Life first, business second

There's a yacht on our vision board.

Jules and I made it before we left Jersey in October 2020, and it's quite funny to look at now. Alongside the yacht there's a big, expensive villa and a brand new plane parked at Jerez airport. These days, the most extravagant thing on our list is two euro tapas.

So how did we get from a yacht to tapas? And why does it matter if you're building a coaching business?

Because the order you do things in changes everything.

The life we tried to pack in a suitcase

In Jersey, we had all the expensive toys. The Porsche, the BMW, shares in a plane, and first and business class holidays. Jules was in her corporate job, I was running my business, and the income covered it all.

When we decided to move to Spain, we sat down and made our vision boards. Without realising it, we did something I now see coaches do all the time. We tried to take our old life with us.

Here's the problem with that. A life full of toys needs a very different business to fund it than a simple one. If we'd brought all of that to Spain, I'd have needed to earn serious money from my business, and mostly on my own. Not impossible. But a big ask, and a lot of pressure.

Then we arrived, and something unexpected happened. We realised we didn't actually want any of it. Most of it was legacy, stuff we were hanging onto from the old life. We were far happier mooching around in flip-flops. Jules still has a wardrobe full of shoes she never wears, which tells you everything.

Life got simpler, and the cost of living came down. The last thing I wanted was to recreate the pressure I had in Jersey, working flat out to fund things we didn't even want.

So once we'd settled, we looked at what we wanted life to look like here, and pivoted the business to fit it.

What designing your life first actually looks like

Here's ours, warts and all.

The plan is to work four days a week, four hours a day on client work. It doesn't always work out like that. Sometimes we flex, taking whole days off midweek when places are quieter and hotels are cheaper, then making it up by working the weekend. We're happy to do that, and no client ever gets let down because of it.

As I write this, we're about to take Thursday off to visit Vejer de la Frontera. No client is waiting on anything. Everyone's work is in place, because we built the business that way.

We also stopped buying birthday and Christmas presents years ago. We buy experiences instead, and go on trips.

Jules was sorting through our old holiday photos recently, and the money we spent on those trips was eye-watering. We needed that two-week fix to escape the life we had back then.

Now we don't. We've built a life we don't need a holiday from.

Where we live has changed too. We spent four happy years in Sotogrande, then moved to El Puerto de Santa María, which is much more Spanish. Our rent in Sotogrande was nearly double what we pay now. Had we stayed in Jersey, we'd probably be paying three times as much. And our quality of life here is better than both.

Then, and only then, design the business

Once you know what your life looks like and what it costs, you can work out what the business needs to be.

Think about this. You might hit the same income target with a membership of 200 to 500 people, or with a handful of one-to-one clients at a much higher ticket price. Same number in the bank. Completely different business. Completely different days.

One isn't better than the other. The right one is the one that fits the life you've designed.

What happens when you get it back to front

Most of the coaches I speak to did it the other way round. They built the business first, then tried to squeeze their life around it.

You know how that goes. Working all the hours God sends, saying yes to everything, and slowly realising you've bought yourself another job. Only this time, you're the boss you can't escape.

We're seeing this a lot with very experienced, very successful coaches. Their lives have changed, they don't want to work those hours anymore, and they want their freedom back. The good news is that many of them are doing something about it. They're stepping back, redesigning their life, and rebuilding the business around it.

It can be done. But it's much harder to unpick than to get right first time.

Jules and I know people who had potentially very successful coaching businesses and built them back to front. Then family life happened, as it does, and it all became too hard to unpick. They gave up and went back to the day job. That's a wrench to watch, because it didn't have to end that way.

If you're feeling that pull right now, I wrote about it in my last blog.

Why we turned down two clients this month

Here's where designing your life first really pays off.

In the last month, we've turned down two clients. One of them genuinely needed help, and we talked it through at length. Could I have found the resources to cover the parts outside my expertise? Probably. But it would have been all-consuming, and it would have affected the clients we already serve.

When your business isn't designed around your life, that decision gets much harder. If revenue isn't where it should be, the pressure kicks in and you think, "I'll take it and see what I can do." That's when the house of cards comes down.

We've all had a nightmare client. One person who causes more grief than the rest of your clients put together. Many of our clients say the same thing: they've become very picky about who they work with, and for good reason.

So when you design your life, decide who you want to work with, and who you don't. It's part of the design, not an afterthought.

There's no point in starting a business to buy yourself another job.

Who's coming with you?

Your life design is probably going to look very different to ours. You might have kids to consider, a partner with their own plans, or family who need you close by. All of that adds a layer of complexity, and cost, so work it out together.

It's also never finished. Ours is a constant work in progress. In a year or two, we'd like to move to a nicer house, and the business will need to flex for that. Life throws curve balls, and your needs and dreams change, especially as you get older. Sotogrande served us perfectly for four years, until it didn't.

The trick is to keep asking two questions. What does life look like now? And how does the business have to fund it?

Skip those, and you'll find yourself adding complexity later and scrambling for clients to pay for it. That's when panic sets in and the quality of your work drops.

And have some fun with it. We had a ball making our vision boards, yacht and all.

Where this fits in The Coach's PATH

My framework, The Coach's PATH, takes you through four steps: Problem, Aspiration, Transformation and Habits. It's how you build the business model itself.

But designing your life comes before all of it. It's the foundation the whole PATH sits on. Get that clear first, and every decision after it gets easier, from who you serve to what you sell and how many hours you work.

Three ways I can help

If you want to build a business around your life, rather than the other way round, here's where to start.

1. Book a free discovery call. A 30-minute chat to talk about where you are and where you want to be. Book your call
2. Book a strategy session. One hour together to map out your next steps, with follow-up notes and an action plan, for £190. Book your session
3. Join The Coach's PATH. The full framework to design your business around your life, step by step. Find out more