April 2, 2025
When people hear that I work with businesses, they often assume I’m a turnaround consultant—someone who swoops in to save failing companies.
But that’s not what I do at all.
I don’t save businesses; I optimize them.
Beyond the Surface of Success
The businesses I work with are already successful. They have paying clients, they’re generating revenue, and from the outside, everything looks great.
But there’s a reality that most successful business owners don’t talk about: having a successful business doesn’t mean it’s operating at its full potential.
Many of these businesses aren’t as profitable as they could be because of inefficiencies.
The owners remain deeply entrenched in day-to-day operations, constantly checking in and leading every aspect of their team.
They’re successful, but they’re exhausted. They’ve built something remarkable, but they can’t step away from it.
The Question That Changes Everything
In my work, I ask business owners one powerful question: “How can this scale without me, and what does that look like?”
This question often stops them in their tracks. They started their business because they saw a problem and wanted to solve it.
Then one day, they woke up and realized, “Oh, I have a successful business and a team—but I feel like I’ve lost the thing I love doing.” They’re just managing a lot, and that’s rarely what they set out to do.
The optimization process isn’t about fixing what’s broken; it’s about realigning what’s working to create more freedom, profitability, and satisfaction for everyone involved.
The Three Pillars of Business Optimization
When I work with clients, we focus on three core areas:
- Realigning Vision: Your vision will change almost every year as you grow differently, lead differently, or want different things from your business. Realigning your vision helps you fall back in love with why you started your business in the first place.
- Building the Right Team: Not the team you think you should have in theory, but the team that will actually grow the business to match your vision. Often, businesses have the wrong people in the wrong seats, or they’re missing key roles that would free the owner from tasks that drain their energy.
- Focusing on Superpowers: Understanding what your unique superpowers are and where you’re getting caught up in stuff that either you’re not good at or that’s draining your time. Everybody loves owning a business, but not everybody likes running a business day-to-day.
Finding What Lights You Up
Part of optimization is understanding your superpowers and identifying where you’re getting caught up in tasks that either don’t match your strengths or drain your energy.
For example, one of my clients has a design firm. When I asked her why she wasn’t doing sales calls anymore, she simply said,
“I don’t know, I just stopped doing them.”
It turned out that sales calls were actually something she enjoyed—she had just gotten buried in the day-to-day management of the business.
This highlights a crucial truth: everybody loves owning a business, but not everybody likes running a business day-to-day.
Optimization helps you identify which parts of your business actually light you up, so you can focus there while building systems and teams to handle everything else.
Why Businesses Reach Plateaus
Even successful businesses experience plateaus where growth stalls and profitability flatlines.
This doesn’t mean anything is broken—it simply means you’ve reached the limits of your current system.
Think of it this way: the strategies and systems that got you to $1 million won’t get you to $5 million. The team structure that worked with five clients won’t work with fifty.
As businesses grow, they need different operational approaches, different team structures, and often, different leadership styles.
Optimization isn’t about fixing failures; it’s about building bridges to your next level of success.
Conclusion
If you’re running a successful business but feeling exhausted, if you can’t remember the last time you took a real vacation, if you’re the bottleneck in every decision, or if your profitability isn’t matching your revenue growth—your business doesn’t need saving.
It needs optimizing. And the best part?
Optimization isn’t about working harder or doing more.
It’s about working smarter and doing less—focusing only on what drives growth and brings you joy while building systems and teams that handle everything else.
Because a truly successful business isn’t just profitable—it gives you the freedom and capacity to live the life you envisioned when you first took that entrepreneurial leap.