Wearing All The Hats
Reframing The Dreaded Lifestyle Business Bits
The dream of a lifestyle business is real, working for yourself, on your own terms, building something that supports the life you actually want rather than the life that just happened to you. It’s a compelling idea and one that more people are moving towards and for good reason.
But here’s the part that most lifestyle business content skips over. When you go solo you wear all the hats, every role that a company would spread across multiple departments, that’s now all you. Sadly, some of those roles carry a lot of baggage.
Sales, marketing, finance, just reading those words probably triggered something within you and reminded you of a pushy car salesman, an annoying pop up advert or a confusing spreadsheet. The reputation these things carry is understandable, but also worth challenging, because when you strip away the bad versions of each one, what’s left is actually pretty straightforward and in my experience more enjoyable than you’d expect.
Sales
We’ve all been on the receiving end of bad sales, you walk into a shop and before you’ve had a chance to look around someone has swooped in like a lion on the hunt. They may be friendly and ask how you are, but it doesn’t feel genuine, more like it’s just the first item on their checklist or the first step of the funnel they have been taught. They ask questions but it doesn’t seem like they are really listening, rather they’re pushing products you don’t want or need, and you can feel it, that lack of authenticity.
That’s not sales, that’s a bad approach to sales, and it’s worth leaving that image behind entirely.
At its simplest, sales is just helping someone find the right thing for them. When you run a lifestyle business, you’re not cold calling strangers or chasing targets set by someone above you. You’re having honest conversations with people who already have a problem, and offering something that genuinely helps them. When you reframe it that way, it stops feeling like something to dread and starts feeling like something you can actually get behind.
Marketing
Marketing has taken a similar hit with its reputation, and we are more aware of its presence in our daily lives than ever before. We’re surrounded by it constantly, adverts that follow us around the internet and now on our streaming services, algorithms that track how long we glanced at a piece of content and psychological tricks designed to bypass our rational thinking and push us towards a decision we didn't really make ourselves.
It’s intense, never ending and inconvenient with a cheeky fee to remove it all, and after a while it makes the whole idea of marketing feel dirty, like something you don’t really want to be associated with.
But strip it back and it’s really quite simple and not dirty at all, as marketing is just communicating the value of what you offer to the people who need it. If you have something that genuinely helps people then sharing it isn’t manipulation, it’s useful. You don’t need tricks, pressure tactics or a huge budget, you just need to show up consistently, be honest about what you do and who it’s for, and let the right people find you.
Finance
I’ll be honest here, I’m an accountant working towards my chartered management accountancy, so this one is closer to home than most.
Finance has a formidable reputation, and honestly it's earned it. Consultancy firms that slash costs, lay off staff and leave companies worse off whilst walking away with enormous fees. Bankers collecting huge bonuses after crashes that wiped out ordinary people's life savings, income and livelihood. Then there's the creative industries, built on the myth of the starving artist, the idea that caring about money somehow compromises the work whilst those at the top make a nice profit from that same creative output. I read recently about writers who had bonuses withheld despite working on a successful project, because clever accounting had turned a profit into a loss on paper. It's a brutal world at the top end of finance, and it's no wonder the whole subject makes people uncomfortable.
None of that is what finance is actually all about. For a lifestyle business, finance is straightforward and honestly quite empowering once you get your head around it. It’s knowing what’s coming in and what’s going out, pricing your products and services so that you’re actually making a profit, budgeting so you can plan ahead rather than react, and keeping records so you’re not stressed when tax time arrives.
It’s simply about having clarity over your own numbers so your business can sustain the life you’re building. When you see it that way, it becomes less of a chore and more of a tool, and one that keeps you in control.
The Bigger Picture
None of these roles are obstacles standing between you and building the lifestyle business that brings about the lifestyle you want, they’re the tools that make it possible. Sales, marketing and finance aren’t things to hand off or avoid, they’re the foundations of a business that actually works.
Yes, all three have been done badly by people, corporations and institutions who should have known better, but that’s not what you’re building. When your business is built around something you genuinely care about, these things stop feeling like distractions and start feeling like part of the work itself.
Wear the hats, you might find some of them fit better than you expected. If they don’t, you’ll have learnt the basics and can bring in a freelancer to do the parts you really don’t like.
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Hi! I found you via Wes's Note Boost and just subscribed. I'm a bookkeeper of 30+ years and just recalibrating to speaking about all the things that entrepreneurs have to do besides the thing they love. I'm calling it "the business beneath the business". It's the heavy, frustrating, intimidating and largely invisible part of a business. The thing most solopreneurs think "How does everyone else know this but me? I must have been absent the day they taught this." Love what you're doing here.