I remember when I stepped up to force my business to become what I needed it to be…

Yes, I said force. It took a bunch of time, effort and strategic thinking. But most of all, it took resolve! I had clench-your-fists and grit-your-teeth determination to create real, lasting change in my business. I refused to accept things the way they had been any more.

That moment of resolve didn’t come during a strategy day or a coaching call. It came during the quiet, painful moments when I looked at what I’d built and realised it was unsustainable. Not because it was failing — on the surface, things were fine. But deep down, I knew we were just surviving.

My business had been running along the same way for three years. Revenue was stable, and our commitment to keep going was strong. But we were unorganised, we wasted time (and a stack of money) fixing silly mistakes, and we had no real action plan for how we were going to move beyond where we were.

We had growth — but not structure. We had clients — but no consistent systems. We had passion — but very little strategy.

Then my 37-year-old husband died.

It was the literal shock of my life.

And it exposed everything.

I didn’t have the luxury of taking time off work, because no one else could run things each day. We had never let go of the reins.

No one else could replace our warehouse staff either – they were the only ones who knew how to do their jobs because they made it up themselves!

And no one else could serve our customers, manage our accounts, or keep building our website. All that information was locked inside our small team’s heads as well.

The business couldn’t operate without us… and that meant I had to keep showing up, even on the hardest days of my life.

I thought we had been building a freedom business, but at that time, with the fragility of my business foundations fully exposed, I realised I was completely and utterly trapped. My vision was blurry and I was exhausted.

This is why I had to force my business to become something else. It wasn’t going to change itself, and I was desperate to get out of that prison!

That was the turning point.

After my husband died it took me 12 months to work out how to devise my escape plan, and another 6 months to execute. This oh-so-humbling journey was not easy… it came with all the bumps and falls and fails of being a complete novice!

But I kept going. Because I knew that every piece of progress I made — no matter how small — was building something better.

And over time, the changes started to show.

As time went on and the staff left, I could replace them seamlessly.

When the warehouse lease ended, I could outsource the logistics completely. (This is the selfie I took on moving day — a picture of simultaneous relief and possibility.)

“What I thought was a freedom business turned out to be a trap. So I rebuilt it—vision, values, and systems that could run without me.”

And when the right buyer came along, I could sell that operation and walk away in a matter of weeks … not years … the handover took only 3 weeks from beginning to end.

After 18 months I had pushed and pulled and prodded the levers in my old business jail to turn it into the small business dream:

A turnkey!

“But how?” I hear you ask.

I clarified exactly what I wanted and why. What was my business vision and what did that look like in practice?
This gave me the words and inspiration to not only haul my widow arse to work each day, but to share that vision with the people I relied on to make it happen.

The lesson here? If you’re scaling a business, your vision needs to be visible. It needs to live beyond your head, so your team can help you build it.

I reflected deeply about why my work mattered, in this business and in the world beyond. I wrote up what my values were so I could fan the flame as I worked the early mornings and late nights to overhaul my business.

Values aren’t fluffy ideals. They’re practical tools for decision-making, alignment and momentum. When you build your operations with your values embedded into every step, your culture strengthens.

Then my vision and values came to life in the world’s most comprehensive operations overhaul you ever did see! I mapped out every core process in my business step-by-step, and drilled down to clean out the mess and make things run on their own.

Every onboarding checklist. Every customer touchpoint. Every task that used to rely on me — systemised.

I know why Simon Sinek says every Why in business needs a How! You can be as lofty as you like in your aspirations and affirmations, but if no-one else knows how to onboard a new client, manage your calendar, look after your accounts, or keep your records up to date, your business vision will always be a reality only in your imagination.

I know from firsthand experience that your vision can become real.

But it takes a rock solid combination of WHY and HOW to bring it to life.

What I learned then about the fundamentals of true business freedom still drive me to this day.

So if you’re in that messy middle — where you’ve grown, but now things feel messy, unclear, or heavy — I want you to know this:

You can get out.

You can build a business that works without you being in the weeds.

And you don’t have to figure it out alone.

Book a call and let’s start shifting your business from growth to scale — with structure, clarity and a whole lot more freedom.