — something you want to explore out loud, and that could benefit other businesses. Hit me up and let’s find a time to record something for my podcast (launching later this year).

I’m indebted to the work, writing, and possibility models put forward by Tim O’Reilly, Otto Scharmer, Jennifer Brandel, Mara Zepeda, Astrid Scholz & Aniyia Williams (and in particular, “Zebras Fix What Unicorns Break”), CV Harquail, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, Bryce Roberts, Sarah Bray, and Andréa Ranae Johnson — and to Channing Rodman and Lauren Sinreich for helping me clarify my ideas.

Better Than Business As Usual: How Smaller Businesses Can Fix the World (and Still Turn a Profit) was originally published in Design and Tech.Co on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Two years into building my first company (a web design studio), I hit the point I’d longed for when we started out: demand for our services exceeded our capacity. Like most consultants and freelancers, our initial response to this challenge was to work longer hours, making hay while the sun shone — but eventually, even for a couple of twenty-something entrepreneurs, that became exhausting. We tried raising our rates, but clients kept buying (the nerve!), and the capacity issue didn’t disappear.

I kept complaining to friends: “We’re so busy!” And they’d respond cheerily, “That’s a great problem to have!” And yes, perhaps it is; but it’s still a genuine problem.

It’s a problem when your work life is too busy — not only because you risk founder burnout, but because you are:

• Too busy working in the business to work on the business — and as a result, you become reactive rather than strategic.
• Constantly playing catch-up, and likely dropping some balls, thereby lowering client satisfaction.
• Following the currents of the market rather than leading the way. And when your unique value lies in your expertise, you need to be leading.

There were only two solutions left for us: hire staff, or start saying no to projects.

The Upside to Turning Down Work

We chose not to hire staff for another three years. Instead, we chose to turn down a lot of work opportunities that came our way. And we did this for several reasons:

1. Expanding your team does not necessarily net you more income. It may increase your firm’s revenues, but employees don’t come with a profit margin guarantee.
2. We were still early enough in our business that we wanted to prioritize stability over growth. Once we were confident that we could maintain this level of demand over time, we agreed, we would look into growing in size.
3. It was clear that while we were beginning to carve out a niche, we were still saying yes to most opportunities that crossed our paths — and we knew that for a firm like ours, specialization was the key to both long-term sustainability and commanding higher fees.
4. Focus begets better referrals. Creative service businesses typically get their best work via word-of-mouth referrals, so if you want more of the right kind of projects, you need to make sure you’re only taking on those kinds of projects. Otherwise, you’re guaranteed to generate more referrals for the wrong type of work, which wastes your time and your prospective clients’.
5. The right clients are more profitable, thanks to the speed of trust as well as their receptivity to expanding project scope when appropriate.
6. And finally, because like most creative professionals and consultants, we went into business to satisfy our own desires to learn and grow, and those drives were better satisfied through the clients and projects that make these things possible.

The decision to stay small and say no more often was only the first step towards solving our too-busy problem, though. Next, we had to figure out two key things: which projects and clients we wanted to say yes to, and how to say no clearly and graciously.

Red Light, Green Light

When we first sat down to define our parameters for saying yes or no to projects, we expected it to be a daunting process. How in the world would we quantify all of the variables that went into a truly satisfying client engagement?

Turns out, it took about ten minutes.

We drafted a Google doc with two columns and a bulleted list in each one, and listed out the qualities that made for an immediate green light (yes) or red light (no). Your version of this might go on a couple of Post-It Notes, or a wiki page for your sales team — the format doesn’t matter, just the content. And the content is dead simple.

Here’s what goes on your YES list:

• Your minimum budget
• Projects with great portfolio potential, if your portfolio helps you land clients.
• High probability of lead/referral generation
• Projects that will allow you to stretch into a new area you’ve been wanting to explore

Some of these may be “ands” and others will be “ors.” (Enough budget is always an and.)

And your NO list might include:

• Clients/projects that don’t meet your minimum budget level
• Low-margin offerings that you don’t need to sell anymore
• Pain-in-the-ass clients (You can often suss these folks out within the first few minutes on the phone.)
• Projects that require lengthy and time-consuming proposals or pitches
• Projects that make you sigh with weariness. (Pass those off to someone who’s more excited about them than you are.)

You may also want to add an amber light column for qualities that should spark caution, rather than an outright no. In our business, for example, we worked with a number of government agencies that required extensive proposals, so that “time-consuming proposals or pitches” bullet went into the “caution” column. Just don’t put too much in this column, or you’ll miss the point of this exercise, which is to make it easier and faster for you to discern between your yeses and nos.

Saying No, Quickly and Pleasantly

OK: you have your green/amber/red light signals defined. Now, how are you going to remember to check new opportunities against your lists?

Let’s go back to basics on cultivating new habits. You need three things: motivation (and I’m hoping you have that now that you’ve read this far), ability (which you’ll have as soon as you jot down your list of yes/no parameters), and what behavioral psychologist BJ Fogg calls a trigger — that is, an existing process you have in place that will dovetail nicely with your checklist.

Reflect for a moment on the system you currently use for fielding sales inquiries: email, phone, etc. This will be a little easier with email, because you have time to craft your response. With phone inquiries, the first habit I had to build was never to make promises over the phone, but instead commit to following up by email within X days, after checking my availability. That gave me an opportunity to review my list, and bow out gracefully if necessary, e.g. “I’m sorry, but we just had several large proposals accepted and we no longer have the capacity to take on your project.”

Here’s how I built the habit of reviewing my yeses and nos before moving forward on business opportunities:

1. Set up a document with my list of yeses and nos. Note: because the idea of saying no to anything — but especially revenue! — made me nervous, I appended a little pep talk from myself at the top of the doc, that went something like this: “What I know about saying yes to the wrong projects: a) I get burned out. b) They always go over budget. c) They take up space in my schedule that I then can’t allocate to the work I love. d) They are a dime a dozen; if I’m really hard up for cash, I can always find more of them. What I know about saying yes to the RIGHT projects: a) I get energized by them! b) I make more money! c) They bring in more of the right kind of work! d) They allow me to learn! e) I write about them with exclamation points!”
2. Create a daily reminder to review the list, that pops up every weekday in the morning, before I start replying to emails.
3. Practice saying yes and no to opportunities as they came in. The key word being PRACTICE. You will slip up and forget to check your list from time to time. You will get scared about money and say yes to the wrong projects. It’s all part of the process. The important thing is, every time you use your list and say no to an ill-fitting client or project, you are making room for more of your best work.

The key thing with the trigger is: it needs to be something that you can’t forget or ignore. So if reminders don’t work for you, figure out what will. Maybe it’s your to-do list, or your calendar, or a post-it note. What is the thing you know will work? Think: leaving your gym bag at your front door so that you have to move it to get out of the apartment.

As for saying no graciously, at first I found myself somewhat apologetic about turning work down, but over time I looked at every inquiry as an opportunity to clearly communicate the kinds of projects we were focused on, because you never know when a prospect might come back to you with the perfect project. (The notable exception being pain-in-the-ass clients, which never got more than a simple, “Sorry, we don’t have capacity.”)

Not only that, but when the truth was that we were just too busy to say yes to even great projects, our experience was that being honest about how booked up we were only increased prospects’ desire to work with us. So we only ever saw upsides to turning people down, clearly and kindly.

The Bad News

I say this reluctantly but emphatically: this isn’t the kind of process you do just once. So long as you’re doing good work, deepening and expanding your expertise, and meeting new prospective clients, you’ll have opportunities to further refine the kinds of clients and projects that bring out your best work, and that are best for your business. So if you’re like me, you might want to set up a reminder for a year from now to revisit your red/green light lists and update them to reflect your current goals and reality.

It shouldn’t take long, but we tend to put it off because even though we know it’s good for our businesses to filter out the clients who aren’t a good fit, it feels hard to turn down work.

Remember, though: the more specific you can be about your yeses and nos, the easier it will be for the right clients to find you — and for you to find them. And the freedom and satisfaction you’ll find in your work will expand exponentially, on every level: financially, creatively, and in terms of your ability to live a healthy life outside of work.

Every time you say a clearer no, you free up space for a clearer yes. And those clear yeses are the projects that will build you the business you really want.

Most of us who start small businesses didn’t start out in business school. We didn’t read all the textbooks, or learn how to read a balance sheet until we’d gotten far enough to hire an accountant.

We all have lots to learn, especially in the early days. So it’s seductive when we find someone who seems to have it all figured out, and has packaged it up in a shiny, “Follow These Three Sure-Fire Steps” kinda way.

A lot of my clients come to me after having invested a lot of time and money in these systems, and they tell me they feel like failures because:

• the system didn’t work for them,
• they never got around to implementing it fully, or
• something about it just didn’t sit well with them.

I’m of the opinion that while there’s a lot of value in many of these tools and processes, they go about things backwards.

They focus so much on the outcomes — especially the financial ones — that they lose sight of what drives you.

They’re all profit margins and no purpose.
All world domination and no connection.
All quantity and no quality.

The business owners I know aren’t just in it for the $$ — sure, you want to make a healthy living, but there’s something else that gets you moving, keeps you going forward even when things are hard.

99% of the usual planning tools, marketing systems, and cookie-cutter courses are based on assumptions. They assume they know what your version of a successful business looks like — but the truth is, that’s different for everyone. Every great business is built from a set of very personal values, drivers, and preferences — and if you try to simply replicate someone else’s model, without sharing those drivers, that model isn’t going to work for you.

(And that’s not even getting into all the people who just want to sell you what worked for them, without bothering to ask themselves if it even applies to anyone outside their particular circumstances. That’s a whole other rant.)

So instead of jumping straight into planning frameworks, I always start by helping you define success for yourself. That way, when you develop your strategic plans, you’ll have way more clarity, energy, and momentum for moving forward with them.

I know this might sound like more work than following one of those “systems,” but it actually requires way less effort, because you’ll be trusting yourself rather than trying to squeeze yourself into someone else’s cookie-cutter formula.

Put another way: until you’re clear on the business you want to build, and what gets you motivated to move forward on your strategic plans, all the magic formulas in the world won’t move you forward.

Some years, you look at your business financials and feel all warm and fuzzy. You hit or exceeded your targets; you did better than the year before; and all in all, your P&L statement has some very pleasing numbers that compare well to last year’s.

Other years… don’t look as shiny.

And yet, that doesn’t mean your business hasn’t grown in important ways. And I don’t just mean “I learned an important life lesson” ways. I mean real business growth — just maybe not the kind that shows up in your financial statements, except perhaps in the explanatory footnotes.

If you’re having a year like this — a year that isn’t likely to wow the number-crunchers in your midst — then this post is for you.

I want to celebrate the kinds of growth your business does beyond the balance sheet.

1 Increased clarity. You figured out what you’re actually best at. You fired some bad clients, cut a product line that wasn’t your best work, stopped trying to land customers that just weren’t that into you. You faced the truth and made some tough calls.

Now you’re positioned to make the most of your marketing and sales efforts, and more likely to turn a consistent profit. This is important growth, even if it temporarily appears as shrinkage.

2 Expanded offerings. You dedicated time and energy to crafting and piloting a new offering. While it required an investment of resources, you’re wrapping up the beta phase and ready to launch.

This kind of growth increases your potential customer base, and can have positive results for your sales funnel as well as your profit margin. Good for you for investing in customer research and product-market fit; it’s critical to your long-term success.

3 Developing your team. You took some courses, hired a coach, mentored your people. You invested in building skills, expertise, and leadership capacity on your team.

Again, this is likely to show up primarily as a cost to your business in the short term, but longer term it will benefit you in the form of greater effectiveness, and more skills you can leverage for your customers.

4 Healthier workplace. You’ve been working your tail off for years, but this year you slowed down. You took some time off, started being more consistent about your work hours, trusted the business to survive without you for a few days/weeks/months while you rested/got well/parented/cared for a loved one/got sober/traveled/took a sabbatical.

This is good for your business. Your business needs to be able to function without you. It’s an important maturation milestone. And it’s so, so, so, so good for you.

5 Refining your systems and processes. Perhaps the least sexy thing on this list, to most people, but I’m into this stuff. Maybe you finally got around to documenting your onboarding process for new hires or new clients. Maybe you figured out a better way to invoice customers. Maybe you found efficiencies, or a better way to make your products, or just a way sleeker email marketing platform that has made your life sooooo much easier. Perhaps you took the time to connect all the various software you use, reducing error margins and making better use of the data you capture.

This is important growth. And it will pay off in the form of higher profits, more customer referrals, or straight-up happiness for you — all important growth metrics.

What have I missed? How has your business grown that might not be apparent (yet) to your bookkeeper? I’m all ears.

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.
 — Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table

My first business was a boutique web design and development agency. A couple of years into building a consistently and increasingly profitable agency, my co-founder and I learned that our kind of company had a name: it was a “lifestyle business.”

We heard the term for the first time at a party where a local entrepreneur with big ambitions (and vanishingly little evidence that his product was likely to succeed) loudly declared to everyone within earshot, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying!”

Now, we had deliberately built a business that defied that imperative; we didn’t believe business success depended on scaling up. Instead, we were focused on maintaining a consistent profit margin, continuing to do meaningful work for great clients, maintaining a healthy and happy work environment, and having lives outside of work.

So one of us — I can’t recall who, at this point — shot back that growth alone might not be the most useful metric, so long as the business was profitable and sustaining itself. And in reply, he sneered:

“Yeah, I mean, if all you want is a lifestyle business, then I guess you can afford to think about growth that way.”

The tone was so snide and dismissive that I immediately grasped the meaning behind the term, even though I’d not heard it before.

A lifestyle business is just about maintaining your lifestyle — not changing the world.

A lifestyle business is just a hobby dressed up like a real enterprise.

A lifestyle business doesn’t scale because its owners don’t know how to scale a business.

At that moment, I realized three things:

1. That dude was an idiot.
2. I hate the phrase “lifestyle business.”
3. But… I love the way so-called lifestyle businesses piss off guys like him.

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need — the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.
 — Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power” (emphasis mine)

Lifestyle businesses upset people who are building, y’know, real businesses, for a bunch of reasons. When you build yourself a successful lifestyle business, you’re asserting some radical notions that blow pretty strongly on the capitalist house of cards these bros keep building:

• You’re demonstrating that you don’t actually have to work all the time in order to have a sense of purpose.
• You’re living proof that one can prioritize care and nurturance (of self, others, world) alongside paid work.
• Your business stands in opposition to the economic philosophy of unlimited, rapid growth as a healthy standard.
• You stand for enough-ness and simplicity.
• You assert that accruing power for its own sake is a losing game.

You might not be doing all of those things, but I contend that many of us who build lifestyle businesses do so because we agree with Audre Lorde that there are human needs beyond profit, and there is life beyond duty.

The older I get, the more radical I think that is.

Finding a definition for “lifestyle business” is tricky.** For starters, it’s easily confused with a “lifestyle brand,” which is another thing entirely. (Think: brands that are trying to sell you something that promises access to an aspirational lifestyle.) But it’s also slippery because it exists largely as a counterpoint to no-holds-barred, growth-for-growth’s-sake capitalism.

The key distinction between a lifestyle business and other businesses is that a lifestyle business exists for some purpose beyond maximizing profits.

That purpose could be anything from the owners’ autonomy, to providing good jobs to its employees, to supporting authors and literature (like your local bookseller), reducing waste (like this gem of a shop), to helping groups of people solve big problems more skillfully. Lifestyle businesses are profitable, and growth-oriented in a different way: profit is the fuel for the overall purpose, not the entire point.

The flip side — the dominant business culture that promotes rapid growth and massive scale — has fostered an environment where many businesses are assessed by it measures. Awards celebrate the fastest-growing companies; media coverage skews towards IPOs and stock markets (and CEOs who make so much money they can’t imagine anything else to do with it than fund space travel); and the whole venture capital world is built to cultivate more businesses that fit this mold.

That leaves the rest of us — the so-called lifestyle business owners — without much recognition, without a shared language about how we approach business, and frequently with a nagging sense that we’re somehow not “real” entrepreneurs, whether that’s because our peers are jibing at us over drinks, or simply because we don’t see as many examples of entrepreneurs who prioritize things beyond quarterly reports, pitch decks, and balance sheets.

I want to change that. I want to hear the stories of small business owners who bring their values to work, who think about contribution, justice and impact as they’re developing their business plans.

Looking back at my own entrepreneurial experience, it’s clear to me that there’s genuinely revolutionary potential in doing business the way my co-founder and I did. We built a sustainable, consistently profitable company, eventually supporting nine full-time staff, while prioritizing reasonable work weeks, working with world-changing clients, and building capacity internally and externally.

In redefining the standard definitions of business growth to promote the kinds of growth we found most meaningful, we put our stake in the ground about what we believed business was good for.

Not just profit. Not just scale. Not just feeding the consumption beast.

As it turns out, many other entrepreneurs feel the same way. But it goes way beyond lifestyle considerations. It’s about what we value. It’s about what we want to see grow. And it’s about creating spaces in the world where livelihood and life are in closer alignment.

That probably doesn’t sound all that radical. I mean, ours was a for-profit enterprise, using a pretty standard fee-for-service business model, with a conventional ownership model in a capitalist system.

We didn’t fit, quite, into any of the “progressive business” categories. We were too small for corporate social responsibility, too profit-oriented to be a social enterprise, and the whole “social innovation” bandwagon hadn’t really left the station yet.

But we were committed to doing business a little differently. And for us and our employees, that made a world of difference. For instance:

• If someone had to work overtime, they took the equivalent time off as soon as humanly possible.
• When one of our employees adopted a puppy, they worked from home for a while so they could potty-train her.
• When people had kids, we topped up their parental leave benefits as much as we could afford to. (This was in Canada, where full-time employees are usually entitled to about 50% of their salary through government assistance, during their parental leave.)

We prioritized care. We prioritized making room for our whole selves. We prioritized having lives outside of work. We prioritized longevity over quick bucks.

What’s radical about that is that it is not the status quo.

It ought to be, but it’s not.

We celebrate big businesses when they institute policies that make their workplaces a little more humane, but when small businesses do it?

Lifestyle business.

Part of me wants to reclaim the damned phrase, because that’s what we do when a phrase is used to sneer at us.

But I just hate the word “lifestyle” so much. In part I hate it because it’s inextricably linked with that section of the newspaper that used to be called the women’s pages (because of course men don’t care about fashion, cooking, or their fellow humans), and the least substantial and most dominant-culture-reinforcing dreck on Instagram.

It reeks of superficiality, and the businesses we are building are anything but superficial. We are building for sustainability, for life-as-it-actually-is (because we know the Ideal Worker doesn’t really exist), and for respect and mutuality.

These values fly in the face of the extraction economy that is literally and figuratively killing us.

Do we want to keep building businesses that extract more value than they create? Or do we want to figure out a better kind of commerce?

If you’re interested in the questions I’ve raised here, stay tuned: there’s lots more to come. I’ve been reading and mulling and talking to other entrepreneurs about how we can shift — and are shifting — the economy into a more humane, and less damaging, mode.

I know there are people out there thinking more radically than I am about capitalism, and how to totally upend it. I’m a pragmatist, and while I think there may well be a better world coming, I do my best work around what we can do in the meantime. So I’m collecting ideas and stories about what small businesses can do to rethink status quo capitalism. And I’ll be sharing them here, and via my newsletter, which you can sign up for below.

The opening quote came to me via Guan Un’s lovely newsletter, Bibliopath. Thanks, Guan.

** Definition of terms: If you’re interested in how the tech industry thinks about lifestyle businesses, there’s a whole internet rabbit hole you can go down about lifestyle businesses vs startups and what each is best at. (This post by Hunter Walk is worth reading, as is this 2005 micro-rant by DHH and, if you can believe it, the Hacker News discussion about it.)

One of my clients is starting a business and she just can’t summon the energy to create the “lead magnet” (AKA free resource) that’s supposed to entice people to join her mailing list. Another knows he should be networking more, but hates the typical gatherings where elevator pitches and business card exchanges are the only things on the menu. Another is struggling with pricing, and longs to find a happy medium between “charging what you’re worth” (which — have you noticed? — always seems to mean “top dollar”) and giving it all away (and thereby abandoning financial stability). And all of them are feeling the pressure to grow big and grow fast.

We all have moments where the accepted wisdom of business — extract as much value as you can; give away as little as possible in return; leave your complexity at home; and scale up as quickly as you’re able — just. Feels. Gross.

It feels gross because it doesn’t respect your humanity or your customer’s.

The freebie might sound generous, but in practice it can be a form of manipulation, a way to trick people into signing up for yet another newsletter they’ll never read.

When you find yourself resisting the “accepted wisdom” of business, it might just be that you’re itching for a new kind of economy — and a new kind of wisdom.

There are ways to make the freebie fun, easy, genuinely generous. Just look at Shenee Howard’s name quiz or Alexandra Franzen’s page of freebies.

And, if you don’t want to create a lead magnet, don’t! (Hey, if a no-freebie newsletter sign-up is good enough for Paul Jarvis, it’s good enough for the rest of us. He literally teaches list-building.)

This is what I call honouring your ick.

That shiver up your spine, that queasy feeling in your stomach when you think about doing business the way everyone else does? It’s trying to tell you something: there is a better way.

And you get there by honouring your ick.

“Networking” sucks, as you well know.

I’ve taught workshops on networking for people who hate networking. I wrote a chapter in my book on it, too. My point is, I have a lot to say on this subject. But the gist of it is this: the reason you hate networking events is that most of them are dehumanizing. The people who go there are faking it and it shows — and they expect you to fake it, too. Ugh.

So instead of “networking,” just show up in the places where your people hang out. And by “your people,” I mean the folks who wind up being your very favourite customers of all time. The people who make your heart sing to work with. THOSE people.

The reason you feel gross when you go to the soul-deadening network events is because they are soul-deadening for everyone. It’s just that some people believe that deadening their soul is a prerequisite for business.

It’s not.

Honour your ick. And go hang with your people instead.

Growth doesn’t always lead to bigness.

Look, I get as excited as the next person by measurable goals and upticks in profitability. But does the world really need more entities that see increasing their revenues, customer base, and/or number of employees as the only viable ways to grow?

We call those things measures of success — but too often, we measure only what we are extracting from the ecosystem our business belongs to, and not what we are contributing back. When we measure growth only in extractive terms, we are seeing only one facet of our business’s impact. We aren’t calculating other forms of contribution, and neither are we measuring costs beyond the financial ones.

I come back again and again to Tim O’Reilly’s advice to entrepreneurs, to “create more value than you capture.” Most of the small business owners I know try to do just that — but the dominant culture within business can wear us down. We see so many companies playing a gluttonous, zero-sum game that it can feel like you have to keep hustling just to stay relevant.

But the fact is, our addiction to rapid, exponential growth is literally killing the earth. And it’s killing us. We are overworked and burnt out. Economic inequality is growing as businesses race to maximize profits at the expense of their workers’ and suppliers’ wellbeing. We are consuming resources at horrifying rates.

We need to be cultivating our sense of enough-ness.

It is enough to build a business that sustains you. It is enough to celebrate your wins with your inner circle and forget about the press coverage. It is enough to grow in ways that are invisible to the outer world.

Maybe your business growth plan this year involves taking more vacation, personal time, or family care leave than you did last year. Maybe it looks like developing a new offering and finding the right product-market fit for it. Maybe you’re investing in some professional development, or bringing on a VA or some other form of help.

Maybe it looks like downsizing (AKA right-sizing), because you’ve learned that you don’t actually want to manage a bigger team.

Maybe your fear of growth is truly avoidance of your potential to be a great leader; maybe it’s fear of success; or maybe, it’s genuinely fear of betraying your true definition of growth.

Uh-oh. I just went there.

Yeah, so here’s the thing. “Honour your ick,” like most advice, has some limitations.

We should all honour the part of us that recoils from truly icky stuff, right? That seems right and good.

But yeah, OK. There is another “ick” that shows up sometimes, and that’s the playing-small ick, the “But I’ve never” ick, the “Who am I to?” ick. (That’s the part of us that would keep our prices close to zero, forever. And keep us from ever trying to expand our customer base. And certainly, shut down every marketing effort we might imagine.)

That ick is bullshit. So we can’t JUST honour our icks. We need to practice discernment about our ick.

Sometimes our ick is telling us, “Hey! If you do this thing, you will be betraying your values of X, Y, and Z.” And sometimes it’s just being an asshole.

We can discern the difference by asking questions like:

• What about this makes me feel icky?
• What’s the tone and texture of what I’m feeling? Is it more anxious and avoidant, or resistant and rebellious? What does that typically mean for me?
• When I am a customer and a company I buy from employs this strategy (e.g. the mailing list freebie, changing their pricing), how do I prefer that they approach it? Can I think of some examples that I really liked?
• What are the alternatives I’m considering?
• If I release the “shoulds” and status-quo thinking (i.e. “the way things are,” “what successful people/businesses do”), what do I really want?

Your ick has something to tell you: about the status quo of capitalism, about your values, about the aspects of your work that chafe–and about how there’s a way to be true to yourself, and more humane, while running a business.

Listen up.

If you’re interested in the questions I’ve raised here, stay tuned: there’s lots more to come. I’ve been reading and mulling and talking to other entrepreneurs about how we can shift — and are shifting — the economy into a more humane, and less damaging, mode.

I know there are people out there thinking more radically than I am about capitalism, and how to totally upend it. I’m a pragmatist, and while I think there may well be a better world coming, I do my best work around what we can do in the meantime. So I’m collecting ideas and stories about what small businesses can do to rethink status quo capitalism. And I’ll be sharing them here, and via my newsletter, which you can sign up for below.

For those times when you know what you want to do, and you just can’t seem to get off your ass (or onto it) to get The Thing done: a compendium of techniques that actually work.

Note: I’m assuming that you have time and the capacity to actually do this thing, and are simply struggling with follow-through, for whatever reason. If your thing is not getting done because you have no time or space in your life for it, that’s a different issue entirely.

1 Remember WHY you want to do it. Write that down, or speak it aloud. What will it do for you (or for others)? What goal will you be closer to when it’s done? What practice will you be cultivating? How will you feel in your body when it’s underway, nearly done, finished? Remember all this and feel your commitment renew itself.

2 Set a realistic deadline and tell someone about it. Stop feeling stupid that you need an accountability buddy; according to my entirely unscientific research, approximately 99% of people do better when we feel like we made a promise to someone. We don’t like letting each other down. Go post your deadline on Facebook, or text a friend, and then celebrate with them when it’s done.

3 Design carrots and/or sticks. I’ve come to believe that some people are Carrot People: they are motivated by rewards. And the rest of us are Stick People: we’re more motivated by fear of punishment. Whatever your driver, sit yourself down and make yourself a promise. When you finish The Thing, you will reward yourself with… fill in the blank: an afternoon spent on your favourite activity, a date with your favourite person, a delicious treat of your choice, et cetera.

Or, for the Stick People among us (hiiiiiiiii!), if you don’t finish by your self-assigned deadline, you will do An Onerous Thing. Some examples of Onerous Things that have worked for me and folks I know:

• Making a painfully large donation to a cause you do NOT support.
• Sacrificing or postponing something you’ve been looking forward to: e.g. a vacation, the new season of your favourite show, etc.
• Giving up a favourite activity for a set period of time (e.g. “If I don’t get this done on time, I’ll go a month without chocolate” sounds painful enough that it would motivate me).

4 Play a theme song. Find yourself some motivating music to get you pumped — or background music to help you focus.

5 Floss one tooth. My friend Sarah Bray has an excellent method for unsticking yourself, if you’re someone with multiple projects on the go, which is to spend just 15 minutes a day on each of your projects. You’re allowed to go over 15 minutes, if you like, but the idea is to make the commitment small enough that you feel silly blowing it off. I think of this as the creative person’s version of Leo Babauta’s habit-building method (hence, flossing one tooth).

To recap:

1. Articulate your why.
2. Be accountable to someone.
3. Promise yourself a carrot — or a stick, whichever works better for you.
4. Music helps.
5. Try just 15 minutes.

(Here are those 5 steps in a pretty graphic.)

And then, let me know how it goes.

Originally published at laurenbacon.com. I also write a monthly newsletter for curious people that you can sign up for here.

When you’re ready to switch podcast players, maybe the most critical aspect of making the switch smoothly is importing all your shows into the new app. So it’s frustrating when you use the import tool and then… hey, where’d the rest of my shows go?

I’ll explain where they went in a sec, for those who are interested in the “why.” (Or you can jump to the explanation right now.) But if you’re reading this article, odds are you just want a fix. So let’s dive into how to recover every single one of your podcast subscriptions from Apple’s walled garden, and migrate them seamlessly into RadioPublic.

1 On your desktop/laptop, open iTunes and navigate to Library > Podcasts. From that screen, go to File > Library > Export Playlist. You should see a window like this:

Be sure to set the Format to “OPML.” Then save the file.

2 Next, open your email and send the file to yourself as an email attachment.

3 Switch to your phone (where your RadioPublic app lives), and open the email you just sent yourself.

4 Tap on the attachment to open it, then tap the “share” icon and scroll until you see the RadioPublic icon.

5 Tap the RadioPublic icon and it should initiate an import sequence where you can check/uncheck any shows to import or ignore them.

Aaaaaand you’re done! All your shows, now in RadioPublic. Rock on.

“But why couldn’t I just import them all in the first place?”

Oh hey, did you want to know why the import function inside RadioPublic didn’t pull in all of your shows the first time around? It’s because the only information we’re able to access that way is a list of podcasts that currently have episodes downloaded on your device. And that, of course, might not include every podcast you subscribe to, for a variety of reasons.

So if you want to preserve all of your subscriptions, this is the way to go. (And now you can jump back to the intro, if you like.)

How to import all of your podcasts from iTunes/Apple Podcasts to RadioPublic was originally published in RadioPublic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here’s why.

How people really listen to podcasts

After years of observing how people listen to podcasts, we found that they sample shows on the web, and then decide to listen more later. They want listening to be easy, and by “easy,” they mean, “Show me where to start.”

Another important cue we took from listeners: when they’re in a web browser, they typically listen to a short segment of a show (~1–3 minutes), to get a sense of it and decide if they like what they hear. After that, they want to “take it to go,” i.e. follow a link to listen inside a mobile podcast listening app. This is particularly true now that mobile web browsing exceeds desktop browsing — your website visitors are already on their phones.

Put simply: listeners discover podcast episodes on the web, but they listen on the go.

As easy as listening to the radio

Because we want RadioPublic to make listening to podcasts as easy as listening to the radio, we pay attention to how listeners actually listen. We optimize our tools for the broadest possible audience, so that you — the podcaster — gain as many listeners and followers as you can.

Most embed players optimize for listening in the web browser. We optimize for how people want to listen.

So we’ve designed our embed player to embed a single episode, and then display links to continue listening inside RadioPublic:

How this helps you

The purpose of RadioPublic’s embed player is to encourage someone to become an engaged, loyal listener. So we’ve made it dead simple for them to press play, sample the episode and turn into a loyal listener. Put another way:

• More of your website visitors turn into listeners: with our embed player, you’ll convert more casual browsers to listening and subscribing to your show inside the app, rather than listening for a couple of minutes and then leaving.
• Once they’re listening on RadioPublic, they stick around: where someone might visit your website once and forget about you, RadioPublic listeners come back again and again.

This article is part of a series on how podcasters can use RadioPublic to grow audience and engagement for their shows. Check out the rest of the series here.

Still have questions? Leave a response, or get in touch. We love helping podcasters grow and engage their audiences.

Why our embed player focuses on one episode at a time was originally published in RadioPublic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.