Erin (00:00)
Before we jump into today's episode, I wanted to share another lovely review that's been left for the podcast.
"I love this podcast. Erin is so warm and she gets it. She understands both the struggles and the rewards. And this podcast is filled with great tips and encouragement as I build my own life-friendly business". Thank you so much for leaving that review. It genuinely means so much to hear that these conversations are helping and I love reading them. So please do leave a review if you've enjoyed the podcast so far.
So let's make a start on episode 100, the final episode of season seven. I'm Erin Thomas Wong, the Life-Friendly Business Mentor, and I'm on a mission to help women realize that they are not failing at business. They're simply following a model that doesn't fit their real lives. I help female solopreneurs adopt a capacity first approach so they can grow successful businesses without sacrificing the very life
they're building it for. And today, as I mentioned, this is episode 100, which feels quite significant to be saying out loud. This year also marks 10 years of life-friendly business. Although if I zoom out even further, it's actually been 18 years since I started my very first business. So I thought today's episode would be a little different.
different.
Not a how-to, not a framework, just a conversation, a chance to reflect on what these past 18 years have taught me. Not only about business, but also about life, because the two have become impossible to separate.
When I started my first business, my eldest son was just six months old.
I made the decision at that point to leave my career in television production. People often ask me like how I made that decision. did it feel like a brave thing to do? But at the time it just felt necessary. I felt like a different person and that I needed something different. I now know that was probably what we call matrescence, becoming a mother, which changed everything about how I viewed the world.
I knew I wanted to be able to build a career around my life rather than trying to squeeze my life around my TV career. Of course, I had absolutely no idea where that one decision would eventually lead. Fast forward 18 years and that tiny six month old baby has just turned 18.
He is becoming such a wonderful young man and so is his younger brother. Sometimes I look at them and I just wonder where the years went because when you're in it, it feels like an eternity. But honestly, those years go so quickly. And when people ask me what I'm most proud of, of course I'm proud of the businesses.
I've had five businesses during that time and I'm proud of the two books that I've published, this podcast, speaking on stages, winning awards, the community that I've built.
But if I'm totally honest, when I think about my life and what I'm proud of, they're not necessarily the first things that come into my mind. The thing I'm most proud of is that I got to be there for my kids. I was there for the school runs, the sports days, the school plays, parents' evening, the difficult days as well, the ordinary Tuesdays that nobody photographs.
For the last 10 years, I've been able to take the summers off with my boys. We've done some traveling, we've made memories, we've had adventures together. We've spent time just chilling out without me constantly working and checking emails.
And now as they're getting older, I realise more than ever what a gift that has been. Because childhood doesn't wait. You don't get those summers back. You don't get to rewind and do them again. And really being present for their childhood will always be one of my greatest measures of success.
But I like to keep things real and be honest with you because I never want this podcast to paint a picture that building a life-friendly business somehow means that everything has been easy. It hasn't.
There have been launches that haven't gone to plan, ideas that didn't work, decisions that I'd probably make differently now, periods where I felt really stuck, moments where I've questioned myself. There have been months where I've reinvested so much back into the business that I haven't even been able to pay myself. There have been moments of financial uncertainty, frustration.
and self doubt because that's business and I never want to pretend otherwise.
But even knowing and experiencing all of that, I still wouldn't swap what I've built for the certainty of a monthly payslip. Because what this business has given me is so much bigger than money. It's given me fulfilment, choice, purpose, freedom, flexibility, and a front row seat to my kid's childhood. There is something else that
I want to be real about. For a while, I too got completely swept up in the online conversations about six figures, then seven figures. Everywhere I looked, people seemed to be celebrating bigger launches, bigger revenue, bigger numbers. And it made me question myself. It made me feel small, like I wasn't ambitious enough.
Like I should want more.
And for a while, I believed it.
and asked myself a really simple question but do I actually want that or have I just been told that I should?
And the answer surprised me because actually six figures was never really the dream. The dream was freedom, flexibility, being there for my kids, loving what I do. Obviously, I wanted to make the same or more money than I would have done in TV. The dream was about feeling happy and building something meaningful. Those were my goals.
When I first started out in business, success was all about trying to achieve more, building more, doing more, growing more. This constant hustle to keep pushing forward, even when things feel hard. But over the years, I've realised that success isn't just about what you build. It's about how you build it and who you become in the process.
Some of the biggest lessons that I've learned have come through the most challenging moments. And many years ago, I was running one of my events. As you know, I run the Momentum Day every year, and I absolutely love bringing these women together in person for the day. It totally fills me up. And there's something so incredibly special about watching women connect and support one another and leave the event believing in themselves again. But back then, I hadn't...
learnt how to protect my own capacity. I poured everything into those events. Those of you who run events will know what I'm talking about. Every single ounce of energy. When we're thinking about our marbles in our business jar, the marbles are overflowing. I'd spend weeks and months preparing and give everything on the day. And after the event, I would be completely depleted.
And at the time I thought that was normal. I just thought that was the price that you paid for caring deeply about your work.
After one event, I came home absolutely exhausted. And that night around 10 o'clock, I think it was, my youngest son, Milo, woke up with a shout and he bashed his head on his bed, half asleep. There was a massive bump on his head and a bit of blood. And I just, I knew that like I should be trying to keep him awake or I didn't know what to do. You know, maybe there would be concussion.
But I remember feeling so utterly empty and drained that I just couldn't do what I needed to do as his mum. I was so tired. I couldn't stay awake. I couldn't keep an eye on him. Now he was absolutely fine in the end, but the point was I simply had nothing left. And I've always carried a little bit of guilt about that, about the what, what if, because it made me realize that
I'd given every single marble from my jars into my business and I'd walked back through that front door with nothing left for the people that I loved most.
And looking back, that moment didn't create my life-friendly philosophy, but it did definitely become one of those moments that confirmed that I was on the right path, because it reminded me that protecting my own energy and capacity wasn't just a nice idea. It was absolutely essential, not just for my business, but for the people I love most.
Because success isn't just about what happens while you're doing the work, it's about what version of yourself walks back through your front door afterwards.
These days, I still love running my Momentum Day events just as much, maybe even more, but I do them differently. I fiercely protect my capacity before and after the event. I block out recovery time. I build white space intentionally into my diary because what I've realised is that the need for a life-friendly business hasn't disappeared as my boys have got older. If anything,
it's grown.
The challenges change, the conversation changes, the support that they need changes, life changes, and I still want to have enough of myself left for all of it.
And you know, maybe that's a surprise because 18 years ago, I thought that building a life-friendly business was something I needed to do because my kids were little. But what I've realised is that I don't need it any less now that they're older. I just need it for different reasons.
realise is that the more honest and the more vocal I became about all of this, the more like-minded women seemed to find me. Women who had been quietly admitting to themselves that they've been thinking exactly the same thing. Women who'd been sat behind their screens wondering, is it just me? Am I the only one who doesn't actually want to build a seven-figure business? Am I allowed to say that I want something different?
And this is not about lacking ambition at all. This is about defining success differently.
And today, one of my favourite things about my Cocoon membership is that we've created this space where women can finally say these things out loud. Someone can say, actually, my goal isn't six figures. And instead of someone making her feel bad and telling her to think bigger, the response from everyone is brilliant. So what does success look like for you?
because I honestly believe that that's the conversation we should be having all along, not how big do you want your business to be.
But how do you want your life to feel? Because your business should support the answer to that question, not dictate it.
If there's another lesson these 18 years have taught me, it's that you don't have to have everything figured out before you begin. I certainly didn't. I'd never run a business before. Now, one of the things that I'm most proud of is when people say to me, it feels like you are in my head.
But I think this comes from refining my message over and over again. And I continue to refine every client, every conversation, every podcast episode, every event I run, every book I write, every mistake I make.
All of these things have helped me understand more clearly what my message is and also the challenges that other people are facing so that I can speak directly to that. And that's one thing I want you to take away is that your message will evolve, your confidence will evolve, your business will evolve, you will evolve. You do not need to have all of the answers on day one. You just need to keep listening.
listening to your clients, to your own instincts, and to the life that you're actually trying to build.
When I think back over the last 10 years of life-friendly business, there's one moment that always gives me goosebumps and it happened at one of the early Momentum Days. We were doing a Q &A session at the end of the day and one woman put her hand up. She was visibly upset and she said, what do you do when someone close to you doesn't support your business? And you could tell that it had been weighing on her for a long time.
I looked around the room, scanned the room and I could just see all these women nodding and looking equally emotional. So I asked them, I said, can you put your hand up if you've ever had someone close to you, doubt you, question your business or make you feel like what you're doing isn't a real job? Almost every single hand in that room went up.
I remember looking around and feeling really quite emotional. It still gets to me now because in that moment something huge shifted. Those women realised it's not just me.
They weren't failing, they weren't imagining it, they weren't the odd one out and they certainly weren't alone. And I think that's one of the greatest gifts that we can give one another. Not another strategy, not another clever marketing idea, but the reassurance that someone else gets it. That someone else has felt this too. Sometimes that's enough to help someone to keep going.
And that is the power of sisterhood.
I am incredibly proud of the community that we have built through The Cocoon and Life-Friendly Business because it's not just a membership, it's a sisterhood. It's a place where women can be ambitious and honest.
where they can celebrate an amazing month and admit when things have felt hard or have gone wrong, where they can say openly I haven't paid myself this month without shame, where they can say actually I don't want a seven-figure business, I don't want a team of 10 people without somebody trying to convince them that they should.
where they can say, I'm exhausted or I've lost my confidence or I don't know what to do next I'm thinking about giving it all up.
instead of judgment, they find kindness, perspective, encouragement.
and women saying, I've been there too.
I just wanted to read out a line that a member wrote in a survey recently, saying that "The Cocoon is a space where I never feel crap about the limits my kids or my disability places on me. The Cocoon treats them as facts and then I can work from there." I love that so much.
because we've created a place where you can think more intentionally about your measures of success and how you are running your business to take your capacity into account.
Business can feel incredibly lonely, especially when you're the only person in it, but being a soloprenuer doesn't mean that you're supposed to carry everything on your own.
And I also want to acknowledge that for so many of us, business feels harder right now. Things that worked five years ago aren't necessarily working today. Social media has changed. AI has changed. People are buying differently. Most business owners I'm speaking to are finding things tougher than they have ever known.
I'm having these conversations every single week. And totally honestly, I felt that too in the last year. There've been moments where I've questioned things, whether I should pivot, whether I should simplify it even further, wondered whether what worked yesterday will still work tomorrow. But here's what I've realised.
The women who are navigating these seasons best aren't necessarily the ones with huge audiences or bigger turnovers. They're the women that have learned to lead themselves well. The women who protect their headspace, protect their own boundaries and focus on what they can control rather than spiralling and feeling out of control of everything around them. Because uncertainty will always
exist but how we respond to it that's where our power lies.
So, after 18 years in business, what do I know for sure?
I know that your ambition doesn't disappear just because you want a life. I know that protecting your capacity is not a weakness, it's wisdom. I know that comparison steals far more than confidence. It steals joy.
I know that visibility matters and not because of vanity but because the right people cannot work with you if they do not know you exist. I know that simplifying almost always beats adding more. I know that belonging to a community changes everything.
I know that success looks different for every single one of us and thank goodness for that because how boring would the world be if we all wanted exactly the same thing. If there's one thing I hope you've taken away from this season it's that you're not failing, you're not behind.
You're not lacking in ambition because you want different things. You're trying to build a business using advice that doesn't always fit the reality of your life.
And there is another way. That's why I wrote the book. That's why I record this podcast. That's why I created the Life-Friendly CEO Reset. And that's why I rebuilt the Cocoon membership, because I genuinely believe women deserve a better way to build businesses. Businesses that will grow, make money, create impact.
but businesses that also leave room for laughter, family, rest, friendship.
happiness, summers with your children, slow mornings, big adventures, ordinary Tuesdays.
and all those moments that never appear on a profit and loss statement. Because in the end, I don't think success is measured only by what you've built. I think it's measured by whether you actually enjoyed building it. And whether the people you love got to enjoy the journey with you too.
Thank you for listening. Whether this is your first episode or you've been here for all 100, thank you so much for being part of this journey.
If you're ready to start adopting the life-friendly approach, I'd love to invite you to download my free life-friendly business, CEO Reset. It's the best place to start and in around 20 minutes, it'll help you step out of reactive mode, clear some headspace and reconnect with what matters right now in your business. I'll pop the link in the show notes.
And because this is episode 100, could I please ask you a small favour? If this podcast has helped you over the last 100 episodes, I would be so incredibly grateful if you could leave a review. Every review helps another woman discover that there really is another way to build a successful business, one that works with her life and not against it. You can also tag me on social media at @lifefriendlybiz
And if one episode has really resonated with you, I would love it if you could share it with a friend. Because really one conversation can change the way that you think about your entire business. So thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for letting me be part of your journey. I can't wait to see where yours takes you next.
you get to do this your way.
