Your Business Can Be Successful and Still Be the Wrong Business | EP 224

Nobody warns you that a business can be working perfectly and still be quietly killing something in you. So the projects were coming in, the money was fine, like on paper, I was doing everything right and it felt absolutely nothing. Like I would open my laptop, look at the work in front of me and realize I didn't care about any of it. Like not in a dramatic way, just like this flat kind of boring way. It was literally like boredom that I kept trying to explain away because how do you like complain about a business that you know working and it's fine. But it was just like not for me. It took me years to actually listen to that inside voice and I want to talk about why. Because I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs don't stop running their business on time. We are very quickly like we very quickly start a business and do you know the things that you're supposed to do. But we slowly make changes, we slowly hire, we slowly fire, we slowly close something that's working. But we don't realize that if we close one thing, another opportunity is, you know, we'll show up. This is Proftable Graphic Designer. I'm Katie Sandal, founder of a branding agency in Austin, Texas, working with clients worldwide. After building over 350 brands in multiple businesses, I've realized that success and fulfillment are not always the same thing. On this podcast, I share what I'm learning about building a profitable business and a life that actually feel aligned. There is a version of being stuck in your business that nobody really talks about because it does not look like being stuck. It looks like success. The invoices are getting paid, the clients are happy, maybe you're selling them like an online course. You're making money, you're booked out or close to it. You are, you know, busy developing new programs. And by every external measure, you have the thing, you told yourself you wanted when you started. And that was me for a long stretch of running this agency, my branding business. And honestly, it was one of the most confusing periods I've had in business because there was no obvious problem to point at. You know, like if you're not making up money, okay, you don't have enough clients, you need to increase your pricing, you have to post more. Maybe you invest in ads, like you have a problem, but I didn't have that problem. So sit down to work and fill this strange disconnect and the work was fine. The clients were fine. I just didn't care. I would catch myself doing a project and realizing I was fully on our pilot, like going through the motions, I could do in my sleep and feeling almost nothing about the outcome. It wasn't like burnout exactly because I wasn't overwhelmed or exhausted in the way people usually mean when they say that word. It was quieter than that. It was bored. I'm like, it was so bored. And I think boredom is one of the most underrated problems in business because it's so easy to dismiss and sometimes not even notice it. You know, when money's coming in, who are you to like feel bored, you know? That's the internal voice most of us have. You feel almost guilty for it. You think, I should be grateful. This is what I built. Plenty of people would kill for this. So you push the feeling down and keep going and the business keeps working and you keep feeling nothing. And for a while, it's almost like when you have a night to five business and you're paid well, everything's fine, but you're just like, oh God, can I do something else? Maybe a different job, maybe something different. And really for a while, I dressed it up as other things. I told myself I needed a better process or a new type of client or a break. And I looked for the tactical fix because that's more comfortable than admitting the real thing. But the real thing was simple. I was bored out of my mind and once I actually named it, instead of, you know, talking around it, I could start looking at what had gotten me there in the first place. So to understand the boredom, you had to understand what's the working version of my business actually looked like like day to day, because it wasn't glamorous and it wasn't focused. In the early years, I took basically everything. So if you had a budget and a project, I was your designer, logos for restaurants, websites for gyms, branding for coaches, business cards, flyers, whatever. I said yes to almost all of it. And at the time, that felt like the responsible thing to do, because I would move to this country with very little money. And I was building this, you know, thing project by project. I don't regret that season, you know, that's just how you learn. But I knew that I have to or want to move away from it. So, you know, when you take on a huge range of work, you get reps fast and you figure out what you're good at and what drains you. But somewhere along the way, the strategy that got me started quietly turned into a trap. Taking every client meant my business had no shape. Every project was a fresh start, a new industry, a new set of expectations. And I was constantly like context switching between worlds that had nothing to do with each other. For example, I was working on a logo for a lawyer and a business card for skincare business, like completely different. And then there was the co-working space here. So years, my husband and I opened the co-working space in 2017. And that added a whole, you know, other layer of running something that worked without being the thing I actually wanted to be doing. Like I didn't know that until I started it, of course, you know, we ran it, we grew it, and you know, eventually sold it in 2021. And through all of that, I kept the design work going too, you know, saying yes to projects that paid, but didn't interest me even a little. But again, I just needed to make some income. And the thing about the business that works is that it can hide this from you for a very long time. As long as the money's coming in, there's no alarm going on. Nothing forces you to stop and ask whether you actually like any of this. You just keep feeding the machine because the machine's hungry and it pays you. And I think that's how a lot of us end up, you know, years into something that functions perfectly and feels completely hollow. It's not that we made one bad decision. It's that we kept like making the safe one over and over and never noticed the sum of them. So for example, I think her name is Melissa Griffin. She was very successful. Like she was selling online courses and she was making like millions and all of that. And all of a sudden, like she decided to shut down her company because she was just like, okay, I can't do this anymore. I think she was like burnt out, not just like bored. Also, Jenna Kutcher, she just decided to close her podcast, Amy Porterfield, she decided to close her marketing or business academy, something like that. It's not that it was not working. It's just they were bored. Like they don't want to do that anymore. And that's okay. You know, so what finally interrupted that like that pattern, like for me, like wasn't a strategy or something like that. It was something that like I simply had to change luckily. So in 2022, I had a baby and then COVID hit. Like literally, I got my daughter in February and then COVID hit in March. And so the day occurs, you know, overall closed. I have no family nearby here in Austin and my husband was working full time, but also his family's not around and suddenly the amount of time I had to run my business collapsed down to a couple of hours during nap times. Like that was it. That was my whole work day. A couple of hours, if I was lucky, like in fragments, while a newborn slept. Now, the obvious move in that situation is to figure out how to squeeze more work into last time. Like systems, efficiency, hassle harder, you know, in the little windows you have. And that's what I would have told you to do a few years earlier, but I looked at the math and it just didn't work. I physically could not take on more volume volume, not volume volume. And there were no more hours to give. So instead of trying to do more, I did something that felt genuinely like terrifying at a time. I raised my pricing. So I went from charging around $3,000 for a project to $12,000 for the exact same project. Not like identity increases like gradually. It literally went from $3,000 to $12,000. I just decided that if I only had a couple of hours a day, each of those hours had to be worth dramatically more. And the only way to do that, like was to charge, you know, for the value of the outcome instead of the time. I was fully prepared for people to say no, but I was always hoping they would say yes. But I assumed some would say yes. And people started saying yes. And that was the moment the frame, like cracked for me. So for years and operated on this quite assumption that growth meant more. More clients, more projects, more volume, more guesses. And here I was even in the most constrained season of my life with the least time I would ever had. And the business was actually healthier because I would stop optimizing for volume. And funny enough, one of my friends who is now our roommate for a couple of months as she was looking for a new apartment, some things fall through long story short, she now lives with us. And she's also an entrepreneur, which is amazing. So now we have like these coffees at like random days and times and we talk about business like all the time. I think that we just have these businesses that films feel like hobbies and we love talking about them. Anyway, me and her were talking about the volume. Yes, volume can work when you're like posting on social media. And if you can post 10 times a day, like, yeah, sure, your account might grow faster. But at the same time, it's the quality. And so when I was, you know, working with those clients, even when I was back like on Craigslist charging, you know, $65 for a logo, just imagine how many clients I would need to like get in order to make $12,000. Like it's crazy, right? I can't even, I don't even want to think about it. But here with one client, I make $12,000. And so it wasn't because my work changed overnight. It wasn't because I, you know, became this amazing designer overnight. But the clients who paid $12,000 were more serious, more committed than honestly, better to work with. And yes, over time, my work became better and it is not amazing. And especially now when I have design agency, so I have a team that can deliver amazing work. But of course, we're not charging $12,000 anymore. Now it's like 20k minimum. But the work got better because they had more at stake. So the clients, right? And I want to be clear that this wasn't some, you know, a decision about like alignment or something like that. Like I wasn't thinking about fulfillment on purpose. I was just thinking about survival and how to keep the business alive with almost no time. But it planted something. It showed me that the answer to a business that didn't feel right wasn't necessarily to work harder inside it. Sometimes the answer is to change the shape of it entirely. And once I've seen, you know, that with pricing, I started to wonder, what else? I'd been like assuming that just wasn't true. So the next shift was narrowing the agency down to skincare specifically, and I want to be honest about how unglamorous that process actually was because everyone loves a clean, you know, pivot story. Well, mine wasn't clean. It wasn't one dramatic decision where I woke up and, you know, declared I only work with skincare brands now. It was a series of small decisions over years and most of which I didn't recognize as important while I was making them. So what happened was that I started paying attention to which projects I actually looked forward to. So skincare and beauty work kept coming up as the stuff, you know, I generally enjoyed it. And the brands were interesting to me. The visuals, you know, the whole visual world was rich. The clients cared about design in a way that matched how I care about it. So I started saying yes to more of that and quietly saying no to more of the work that, you know, left me flat. And that's really all it was at first, a slow tilting off the weight toward one thing and away from everything else. Along the way, I also learned difference between things that look like progress and things that actually are progress. And the clearest lesson, there cost me $5,000. So I decided to test meta ads to bring in clients and spend $5,000 on it and I got zero clients out of it, like not one, like nothing, absolutely nothing. But let me tell you what happened. So the metrics look good. The leads were cheap, the cost per lead was low, everything like on the dashboard suggested that it was working. If you'd only look at the numbers, you would have, you know, said, keep going. This is great. But cheap attention and real buying intent are completely different things and no amount of good looking metrics changes that. The people clicking weren't people who wanted what I actually did. They were just cheap to reach. That taught me something that connects directly back to the boredom. A business can generate activity that looks like the right thing while being completely disconnected from what you actually want, busy metrics and real alignment are not the same thing. And you can have a full pipeline of the wrong work. And that's exactly what I had. And you can have a dashboard full of green numbers pointing at nothing. And you can have a business that works in a technical sense. But that has almost nothing to do with the business you've actually chosen to like run or choose to run like things that you want to do. So narrowing to skincare wasn't about finding a clever niche for marketing reasons. It was about slowly removing everything that didn't fit until what was left was something I actually wanted to do. And that took years. And it didn't feel like a breakthrough at any single point. It felt like a lot of small, slightly uncomfortable changes and adding up it in a direction. I could only really see once out travel far enough down it. You know what I mean? In simple words, it was just like a lot of small things that one day I was like, okay, so this is where we are. It's not that I just change everything overnight. But then once I chose an issue, yes, I chose I changed everything overnight. Like I literally went to my website and just was like adding skincare words and changing the portfolio and all that. But so where that leaves me now is a business that specialized in skincare branding, working with clients and projects I genuinely care about. And I want to describe what it actually feels like because I think the word alignment gets thrown around in a way that become almost meaningless and I don't want to add to that. So the honest version is that alignment mostly feels like not dreading things. It's subtle. So when a skincare project comes in now, I feel a kind of interest that I just didn't feel with a random restaurant logo or the gym website. And I care about the outcome. I have opinions. The work engages, the part of my brain that had gone quiet for years. It's not fireworks. It's not some constant state of passion. It's more about the low, okay, this is what we are working on. I love it. Let's do this. How about this? This is what I know. This is what I need the information for my client to pull and all of that. And the other thing is that the business funds without me well, I can take summers off like literally the whole summer. And the business wouldn't collapse while I'm gone. And that's one because I found some magic system. It's because I narrow things down enough and price things well enough and build things clearly enough with the whole operation isn't dependent on me grinding through it every single day. And that's also my choice. I never want to be a freelance crapping designer. I always want to have a design agency. And so that's the practical payoff of the years of small decisions. Not just that I enjoy the work more, but that I designed something I can actually step away from. And that's very important. Now, I also want to mention that it's not that everything is perfect now. And I've arrived at some final state of bliss. There are still parts of running an agency that I don't love. And that's normal. I try to do not many things of those things that I don't love and I try to outsource like all the time. You know, there's still hard days and annoying problems and clients who test my patients, especially now when we have chat GPT like oh my god, some clients will just like run everything through chat GPT and chat GPT is going to agree with whatever you say, you know, so sometimes it is hard and it is annoying and all of that and it's always like that when you work with people like you just, you know, it's just what it is. But most of the time, I really, truly love what I do. So, you know, specializing doesn't turn working to like a permanent joy, but what it did was raise the floor. The baseline is engagement instead of bored of them. And interest instead of like that flat autopilot feeling and that's like the honest like difference and huge difference. Anything that the real like thing that I that I would like separate like business that runs and a business you actually want to run. So for years, I had the first one, it ran, it paid me, it worked and all of that, but it didn't want to run it and it kept confusing the fact that it worked with the idea that it was right and then at some point it didn't even work anymore and it's just like all of that, you know, but everything is like a separate thing. But all connected so business can be completely functional and still be the wrong business for you and getting to The second kind and you know, it's like the business that you actually want that can be last Traumatic when people make it sound. It's just a series of decisions about what's to keep and what to let go You know and those are decisions that you make like over a long enough time They're the shape of the thing finally changes. So if you're seeing like where I was Meta business that is okay, but feels off I want to say a few honest things to you because I think the way most people frame this is unhelpful So the first is that the boredom you feel is not a character flaw. It's not, you know random thing and it's not you It's simply that you Outgrown the thing you have at the moment and it's information that you can change it your own Instinct telling you that something about a shape of what you built doesn't fit you and that's worth paying attention to rather They're shaming yourself for so for a long time. I treated my own boredom as a problem to me I thought I should be more grateful. I should just be happy and I should push the feeling down and keep going and all of that like Did and and all that did was Keep me stuck in the wrong things for longer than I needed to be and the boredom was actually the most useful Signal I had it was pointing directly at the gap between the business. I was running and the business I actually wanted to run and I just wasn't willing to read it like that way because reading it that way meant I would have to change something and change is uncomfortable when you know Like it's just simply uncomfortable And so the second thing I would tell you and then we'll be done with this episode is that you almost certainly don't need to blow anything up Like you don't have to close your business Even though you should if you feel like you should and this is where a lot of you know the online advice goes wrong I think you know it tells you to burn you down quit Pivot dramatically just make change make some bold leap that's not what worked for me, and I don't think it's gonna I don't think it's what works for most people what worked was small decisions like raising a price Saying no to one kind of project saying yes to more of another killing an experiment that looked good on paper But wasn't bringing the right people like none of those were dramatic and then added up over years They completely changed what my business is today, and that's really the honest takeaway if you know There is one alignment isn't something you find in a single move There's no one decision that fixes it no perfect niche you discover one after noon No pivot that suddenly makes everything click like it's built. It's like one thing after another So if your business works or you feel like it's okay, you know, you will never say it's perfect Like remember that like no business is perfect But you're simply bored out of your mind how I like to say it I'll just you know say it don't wait as long as I did to take that feeling seriously You don't have to have the whole plan figured out you don't have to know exactly what the aligned version looks like You just have to start paying attention to which work you actually care about and which works leaves you flat And then start slowly like quietly tilting the weight of the random, you know, direction That's it. That's the whole thing. It's not a leap. It's a long series of small honest decisions And they end up to something you actually want to run if you enjoyed this podcast episode Please subscribe and I would really appreciate a podcast review You already know how much reviews matter for a business and it would generally mean a lot to me You can leave one on Apple podcast or Spotify and if you want to stay in touch You can find me on Instagram @cady sundale or YouTube @cady sundale official