The Sheila Botelho Show
Sheila Botelho is a business strategist guiding visionary leaders to more profit, freedom, and self-trust. With decades of experience in wellness, sales, and transformational coaching, she helps founders grow businesses that generate wealth and impactâwithout burning out or dimming down.
On this show, Sheila sparks future-focused conversations about growth, leadership, and the shifting landscape of business in an era of rapid change. Her self-trust-centered approach equips founders to align strategy with soul, scale sustainably, and create a legacy of influence and abundance that touches every area of life.
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The Sheila Botelho Show
The 3 Leaks Stealing From Your Expansion | EP 527
đ Mentioned on this Episode: Show Notes đ
What if the real obstacle to your next level isnât your strategy... but the invisible leaks in your foundation?
In this solo episode, I unpack the 3 most common ways high-achieving entrepreneurs unconsciously leak energy, clarity, and revenue. These insights are drawn from real conversations with six- and seven-figure clients navigating pivots, leadership challenges, and growth transitions. This isnât about working harder, Itâs about working in alignment with the season youâre actually in.
If youâre scaling a values-driven business and want to lead with more clarity, presence, and ease, this episode is your call to re-center. Your clarity is closer than you think.
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If you've ever found yourself wondering why things feel heavier even though your business has grown, we'll be talking about that today, because it's not always your strategy that's the problem. Sometimes it's the subtle, invisible ways your business is leaking energy, time and clarity. We're walking through three of the most common leaks I see in growing businesses and how understanding them can shift the way you lead, delegate and grow. Hi, welcome to the podcast. I'm Sheila Botello, holistic business coach, creator of the Season Success Method and your guide to growing success from the inside out. This space is where we explore what it looks like to scale your business, your impact and your self-leadership in a way that feels aligned, profitable and rooted in who you actually are. Today, I want to talk about the silent thieves in your business, because I know you already know strategy, you already know how to grow, but something's possibly been slowing you down lately and it may not be what you think.
Speaker 1:Over the last decade, I've supported hundreds of women founders as they scale and what I've seen, particularly in this past year, is a growing gap between visibility and vitality, because we have so much more access to all of these tools than we ever have had before AI, automations, sops that are really seamless launch templates and team structures that would have taken years to build in the past. We are smarter and we're faster, but what I'm hearing and what I'm seeing in DMs, voxer messages and during coaching calls is that many founders are feeling heavier than they did when they were making less money, if you can imagine. So why is this? Because growth without clarity becomes pressure, and speed without intentionality can turn into chaos. At least that's what I've witnessed. So what I want to offer you today are three core leaks that I see in the businesses of even the most brilliant, seasoned, multi, six and seven figure people that I coach Leaks that are subtle but compound over time and siphon off your momentum. And the wild thing is, these leaks have nothing to do with your strategy. They are truly about your foundation. So the first leak we're going to talk about is decision fatigue. So this is when you're making too many micro decisions daily, and it's draining your creative and strategic bandwidth. So why does this happen at all? Perhaps you've scaled fast because you had an idea, it took hold and you ran with it, and the difference is, though, as you kept growing, you continued making decisions like a solopreneur and like a small business, owner of a smaller business. So perhaps you haven't offloaded that mental load of the small decisions because you're afraid they'll be made poorly or mess with your brand integrity, and the impact of this is that you end up working more just to manage your business and your genius starts leaking out of the cracks.
Speaker 1:One of my clients, a course creator, realized that she was still the one approving every single Instagram caption, and this wasn't because her team couldn't write well. They were actually very gifted in many cases. As she came to realize, they could actually do even a better job than she could, but it was because she didn't trust that her voice would be carried properly, which is such a real thing to experience. I mean, I've personally gone through this journey myself. So we mapped out her vision map and what we discovered was that her bottleneck was not capacity, it was clarity on that specific message. So once she redefined what only she could do, she then trained her team to carry the rest, with boundaries and creative freedom, and within weeks, her content was scaling without her micromanaging, and her voice was still intact. And what was even more powerful for her is she got her energy back, so she was able to start thinking bigger again and being more present for the people that she was directly impacting in her day to day, not to mention in her personal life.
Speaker 1:The second leak is all about unspoken tensions. So what this is and I'm sure you found yourself here. If you are human it's avoiding hard conversations with your team, with your partners or your collaborators, and you can only imagine why this happens. But truly, in this case, you're a visionary, you want to protect people's feelings and you don't want to be perceived as difficult or demanding, so it's very easy to stay silent about any misalignment that you see going on, and yet it's not something that you can let slide. The impact of this, of course, is that you start resenting your calendar, your inbox, you start resenting your team and you show up to meetings already bracing for what's to come, because you're holding back on what you really need to say. So this energy leak actually turns into miscommunication, lost productivity and emotional burnout. Because, if you're like me, if there's a conversation you need to have and you're putting it off, it's not like it just goes into some drawer in your mind and stays silent in there. Usually, it is the one thing that is front and center in your mind. You're carrying it around with you all throughout the day, through every single interaction, and it can actually color other interactions with people because you haven't dealt with it and it truly is draining your energy. And when you get that out of the way, when you actually have that conversation and get some movement happening, shake things up, that's when you create more space in your mind and, frankly, your energy starts to increase.
Speaker 1:So several of my private VIP clients are actually navigating business pivots or exits. I mean this is just standard in the business space, but one founder was transitioning out of an offer suite that had made her multiple six figures but no longer aligned with her values in terms of the way she wanted to live her life, her time, her calendar, right. She knew that she needed to communicate this to her team and eventually her clients, but she was dreading it because everything was like a well-oiled machine and everybody you know when you're a business owner and you have a team, of course there's impacts to every single decision you make. So together we mapped the timing of this, we practiced the conversation and then, once she had that conversation, we debriefed. I helped her get grounded again into the vision of why she was doing this in the first place, and then we reflected together.
Speaker 1:Something about having that energy of someone who understands what your outcome, your ideal outcome is, who doesn't have a stake in your actual business, is very grounding, and what followed from this experience was a ripple effect of really respectful transitions and more space for her next expansion season, because of the way she had really thought through how she wanted her outcome to be, but also how she wanted to care for her team in the process. Her team was actually rooting her on for the changes that she wanted to make, and it wasn't like they were going to be left without a purpose or a mission for next steps. They actually had an even clearer mission for the next steps that were coming and they were on board for it, and it was because she helped them feel like those stakeholders in her business. And this is the invisible ROI of self-care in leadership. It's so much more than just taking a day off here and there. Right, it's really the inner workings that are constantly at play.
Speaker 1:The third leak is internal misalignment, and this is when you're operating in a way that's completely out of sync with your actual capacity or values, and this we see this happening when, again, you've scaled up and then you say, have shareholders, for instance, or board members who are really focused on growth and they just want to keep growing and growing and they're not so much in tune with understanding or wanting to understand the cycles of business and so you are pushed beyond your capacity, possibly pushing your team beyond capacity, and that's when cracks can sometimes show up in the business and what you're delivering and you start to lose quality in what you're delivering. And this can happen in any type of business, like even if it is at the service level, in a in-person environment, or a product type level. It can happen when you're opening too many locations. It can happen when you're starting too many product codes, right, you're not maybe improving all the existing things as best you can before you move on and you may be watering down what it is that you're offering, maybe even confusing people because of just profit for profit's sake, right, like, ooh, everybody's interested, let's just throw everything at them. Profit for profit's sake, right, like? Ooh, everybody's interested, let's just throw everything at them.
Speaker 1:So why this happens is, you know, somewhere along the growth journey you adopted strategies or timelines that weren't yours. They were things that have worked for other people you've seen, perhaps again those people who've been on your board, et cetera but they're not sustainable for who you are today. And that ties into the values piece right, things that are out of sync with your values, because perhaps your values are to have a specific impact on clients or on the world or on your community. And, yeah, you're a business, you want to be profitable, but you are really looking for legacy profitability, which involves not necessarily like a skyrocket to hit a major revenue goal, like really quickly. It's more of a strategic move towards long-term sustainable profitability. And again, when you have other people who have their hands in the business, who are looking to profit quickly and maybe you don't, that's where the mismatch can show up. And so the impact of this is you keep overriding your nervous system. So you might even be hitting your goals and everyone's happy, but you don't feel fulfilled. And so how is that going to impact everyone on your team and perhaps the products and the things that you're bringing to life? There's going to be a direct, energetic impact, because you're always preparing for the next thing instead of living the season you're in or allowing your business to be in the season that it's in.
Speaker 1:So one of my clients was launching a second business while scaling her first, and I mean, sometimes just the thought of that is, um, it gives me pause because I've seen it happen a lot and I see the things that can happen in that, in that situation, and it is possible. It's just there's very strategic things you need to do to help that be to help that work. So on paper, everything looked incredible, of course, right, doesn't it always? But her body was giving out loud signals fatigue, lack of focus, emotional volatility, which again does not help the cause when you're working with a team. So when we zoomed out using the season's success method, we realized she was in a harvest season with her first business and a planting season with the second and she really needed to honor both and not override them. And what that involved is us looking at her calendar and helping her realign it, realign the team, support the launch strategy so she could grow both businesses but with less pressure and greater impact. And of course, that was quite a process. But it is possible and you just need to be intentional and you cannot cut corners when it comes to this. So let's bring this together.
Speaker 1:The three most common leaks stealing your expansion are decision fatigue, caused by unstructured delegation, perhaps, and lack of clarity on your core genius. The second is unspoken tensions, which can be caused by misaligned communication and fear of disruption. And then, of course, the third is internal misalignment caused by potentially strategy stacked on top of outdated identity or unacknowledged season that you're in. These are not surface level problems. They are so subtle and they're foundational gaps that slowly eat away at your momentum. But here is what I want you to remember when you honor your season the season of life, business, health, everything and you realign your foundations and lead from your nervous system instead of your to-do list.
Speaker 1:Expansion stops feeling like a fight. It starts feeling like more flow. This is what I teach in my VIP days while we're doing it in practice and, of course, inside of my private client containers. So if you've been scaling your business but wondering why it feels heavier than it should, the next step is not another strategy call. It really is a return to the root, and you can check the show notes to learn more about how to work with me, to learn about my vision map and the season success method. And if this episode landed for you, send me a DM on Instagram at Sheila A Botello, and let me know. I would love to hear, because these stories that I'm sharing with you are not unique, but you are unique and, of course, the season that you're in may be quite unique compared to those in your midst. Your expansion does not have to leak. It gets to feel like you. So until next time I will see you in another episode. Have a beautiful rest of your day, thank you.