57. Profitability Beyond Hustle Culture with Ashley Gartland

 
 
 
 
 
 

Is bigger really better? 

The online business and marketing spaces are flooded with messages and promises of how you, too, can make $10,000 from two emails or get 10,000 followers in 30 days, or make seven figures in seven months. All of these messages tell the story that bigger must be better.

So much of the focus is on expansion, growth and scale, but what if that approach isn’t aligned with your values or what makes you happy?

Ashley Gartland and India dig into what it means to be better than big, being profitable without the never-ending hustle, and how a subtractive approach can create simplicity and ease in your business.

In this article:

  • Why focusing solely on growth and scale can create complexity and overwhelm

  • How a subtractive approach creates simplicity and ease

  • How to implement subtraction in your business

  • What is means to be “Better Than Big”


This article is based on a Flaunt Your Fire episode called Profitability Beyond Hustle Culture with Ashley Gartland

Meet Ashley

Business mentor and coach Ashley Gartland helps service-based business owners get out of overwhelm and create more sustainable, life-giving businesses by simplifying their services and freeing up their time. She is the host of the Better Than Big podcast, where she talks with small business owners about the strategies, shifts and solutions that have helped them create simple, streamlined businesses. Ashley runs her business in 25 hours a week, leaving her plenty of time to enjoy what's most important to her including long trail runs and time with her family.

Overwhelmed by the hustle

So much of the rhetoric in the world of business and entrepreneurship is focused on adding more, more, more. Keep growing, keep expanding, add to your team, hit these numbers.

“I feel exhausted just saying all this stuff,” India notes.

When is adding more just the pathway to increasingly complex businesses and overwhelm for business owners?

Ashley recalls being at a conference with other coaches where much of the conversation was about striving to hit targets and hustle and strive.

She remembers asking herself, “But what if I don’t want that? What if I want the smaller, sustainable business that provides me with a really rich, fulfilling life?”

She says the constant focus on moving targets for income, audience, clients, platforms, etc felt like a hamster wheel.

But the alternative isn’t always obvious to people.

She says, “Once you define what’s really important to you…you can see where you’re adding more unnecessarily and where you’re creating unnecessary stress, complexity and overwhelm.”

The opposite of addition is subtraction

Ashley runs her business with just twenty-five hours per week, which leaves her time to have the rich, fulfilling life she remembers thinking about at that conference.

She achieves that balance by applying a subtractive, rather than additive, approach to her business.

While many circumstances can trigger someone to think about what they can let go of in their business, for Ashley it was parenthood that forced her to review what she wanted to prioritize in her life to allow for freedom and flexibility in her schedule.

She started by examining bloat in her services and cutting anything that didn’t add real value.

She says bloat happens for lots of service providers. They have a lot of products and services because they’re working with the belief that they have to offer more to grow. Or they pack so many features and bonuses into their offerings that they struggle to deliver it all.

In either case, it creates a lot of complexity and overwhelm for business owners.

When she was trying to meet so many different needs and following the advice of multiple industry experts on how to scale her business, Ashley “ended up with a service menu that kind of felt like a Cheesecake Factory versus something really refined.”

Like the kitchen of a restaurant with a huge menu, “As a solopreneur, or even someone with a small team, that volume and that complexity is really hard to deliver.”

And those services take up time, resources and brain space in your business, even if clients aren’t using them.

Subtracting for ease and simplicity

Ashley shares a story about a client of hers who is a branding expert, and also included website design in her packages. In order to create the time off and flexibility she wanted, she ended up giving up the website design portion and now focuses solely on branding.

Dropping that service created simplicity, ease and time freedom for the client, and it allowed her to put all of her focus on being the expert in one thing, rather than several.

India says Flaunt Your Fire has also gone through a similar shedding process. “It actually reignited our creativity and our passion about it too, because we could be fully focused on that thing, and really just kind of pour our energy back into that instead of stretching it into thinner places.”

Ashley says that fear of losing income and saying no to work is also a driver in the way people get stuck offering services that drain them or stretch them too thin.

She had another client who had become known for doing large-scale interior design projects that she actually loathed doing, but who was initially afraid to shift her business’s focus to the smaller scale work that she loved.

“My goal is always to free up your time while maintaining the business, [but] both of these clients have seen growth. And I think it's because they focused on the things that…really light them up and that they want to be known for. And they've been able to do that at a higher volume without working more.”

Better Than Big

When so much of the conversation is focused on scaling infinitely, Ashley says a business that is “better than big,” prioritizes possibility, time freedom, and choice over scale. It emphasizes balancing impactful work with having a fulfilling life outside of work.

Her main aim for her clients is to maintain the business while freeing up their time.

India adds that often when business owners or coaching are touting their launch numbers or other success markers, they’re not showing the full picture of advertising and admin costs that go into those successes.

“The numbers that you’re hearing are the overall numbers, but it’s not the profitability.”

Ashley agrees that we need to recognize that there are always costs in team, financial investment and time when it comes to the figures that get tossed around online.

And she wants her audience and her clients to know that if that version of your business is not for you, you don’t have to chase those benchmarks.

You can build a business that is tied to your goals, your values, and the lifestyle you want.

Defining success when the goal isn’t “more”

Ashley says success shouldn’t be just defined by revenue or the number of clients you serve.

Over the course of her career and two businesses, the definition of success has broadened to emphasize flexibility with her schedule and with balancing work and family.

“When I really think about what success looks like for me as a coach, it's having choice in how I spend my time…There's so many things that it's making possible when I broaden my definition of success. We could really start to appreciate that and also orient my decisions and my business to support that broadened definition of success.”

Subtracting to play to your strengths

Ashley says that social media is an area where she has had to do a fair amount of subtraction.

She started accounts on various platforms and ran a Facebook group on the advice of various experts and mentors, but maintaining an active, responsive presence “felt like something that was taking up brain space and it wasn’t really driving results in my business.”

Scaling back and subtracting it “freed up very minimal hours for me and minimal hours for my team, [but] the mental weight of it, getting rid of that was huge. And allowed me to have more creativity pour into the things that I love."

For Ashley, social isn’t a medium that feels aligned with how she works best and how she is most successful at getting her message out.

She says it’s important to consider what serves you, what fits for you and your strengths, and personality and give yourself permission to subtract so that you can focus on those things rather than expanding your energy on a platform or medium that doesn’t play to your strengths.

How Ashley Flaunts Her Fire

“For me it means standing up a little bit more and being a little more contrary or being more vocal about being contrary, because there are so many…messages about building your empire and helping you be more productive and efficient with the aim of reaching the next level.

And I'm just far more interested in helping business owners with the currency of time and maximizing it and freeing it up…Flaunting My Fire right now means talking about that more…really making it the focal point and sharing with people so that they can give themselves permission to set that time freedom goal in their business and take the steps to achieve it.”

Connect with Ashley Gartland:

Connect with India Jackson and Flaunt Your Fire:

Resources:

Your actions for this episode:

In Pause on the Play® The Community we are reconnecting with what's essential in our lives and brands. Join in on conversations and prompts to help you declutter the noise in your life so you can better access the people and causes/non-profits that matter most for you.

Let us know through the rating and reviews feature of Apple Podcasts or FlauntYourFire.com/rate what types of episodes you'd like to have more of here on the podcast.

Want to dig deeper? This week you'll also hear from Erica Courdae and I over on our main podcast, Pause On the Play®. We’ll break down consumerism and how we personally began having more once we took a subtractive approach to our shopping.

 
 
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