How do I tell if my business is healthy or just busy?
Check your business against three kinds of profit rather than one, because busy and healthy overlap only sometimes. Most consultants have a clear read on the money and have never put words to the other two, which is why a good year can still feel wrong and be hard to explain.
| Kind of profit | What it means | The question that tests it |
|---|
| Financial | Getting paid for the value of the work rather than for your hours | Am I making what I intended, without working more to get it? |
| Professional | Doing work you love, with clients you enjoy, being known for what you want to be known for | Do clients come to me for the right things? |
| Emotional | Having fun, having time for what you care about, feeling optimistic about what's ahead | Is this what I pictured when I started? |
Answer all three without flinching and the diagnosis usually writes itself. The lowest one is the thing to work on, and it's very often not the one you've been working on.
The reason I put emotional profitability on the same footing as the money is that it's the one people treat as a luxury. It isn't. It's the one that decides whether you're still doing this in five years.
What does a business look like when one of the three is missing?
Each missing piece produces its own recognizable pattern, and naming the pattern is usually enough to identify which one you're in. The three go together, so any two without the third has a predictable shape.
| What you have | What's missing | What it feels like |
|---|
| Financial and professional | Emotional | Good money, work you're proud of, and no time and no fun. This is the burnout combination, and the most common one among the consultants I talk to |
| Professional and emotional | Financial | You love the work and the clients, your life has room in it, and the money doesn't add up. This is the broke combination |
| Financial and emotional | Professional | The money works and your time is your own, and you're always chasing the next thing. It pays, and it feels a little empty |
Read those three and you'll know which one you're standing in. Most people do, immediately. Underneath the broke combination there's almost always a price that was set years ago and never revisited, and working out whether you're undercharging is the first move on that one.
Is a healthy business the same as a bigger business?
A bigger business is not automatically a healthier one, and revenue on its own tells you about one of the three. This is worth saying because growth is the default answer to almost every business question, and it's the right answer to some of them.
Growing revenue fixes the financial piece and can make the other two worse:
- More clients can mean less of the work you want, if the growth came from saying yes more widely.
- More revenue can mean more hours, which is what happens when the growth came from volume rather than from value.
- A bigger business has more moving parts, and the parts that used to be enjoyable become management.
None of that is an argument against growing. It's an argument for knowing which of the three you're growing, because a year that adds revenue and removes the other two is a year that felt bad and looked good, which is a confusing thing to live through. Getting paid for the value of the work is what lets the financial piece rise without the emotional one falling, and value-based pricing is the mechanism for that.
How do I decide what healthy looks like for me?
Decide what healthy looks like for you by starting with the life you want, then building the business to support it. That's the reverse of how most business advice runs. Most methods start with the client and put them at the center of the universe. Mine starts with you, because we have to know what we're building before we choose what to build it out of.
Write it down without editing yourself
Put the version you want on paper, in specifics:
- How you want your weeks to look. If you want to work three days, write three days. If you want to start at eleven, write eleven.
- The kind of clients you want to be surrounded by, including the ones you don't.
- What you want the money to make possible, in real things.
- What you want to be known for in five years.
The instruction I'd hold hardest here: don't censor yourself, and don't negotiate against yourself. Those voices saying it isn't possible or it's selfish get loudest when you have no plan, and they quiet down once you do. Then the business gets designed to produce that, instead of taking whatever happens to come your way and hoping it adds up. When it doesn't add up yet, the swing in the income is usually the first thing to fix.
Leah's take
I get why people skip this and go straight to tactics. Tactics feel like progress and a vision exercise feels like a workshop.
But here's what I've seen over and over. A woman does everything right on the marketing and the sales side, hits the number she said she wanted, and feels flat. Nothing went wrong. She just never decided what she was building toward, so she borrowed a definition of success from her old corporate job, hit it, and found it wasn't hers.
There's something else in this I think about a lot. When we picture what we want, we mostly picture the absence of what we had. Not toxic. Not the commute. Not the politics. That's a list of things you're running from, and it will get you out of the building. It won't tell you where to go.
Going toward something you want is different from getting away from something you don't.
So my ask is that you write down the version you'd be embarrassed to say out loud, the specific one with the three-day week and the clients you'd choose. Then we build the business that produces that. In that order, because your business starts with you.
