Satisfaction Strategy: A New Paradigm for Business Success - EP 035

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Traditional business approaches often leave entrepreneurs feeling depleted, disconnected, or struggling to make ends meet. In this episode, I introduce the Satisfaction Strategy—a framework that moves beyond work-life balance to create true integration and alignment. Learn how Impact, Profit, and Pleasure work together synergistically to create sustainable success, and why neglecting any of these elements can lead to burnout or stagnation. Whether you're just starting out or looking to transform an existing business, this episode offers practical insights for building a business that serves your mission while supporting your wellbeing. 

Episode Takeaways:

• Work-life balance is an outdated concept that perpetuates the separation between work and life
• True sustainability requires integrating impact, profit, and pleasure
• When these three elements work together, they create a self-reinforcing cycle of growth
• Common blocks in each area can be overcome with intentional action
• Sustainable success requires moving beyond hustle culture to aligned action
• Taking regular breaks for restoration is crucial for maintaining creativity and momentum

Key Insights:

"When you work in an aligned way, the arbitrary boundaries between work and life begin to dissolve and they're replaced by a natural flow of energy, creativity, and impact." 

"Your impact mission is directly connected to your soul's purpose in this lifetime." 

"Financial capital translates directly into capacity to affect change. In short, profits equal power."

Question for Your Reflection:

Which of the three elements—Impact, Profit, or Pleasure—needs the most attention in your business right now? 

What's one small step you could take this week to strengthen that area?

Connect With Me:

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Remember: Your pleasure is your power. 💫

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Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Pleasure and Profits. Following our season opener where we talked about the emergence of a new paradigm in business, today we're diving deep into the framework that I've developed called the Satisfaction Strategy. It's an approach that I believe is practical and necessary to building a soul-aligned and sustainable business. 

Like many of you, I've witnessed and experienced firsthand how traditional business approaches often leave us feeling overwhelmed, depleted, disconnected from our mission, often with the promise of financial success that we may or may not ever get to experience.

As I shared last week, I spent years trying to make incremental changes within a broken system before realizing that we actually need an entirely different approach. One that takes into account what we, as purpose-driven entrepreneurs, value, what's important to us, how we want to be experiencing life and our businesses, and that we're looking for something that's more meaningful than just dollars in our bank accounts, but that those dollars are, in fact, important too.

If you're like so many of my friends, colleagues, peers, and clients, then you probably started your business with a vision for making real change in the world while creating a life that you love. But what happens often is somewhere along the way, the day-to-day demands of entrepreneurship begin to overshadow that bigger purpose that you started with.

Maybe you found yourself caught in a cycle of constantly working to make ends meet while your impact and your joy have taken a backseat. Or you found yourself pulled farther and farther away from doing the work that truly inspires you, instead focusing your efforts on where the money is because the need to earn income has taken precedence over your purpose. Maybe you've been lured into trying marketing and sales tactics that left you feeling like you needed a full body scrub afterwards.

But you've struggled to find any alternatives to what seems to be the way everybody else is doing it. Maybe you found yourself overwhelmed with all the information coming at you about the latest and greatest techniques and tactics. So much so that you find yourself either frozen within indecision or feeling like you're just throwing spaghetti at the wall and not seeing any real results. Or maybe you have been successful, maybe outrageously successful in scaling and in creating impact, but your personal life and your wellbeing have been severely neglected along the way. 

This is what happens when we try to operate within the paradigm of the patriarchy, of the hustle culture. Which is built on fear and lack and never enoughness. It requires us to constantly look outside ourselves for validation and indicators of success, often at the cost of our wellbeing and our true potential for impact. It also keeps us constantly buying, constantly in search of the next best thing that we hope will solve our problems instead of investing in our own greatest asset, our own wisdom.

I believe that regardless of what it seems like most people are doing out there, that it doesn't have to be that way. What I've discovered through my own journey and with working with countless entrepreneurs is that sustainable success, the kind that allows us to do meaningful work in the world for a long, long time in a way that really fills us up and feeds our souls. That type of work requires a fundamental shift in how we approach business altogether.

Before I introduce the framework itself, I want to make something clear. What I'm talking about isn't work-life balance. That concept itself is part of the old paradigm for sure, suggesting that work and life are somehow separate and that we need to constantly be juggling and compromising between the two of them, or that there's some magical world in which all things can be perfectly balanced, which is an impossible standard of perfectionism that absolutely no human can achieve. It implies that work is inherently something we need to balance against something that drains us or takes away from our life. 

The satisfaction strategy takes a completely different approach. Instead of trying to balance competing forces, it's about integration and alignment. It's about designing your business as an authentic expression of who you are and what you're here to create in the world. When you do this, your business becomes a source of energy and vitality rather than something that you need to recover from or balance against.

 This isn't about working less or working more. It's about working in an aligned way. And when you work in an aligned way, the arbitrary boundaries between work and life begin to dissolve and they're replaced by a natural flow of energy, creativity, and impact.

The satisfaction strategy is built on three essential elements that when properly cultivated and integrated create unstoppable momentum in your business and in your life.

So we're going to talk about all three of them. First, let's talk about impact. When I talk about impact, I'm not just talking about what you do, your personal actions. I'm talking about the ripples of positive change that extend far beyond your immediate reach. When you're doing work that's aligned for you, when you're clear on your mission and you have systems to support it, the impact you're able to create will expand exponentially and often in ways that you didn't even intend for it to.

For example, if your mission is to share your wisdom, your expertise with the people who are in your community, in your audience or your target market, and you do so by building a company in which the ethos of the business is to create a supportive and nurturing environment for all of the team members who help bring your mission to life, then the change you bring to your team members' lives is a ripple effect impact of your larger mission.

And this is super important, the impact you desire to have and how you go about creating it is unique to you. It could be on stage sharing your message with millions of people. It could be effectively running a small nonprofit organization that supports a segment of your local community. It could be creating a product or a service that revolutionizes an industry. Or it could be through carefully curated experiences with a select group of people who you feel deeply committed to serving.

 Your impact mission is directly connected to your soul's purpose in this lifetime. It's not about ego or impressing somebody else or being perceived as altruistic. And it can be super easy to get sidetracked. And then we have to find our way back to our original purpose. Sometimes a well-meaning coach or a mentor or a friend or a peer can plant a seed that feels like it's something we should focus on because it could be huge because there's a ton of potential there because it's something we're really good at, but maybe it's in our zone of excellence and not in our zone of genius. And it's not directly connected to the impact that our heart is calling us to make in the world. 

And so we need to learn to discern what really is at the heart of the work that we're doing, what really is our purpose in this lifetime and what is the impact that we want to create that's truest and most aligned for us.

When I'm talking about satisfaction strategy, I tend to focus a lot less attention on the topic of impact than on the other two elements because I believe that if you're here listening to me, that you're already impact driven. I just take that as a given. So what I think is most important to say about impact is that the other two elements, profit and pleasure, directly affect your capacity to create impact. And that's important to know.

Okay, so second, let's talk about profit. When I speak of profit, I'm talking about creating sustainable abundance that fuels your mission and supports your wellbeing. Strong profits enable you to increase your impact through reinvestment and innovation while giving you the freedom to experience more pleasure in your work and in your life. 

Over the years, I have found that purpose-driven entrepreneurs often shy away from conversations about money for a number of reasons. Either because they believe that the purity or the beautiful intentions of their mission, their purpose, the impact that they want to make outweighs the need for financial sustainability. Or because they're afraid that if they focus on finances, on money, on profit, that people will think that they're just in it for the money and that their intentions or their mission will be lost along the way. Or because they feel overwhelmed or confused because they didn't study business or financial management. Their expertise is in creating something unrelated and managing the money side of the business feels like a mental or emotional burden that they would rather just ignore. Or any of a long list of other negative beliefs and stories that so many of us have acquired over our lifetimes about money and what it means to be focused on money.

I have seen some really, really brilliant entrepreneurs who have so much wisdom and experience and insight to share in their area of expertise and who have chosen to be willfully ignorant about the financial side of their business to the detriment of the business and their personal finances and ultimately to the impact that they could be having in the world.

The reality is if your business isn't financially sustainable, then it cannot go on and it will not go on. At some point it will have to end. And if that happens then it can't have the impact that you desire for it to have and that the world needs for it to have. And in case you haven't noticed, in the world that we live in, financial capital translates directly into capacity to affect change.

In short, profits equal power. And don't you think it's time that more of that power was in the hands of people who want to do good in the world?

Okay, the third and often overlooked of the three elements is pleasure. And as I've said, I'm not talking about indulgence. I'm talking about creating a business that energizes you rather than depletes you. And it's about investing in prioritizing your wellbeing and your experiences outside of the business.

When you prioritize pleasure in your daily operations, in your team dynamics, in your personal schedule, you tap into a creative energy that naturally enhances both your impact and your profit.

Now, I know that this can be a huge shift if you're coming from a corporate background and you have an established belief system about how businesses should operate or how things should be done that you've brought along with you to your own business. I did this myself, the first iteration of my venture into entrepreneurship. I set up a business based on what I knew, what I had learned worked in traditional business environments. And effectively what I did was created a business that I didn't like, that I didn't like going to every day, but that I felt obligated to operate following all of these criteria that I had learned along the way was the way that you did business. And I had to peel myself out of that and start again, as so many people have.

I've heard Abraham Hicks talk about this a number of times. People often ask the question, you know, I was feeling so inspired and motivated and aligned with this idea. And then I got into action and I started to create it and build it. And then all of sudden I felt drained and exhausted and overwhelmed. And now I wonder if it was ever the right thing to begin with.  There tends to be like a desire to start again and start again. And what Abraham has shared is that it's in the transition to the doing that our energy shifts. That when we're in the creative process of dreaming it up, of imagining it, we're in alignment and we're excited and the flow is there. And then we shift gears into doing the thing and we go back to old ways, old habits. We go about doing the thing in the way that we think we're supposed to do it, instead of keeping ourselves in that energized, aligned, excited place, that is what allows for the creative experience, for the abundance, for the expansion to happen. And so often what happens is we hit a point where we just feel overwhelmed, exhausted, we feel like we need to take a break, and then in the taking of that break, things start flowing again.

And we'll talk more about that in a second. So how do these three elements work together? Well, when we are actively working to engage and improve all three areas, they create a self-reinforcing cycle. When one grows, it naturally elevates the others and so on. So let me give you a couple of examples. 

When you're operating from a place of pleasure and alignment, you naturally attract more opportunities and that leads to the ability to have greater impact. Have you ever noticed that when you're on vacation or you're just having a good time or you're just relaxed and things are easy and fun, like that's when you get that mystery phone call or you bump into someone or you make a connection and something just clicks and things flow and an opportunity has arisen that you couldn't have planned for, you couldn't have expected.

That is the power of being in that place of pleasure and alignment. And when your impact grows, reaching more people, being more effective with your work, it creates more opportunities for profit. It creates more opportunities for revenue, for growth. And when you're profitable, then you have all these resources to invest in the systems that support increasing the impact and support increasing the experience of pleasure in both your work and your life. 

So what this might look like is creating scalable systems that multiply your reach while also reducing your personal workload or designing offers that maximize both your impact and your income and feel really joyful and aligned and exciting for you to deliver. Like you love to show up, you love creating it, and you love delivering it.

It might look like building in regular restoration time that enhances your creativity and your innovation. It might mean developing your team in ways that extend your impact while also giving you more freedom.  Focusing on the synergy in these three areas creates an ever-expanding upward spiral.

And so you might wonder, what's the alternative? What happens when they're not working synergistically to create expansion? Well, the opposite happens, an ever-contracting downward spiral until something breaks or we choose to make a change or an adjustment.  I've seen so many examples of this over the years. One scenario I've seen over and over again are entrepreneurs who are so purpose-driven. They have the biggest hearts and they just want to have an impact. They want to make people's lives better and they're focused on their impact above everything else. 

And what ends up happening is there is a burnout that happens. Like they're giving and giving and giving and not replenishing and not receiving. So it could be an energetic burnout. Often there is a level of financial desperation that evolves because they're not focused on creating the revenue. They're just focused on giving and giving and hoping that the revenue just comes in or the financial piece just gets solved without them really having to focus attention on it. And ultimately what happens is a reduction in the very thing that they were so intently focused on from the beginning, which is impact, because now they can't have the impact because they don't have the money to have the impact and they don't have the energy to have the impact.

Another example that I've seen again and again is focus on profit above all else. And more often, the focus is actually on top line revenue and not on profitability. What I've seen often is in an effort to generate the revenue in order to be able to continue to have the impact, there is a move away from the impact that was the initial focus. It becomes like, well, we need to do this to make the money over here so that we can then go have the impact over there. And it's usually intended for some short term period. But what happens is all the effort that's going in to generate that revenue creates a requirement for more effort to create more revenue, to create more effort, to create more revenue. It just snowballs.

And then sometimes what happens is someone creates a financially booming business that is completely draining and has totally lost the plot, has lost the purpose, or there just becomes so much effort and the business still isn't profitable because the systems, the foundational processes and systems and team, et cetera, are not in place to actually do that in a sustainable way. And so it turns into a scenario of people just working and working and working and not ever really accomplishing the thing that they set out to accomplish.

A third experience of this that I see that also is very common is focusing on both profit and impact, but not on pleasure, not on wellbeing or satisfaction or enjoyment. And what that often leads to is a personal burnout or waking up one day and realizing that you've built something, maybe something awesome, but that you've lost years of your life in the process.

And so what about pleasure? It's definitely the most neglected in this world of entrepreneurship because we've sort of been brought up in a culture of hustle and sacrifice. And so often there's all this effort being put into either profit or impact, or the two of them, with a neglect of the pleasure or the joyful experience. And what I've seen so much, probably mostly because I've worked a lot with people in the personal development world and in the holistic health and wellness world, is that what that creates is an integrity break. Where it becomes apparent energetically that what's being taught is not what's being lived. 

And that integrity break breeds mistrust either from your audience, from the people who you're trying to serve. People can sense that there's lip service happening, that you're speaking the words, but you're not actually a living, breathing example of these philosophies that you're teaching or that you're sharing. So it could breed mistrust from your audience, but it also breeds mistrust for yourself. 

If you are in that space where you are teaching every day, you're standing up on a stage and you're speaking or you're teaching or you're writing the book or you're delivering the creative work for somebody else, with this idea that it's meant to have impact, that it's meant to make people's lives better while you yourself are suffering, unhappy, discontent, unsatisfied, there can also be an integrity break with yourself where you don't feel like you're being true. And so it can become harder and harder to actually show up and do the work.

Now, what I am 100 % not talking about here are lifestyle businesses. So as I've said, it is my assumption that if you're here listening to me, that your desire is to have a business that's creating impact in the world, and that that impact is the thing that's most important to you, and that your desire is not to work for the next three to five years, sell your business, and then go live on a beach someplace. If that's your desire, if that's your dream, then fantastic, great for you. I'm probably not the best person for you to be listening to.

I'm talking to those of us who are really committed to the work for whom there is an enjoyment and a pleasure in delivering the work that we do in the world. And we want to be able to do it for a long, long time and to increase our impact for a long time. Now that doesn't mean, you know, never retiring, but the philosophy that I hold is that we're creating lives where we can be creating impact, having a pleasurable experience, and we're not just like chasing retirement or desperate for the weekend, right? And so I'm not talking about lifestyle businesses. I'm not talking about where your goal is, you know, to work four hours a week and sit on a beach the rest of the time. If that's the type of pleasure that you're seeking, there are definitely better people that you could learn from.

I'm talking about a sustainable, soul-aligned integration of meaningful work and your daily life in a way that creates magical impact in the world.

Okay, so what actually happens in these circumstances where we're not focused on the seamless and soulful integration of impact, profit and pleasure? What happens when something breaks or something feels like it's going to break? Well, often we take a break and that might be by choice or that might be by force.

It's my observation that if we don't choose to slow down, that the world will force us to slow down. And that could happen in a variety of ways that I'm sure you're familiar with. People getting sick, people having an injury, having some sort of crisis that requires them to step out and step away. And it's in the taking of that break that we get to assess whether we're going to adjust and adapt or whether we're going to quit or give up, walk away. And so whether that break is forced or we've just chosen to step away and take some rest and restore and replenish ourselves, we find ourselves in a place of needing to make a choice about how we move forward. And often what happens is that in the reinvestment in our wellbeing, during that break, alignment returns and we find ourselves inspired again.

You know, I'm certainly guilty of this cycle over the decades of my life. And I certainly have had this experience where I stepped away and I rested and I restored and I found the energy to come back in. And then we choose to either go back in the way we've been doing things or we choose to go back in having adjusted and adapted to do things in a way that actually is more sustainable. And that I think is the best case scenario. 

If we can learn that lesson and adapt, and sometimes we have to learn these lessons again and again and again. But in the meantime, what's happened when we take this break by choice or by force is that we've lost time, that we've lost money probably, and that we've lost momentum. And I don't believe in regrets. I think that we learn the lessons we're here to learn.

Sometimes, like I said, we have to learn them again and again, or we learn them in layers, we get a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better every time we go through the process until we get to a place where we can see it coming beforehand, until we get to a place where we can be preemptive in our actions and prevent these things from happening. But I don't believe in regrets. I don't believe that we can be anywhere other than where we are right now in this moment. I don't believe that it could be any other way. 

So there's no point in looking back and saying, if I had figured this out sooner, it doesn't matter. If you find yourself in that spot, it just is a reminder. It's a lesson that you're learning. And the more intentional you can be about investing in changing your behaviors and changing the way you show up, then the less times you're going to have to learn it again and again in the future. So every hour, every minute, every day is an opportunity to start again in a more aligned way.

So how do we do that? Well, starting to implement the satisfaction strategy begins with honest reflection. Where are you currently experiencing blocks in each of these areas? Some common blocks in terms of impact might include, getting caught in the weeds of daily operations, trying to serve everyone instead of focusing your energy on the most impactful actions, lacking systems that would amplify your reach, not wanting to slow down to take the time to create those systems, or like I said, just getting completely off track from what your original mission was to begin with and finding yourself far away from what you intended.

In terms of profit, you might be undercharging for your services. You might be making reactive rather than strategic decisions around your finances. You might be operating without a proper financial tracking system or planning system. Or you might be just ignoring your finances altogether, which is so common.

And with pleasure, many entrepreneurs believe that struggle equals success, that they have to suffer for the cause, that they need to postpone joy for some day down the road. Then they're operating from a place of “shoulds” instead of desires and taking action that doesn't feel aligned but feels like it's what they're supposed to be doing because it's what they see everybody else doing. And another telltale sign is that you're not allowing yourself to take a break until you reach a certain goal or objective.

So wherever you are, the key is to start right there and begin to take aligned steps forward, starting by identifying which element feels the most depleted right now and make one small shift in that area. 

As we wrap up today's episode, I invite you to consider which of these three elements, impact, profit, or pleasure, needs the most attention in your business right now. And what's one small step that you could take this week to strengthen that area? 

Remember, the goal isn't perfection. The goal is progress towards a more aligned and sustainable way of doing business. One that serves not just your bottom line, but your well-being and your mission also. Next week, we'll be diving deeper into the first element, into impact, and exploring specific strategies for amplifying your mission without burning out. 

Until then, remember, your pleasure is your power. Take care.