The Sheila Botelho Show

The Quiet Signs You’re Ready to Shift Your Business | EP 525

• Sheila Botelho

Share episode

🔗 Mentioned on this Episode: Show Notes 👈

In this episode, I’m sharing what most high-performing founders don’t say out loud. The subtle signs that your business model no longer fits who you are now. If you’ve been growing your business for years and success is coming in, but something feels... off? This one’s for you.

I open up about the quiet pivot that reshaped my own business, from leading with hustle to leading with well-being and the ripple effects it had not only on my income but my health, relationships, and clarity of purpose. You’ll hear three signs you may be outgrowing your model, plus the common traps that keep founders stuck in old frameworks.

You’ll also get one key insight that will help you build with more alignment and impact, while doing less. This is for the person who embraces success but who’s no longer willing to sacrifice herself for it. Let’s get you back into a rhythm that actually supports the life and legacy you’re here to build.


Text us! What landed for you from this episode?

🎁 Subscribe & Get the Seasons Success Method & Meditation
🎧 Listen, Subscribe & Rate this podcast
📲 Follow me for more insights: Instagram | LinkedIn

Sheila:

If you're making money but feeling drained. This is the conversation that will give you language and clarity around what your next season could look like. I'm sharing how I pivoted from wellness coaching into building high impact programs for founders who want long-term success without sacrificing their health. I'll walk you through three signs it's time to pivot, plus the traps to avoid that most entrepreneurs miss. This might just save you months of burnout and help you reclaim that freedom that you started your business for in the first place.

Sheila:

Hi, welcome to the podcast. I'm Sheila Botello and I believe true success is built from the inside out. I want to start today by saying something you might already know deep down, but you may need to hear again. We are in a season where the old playbooks are breaking down. The way you built your business up until now likely isn't the way that you'll grow it from here, and that just means you're evolving and our world is definitely evolving. So last week I talked about lightening your load, about creating more white space, and today I want to talk about what happens after that space is created, what you might begin to hear in the quiet, because often those whispers are telling you that it's time to pivot. It's time to do something different, or to at least do what you're doing in a different way perhaps, and if the thought of pivoting brings up some kind of fear or uneasiness, or if you're unsure whether it's truly time, you're in the right place, because we are going to talk about that today. So you may know, my background is rooted in the wellness space and for years I've had a thriving wellness business. It continues on to this day, helping people feel better in their bodies and to address different health concerns so that they can have more of an understanding about how they can improve their quality of life and lifestyle and just make those empowered lifestyle changes.

Sheila:

And I loved how it started out. But something started to shift. I began to notice a pattern, both in my clients and in the people around me. They were specifically women who looked really successful on paper and their names were being tagged in podcasts. They were hitting launches, their feeds were polished and full of high vibe content, but behind the scenes they were exhausted. They were carrying the weight of their business, their families, their team, their communities in some cases, and slowly it was catching up to them Adrenal fatigue, gut issues, hormone imbalances, lack of libido, marriages strained and, ultimately business momentum plateauing or collapsing altogether, and I was not immune.

Sheila:

I also experienced in my circle my dear loved ones experiencing some of these very things, and it started me to really take a close look at some of the things that I was personally doing to make sure, hey, like do I have everything together? Because you know I've for years been doing quote all the right things regular movement, clean eating, quality supplements, mindset work, deep self-reflection. And yet I was still blindsided by something that had me head into pause. It was not burnout, but it was a deeper invitation to just look at what needed shifting in my own life. And I realized when I was pausing, that success isn't just about systems, sales pages and showing up. It is about sustainability, and that has everything to do with how you care for your internal world. Now, that's when the pivot began in my business and I started working with founders not just on their health goals but on building businesses that could actually support their wellbeing, and the ripple effects have really been beautiful more intuitive decisions, stronger boundaries for people, more connected teams and revenue that grows with them, not at the cost of them. But what I didn't expect was how different the world would feel after making this pivot, I suddenly had more creative energy because I was dreaming bigger. And when I brought that energy into my client work, they started experiencing breakthroughs in ways that weren't just about business metrics. I had people messaging me saying their marriages were improving and their kids were actually noticing their sense of calm. They had sleep that was improving and improving and still they were making more money. And that's what I want for you, like that's the whole enchilada right there.

Sheila:

So how do you know when it's time to shift the model that you're operating from? Here are three signs. Number one you're doing all the things and your revenue is stable, but it really feels heavier. The clients are coming in, your offers still convert, but it's like pushing a boulder uphill, and it's not just the ordinary struggle bus that sometimes we are in in our business, because it's not always smooth sailing. This is part of it. But you feel more tired after launches. You feel more resistance to content creation and less joy in the day to day. That's not just a mood, that's data. So ask yourself am I building a business I still want to run a year from now? Number two the industry is shifting around you AI, the coaching space, evolving client expectations changing, new business models shifting and being dropped into our laps.

Sheila:

If your model doesn't account for these shifts, you'll end up over-delivering, under-charging or both, and that is a recipe for resentment. And you don't get into business to feel resentful. You get into business to feel free and to serve other people. Number three you feel misaligned with what you're delivering. So your offer may still be selling, but it doesn't light you up anymore. You've outgrown it. Maybe it's a specific product that you have been marketing for a long time and you really want to move into a different area. Or perhaps your delivery method drains you. Maybe you're on back-to-back calls, or your team is way larger than you need, or it's not large enough. Maybe you don't want to be the one managing the team, you just want to be the visionary. You don't want to be the one managing the team, you just want to be the visionary. That dissonance is a signal for you. A healthy business model should feel energizing, of course not perfect and not effortless, but like something you want to keep showing up for.

Sheila:

Let's also name the mistakes that we tend to make during this phase. The first mistake is we just push harder. You think. Maybe you just need to do more. You need to launch again. Hire somebody else, work through it, but what you might actually need is a strategic pause. One of the bravest things you can do in this season is slow down long enough to hear what your body, your nervous system and your business are all trying to tell you. The second mistake copying your peers. You look around and try to mimic what someone else is doing, but you don't know what their nervous system is built for or what their revenue structure looks like. You don't need a copycat strategy, you need a self-honoring. One Third mistake dismissing your intuition. Sometimes the model looks so good on paper and, like your accountant might say to you, oh, everything's working, but your body is saying, no, that right there. That is what you need to listen to the most.

Sheila:

So what does pivoting really look like? Pivoting doesn't have to mean burning everything to the ground. I often talk about this on the podcast because we feel like this sometimes. Right, we just want to go and live on a desert island and just have people feed us grapes and not have to make big decisions. Well, sometimes it actually just means refining your offers, moving from a one-to-one type of situation to more of a group type of situation that you're offering, or maybe from a live delivery to something that is more automated, or maybe simply raising your prices or protecting your time, and sometimes it's realigning your business around your personal energy and your desires. It could look like taking Fridays off to restore your creativity. It could look like off-boarding a client who is just not aligned for you. It could be restructuring your team and it could also be launching things slower and more sustainably. The most sustainable businesses are not built from scale. They're actually built from self-awareness. That's what I've noticed as I've been working with so many different, diverse business owners. So give yourself permission to build from the inside out, because it will not only serve you, but it will shift the culture that you create in your community and your team. If you are afraid of pivoting because you don't want to confuse your audience or lose momentum, please remember nothing will kill your momentum faster than staying in misalignment, and the beautiful thing is, once you realign, your people can feel it and the right people will respond.

Sheila:

One of my clients had been doing a specific line of work for seven years and she was so deeply attuned to the her clients and loving it along the way, and then after a while, she just started to notice she was resenting showing up in the model that she had created, and so what she tried to do instead was build the team around her. So she only did the pieces of the business that really felt good during that time and that worked for a little while for her. And what she did notice, though, also is her profitability started to go down, because, of course, she was sharing more of the revenue and needing to also make sure she was using her energy to oversee even the people who are overseeing the rest of the business, so she wasn't really getting her energetic time back. She actually started to resent it even more, and so what she did was she decided to take a little mini sabbatical and she set up some structures in her business that would allow her to step away, and she stepped away for a period of time I believe it was 60 days, and it was between launch cycles. It was just during delivery type of phase. So she really set things up with a lot of automation and other things that came in to kind of fill the void that people wouldn't really notice that she was not there, and she also was very honest with the people that she was delivering to what she was doing. And actually what ended up happening is everybody was so incredibly understanding because they really valued what she had created for them, and this gave them permission to also take a look at what they were doing and how they were doing it, and a lot of people made some beautiful growth moves.

Sheila:

Now, of course, there were some people who did not like this shift that had to be made, but when it was framed from a place of really a self-care lens and making sure that she was feeling her best to be able to continue bringing her absolute best work to them, it was so appreciated by not only her clients but her team. And when she stepped away, she created some white space and something new emerged within her. She realized there was something different that she was meant to be doing and she didn't need to completely revamp her business. Instead, she added on a whole new arm to the business that she became more involved with bringing to life, and she was still able to dip in to this other part of her business with her clients, where they still got to spend time with her and she was so lit up that they got so much more result of positivity and impact, from her being in that state of mind that her business grew even more and more people came into that original arm of the business. But it was because she was lit up from developing something new.

Sheila:

We are meant to grow and change and evolve, and as business owners, we get to do it in the way that makes sense to us. We get to really innovate Isn't that why we are doing this in the first place? Because we get to create. We are co-creators with the universe, co-creators with really our clients and the people we're serving, because we are delivering to people the things that they're letting us know that they need and we're bringing it forth with our own unique essence. And so that was a really inspiring story for me to witness, because I really thought that she was going to close her doors and she had so much magic in her to give that it was just getting really dimmed down from her being so exhausted and uninspired that this pause she gave herself permission to take and her wonderful team and her beautiful clients also gave her permission to take meaning they supported her in it really revived her and now she is doing the work that is lighting her up and more people are being positively impacted, and that is possible for you too.

Sheila:

If you are noticing signs like wondering, do I need to shift things completely? This is just your next season calling and, yeah, it may just feel very uncomfortable at first, but what is on the other side is more aligned, more easeful and more expansive than you can imagine. If you're in a space right now where you can feel that pivot coming but you're unsure how to navigate it without unraveling what you've built already, I want you to know again you're not alone. You are just ready for your next iteration. Next week, I'll be sharing a practical way to get crystal clear on your vision and how to lay the framework to carry it forward with more ease. And, until then, honor what your body is telling you and remember the next level of your success is not always about doing more. It's about becoming more you. Thanks for listening and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.