Most business advice starts by asking how much money you want to make. That’s the wrong question.
The business you build should support the life you actually want to live, not consume it. In this kickoff episode of the Dream Business Blueprint series, Lori challenges the traditional definition of success and introduces a new framework for designing a business around freedom, flexibility, and the season of life you’re in today.
This episode lays the foundation for the next nine episodes and introduces the first Blueprint Challenge to help you evaluate whether your current business truly supports the life you want.
What You’ll Learn
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Why most business advice starts with the wrong question
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How to design your business around the life you want first
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The first step in creating your Dream Business Blueprint
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Resources:
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TRANSCRIPT
0:00 What If Everything You’ve Been Told About Building a Business Is Wrong?
What if everything you’ve been told about building a successful business is actually what’s keeping you from having a life you love?
I’m Lori Lyons, and welcome to the Midlife Business Academy. If you’ve ever felt like your business is running your life, instead of supporting it, you’re in the right place. Around here, I believe a dream business isn’t measured by size. It’s measured by the freedom and the life it makes possible.
1:41 Introducing the Dream Business Blueprint Series
Now, this episode has been months in the making. Over the last several months, I’ve been having the same conversations over and over with clients, with listeners, with people who reach out after an episode hits, and somewhere it hits them where they weren’t expecting it. And those conversations keep coming back to the same old themes. Building a business you actually love, redefining what success looks like for you, realizing your dream has changed. And that’s not failure, it’s growth. understanding that starting over isn’t always the answer.
So it’s time to get practical. Starting today, we’re building your dream business blueprint together. It’s a 10-part series where each episode focuses on one piece of the blueprint, each one building on the last. By episode 10, you’ll have evaluated every major area of your business through a completely different lens. And yes, it even includes social media we’re going to talk about. I’ve also created a downloadable dream business blueprint to go along with the series. The link is in the show notes. Grab it now because you’re going to want it and you’re going to want to fill it out today after this episode.
If that’s the kind of business you’re ready to build, hit the subscribe button and click the bell. This is a ten part journey, and I’m going to be right here with you for every step of the way. Let’s make sure you don’t miss any of the episodes that premiere every Tuesday right here.
3:31 The Problem With Most Business Advice
So here’s the problem with most business advice. It starts with the wrong question. How much money do you want to make? How many employees do you want to have? How do you scale and how do you grow? And those aren’t bad questions, but they’re not the first questions. And when we lead with them, we end up building businesses that look successful on paper, but are completely misaligned in what we want in our real life.
The question I think we should be asking first, before the revenue goals, before the growth strategy, before any of that, is what kind of life do you want your business to make possible? That’s a very strong question. And that’s a very different starting point entirely. And it changes everything that comes after it. Because when you start there, success stops being about how big you can grow. It starts being about how well your business actually fits your life right now in this season with the things that matter to you today.
And I want you to think about that for a second. A dream business isn’t measured by size. It’s measured by the freedom and life it makes possible. And it’s not just a nice idea. That’s going to be the foundation of what this entire series is going to be about.
5:35 Start With the Life, Then Build the Business
Now, before we go further, I want to go back to episode 289. If you haven’t listened to it yet, go back and do it after today. It’s called Why an Ideal Day Isn’t Enough. It’s time to design your ideal week. And it talks about and lays some very important groundwork for everything that we’re going to be doing in this series. So go back and listen to it. In that episode, we talked about what you actually want your life to look like, the rhythms, the pace, and what a great week feels like when you’re living it. And today’s question takes it a step further. Episode 289 asked, what do you want your life to look like? Today we’re asking, what kind of business makes that life possible?
And that’s the shift. And it’s a big one. Because a lot of us spend a lot of time designing a life in our heads without ever stopping to ask whether the business we’re building can actually deliver it. And that’s what the Dream Business Blueprint is all about. Because most business owners build their businesses first. and design their life around what’s left over. I’ve done that. Time, energy, freedom, family. Those become afterthoughts, things that you’ll get to eventually. When the business is bigger, I’ll spend more time here. When the business is bigger, when I’m making more money, I’ll go do this. When the business is bigger and making money, we’ll take a family vacation or whatever. I’ll take my kids and my grandkids away. when the revenue is there, when you finally hit that next milestone.
But the dream business blueprint flips that completely. We start with the life, then we build the business to support it. And that means asking some questions that most business coaches aren’t asking you. They’re not technical questions. They’re reflective ones. What do you want your Tuesdays to look like? How many clients do you actually want to work with? What kind of work gives you energy? And what kind drains you? How much flexibility matters to you right now? What season of life are you in? And maybe most importantly, what are you no longer willing to sacrifice?
Because here’s what I’ve learned about myself and about the clients I’ve worked with. The answers to those questions change. They can change monthly. They can change yearly, depending on what’s happening in our lives. What you’re willing to sacrifice at 35 or 45 or even 55 is not what you’re willing to sacrifice now. And that’s not weakness. That’s wisdom.
8:34 A Friday Afternoon and a Bucket of Soapy Water
Which brings me to a Friday afternoon in a bucket of soapy water. A few weeks ago, I washed my own car for the first time in probably 25 years. Now, I’m not talking about taking it to one of the self-service things. I do that all the time because I can’t take my car through a car wash. But stay with me because this is relevant. I didn’t have a reason to. There is a self-serve car wash on every corner, and that’s usually how I do it. But it was a Friday afternoon. I had the time and something just said, go wash your car in the driveway. Go get a bucket of water. I didn’t put my bathing suit on like when I was a teenager. I didn’t go that far, but it was fun, like really unexpectedly fun.
Like it brought me right back to being a teenager. It brought me back to that time I spent with my son when we would wash the car 20 plus years ago, and we’d like squirt each other and make bubble baths or, you know, blow bubbles with the soap suds and stuff like that. And it was just fun. And it was when washing the car was just something he and I did together, and I forgot how much I enjoyed it.
Now, do I want to wash my car every week? No. But that’s not the point. The point is that on this random Friday afternoon, I was able to do something completely ordinary and enjoy every minute of it. Because my business gave me that afternoon. Nobody was waiting on me. Nothing was on fire. I wasn’t behind on anything, which is kind of rare sometimes. I was just there. I was present. I was happy. And that didn’t happen by accident. I had intentionally protected my Fridays by not scheduling them. That’s one decision that made that afternoon possible.
And that’s what a dream business makes possible. It’s not always the big, glamorous moments. Sometimes it’s a Friday afternoon and a garden hose and a memory that I forgot I had. So when you talk about designing a business around your life, this is what I mean. Not just the big picture stuff, the Tuesday mornings, the Friday afternoons, the ordinary moments that stop feeling ordinary when you finally have the freedom to actually be in them.
11:02 You’re Allowed to Want Something Different
And you’re allowed to want that. And I want to be really clear about that because I think a lot of us have been conditioned to believe that wanting less chaos somehow means we’re not ambitious enough. You’re allowed to want fewer clients and higher profits. You’re allowed to want flexibility over scale. You’re allowed to want a full Friday afternoon with absolutely nothing on your plate. You’re allowed to change your mind about what success looks like to you.
That’s what actually brought me to a decision about leaving that mastermind that I’ve talked about. The one that I love, the one that I’ve been part of for years. I was an original member. There was nothing wrong. The group had just evolved and so had I, but in different ways. And finally I realized that leaving the mastermind, it was a dream that no longer belonged to me. Not because scaling is wrong. It’s just not what I was optimizing for anymore. And that realization that your dream is allowed to change is exactly why this series exists.
12:28 Okay, But How? Here’s What’s Coming in This Series
So for months now, I’ve been talking about the dream business, what it looks like, what it feels like, why so many of us end up building something that doesn’t actually fit our lives. And the response has been incredible. But the questions I keep getting are the same ones. Okay, Lori, but how? What does this actually look like? What do I do first? And I heard you. You want the steak, not just the sizzle.
So here’s what I’ll tell you. I’m not going to give away all my secrets. That’s what I do with my clients and we go deep. But what I am going to do is talk about some of the hows. Enough to get you moving. enough to help you see what’s possible and maybe just maybe enough to make you want to schedule a call with me. And I’ll laugh when that happens because, you know, calls are how I pay my bills. But I mean it, that’s what the nine episodes are about.
So next week we’re starting with your business model because the life you design needs a business model that can actually deliver it. And a slight spoiler alert, simpler is always better. Then we go to point of view, because in a crowded market, what you stand for matters more than what you sell. And having a strong point of view is what makes the right people stop scrolling and say, that’s exactly who I’ve been looking for. Then the message, because you can have the best offer in the world and still be invisible if you’re speaking the wrong language to the wrong people at the wrong time. Remember that all ideal client thing? Hey, you know? Then visibility. And this one might surprise you because we’re talking about social media and asking the question that nobody wants to ask. How little can we get away with and still have a thriving dream business?
Then we’re going to talk about authority because you don’t need a million followers to be seen as the go-to expert in your space. You just need the right people to trust you. Then success because we’re going to completely redefine what that word means for you. And I think for a lot of you, that episode alone is going to change everything. Then freedom. What’s the real reason that we’re here, isn’t it? Freedom. Then we’re going to talk about AI because this is the world we’re operating in. And the question is whether to use it. It’s how to use it intentionally without losing what makes you and your business distinctly you. And finally, profit. Because a dream business actually has to be profitable. Otherwise, it’s just an expensive hobby.
So nine more episodes, nine more pieces of the blueprint, all of it building toward a business designed around the life you really want.
16:03 Your Blueprint Challenge This Week
Every episode in this series ends with a blueprint challenge. One action step to move you forward before the next episode hits. This week it’s simple. Grab the blueprint from the link below. and complete blueprint one. Don’t overthink it. Just answer it honestly. Does my current business support the life I want to live today? Not five years ago, not the version of success you planned when you first started, but today, right now, in this life, in this season, and what matters to you now. That’s it. One question. A few little assessment questions to see where you are. But I promise if you answer these honestly, it’ll tell you everything.
So next week we’re taking everything you just uncovered and asking the next big question. We’ve designed the life. Now let’s build the business model that actually supports it. If you want support doing this work, not just thinking about it, but actually building a business that’s aligned with the life you want, I’d love to talk to you. Go to talkwithlori.com and book a dream business design session. Let’s map out what this looks like for you specifically. And don’t forget to grab the dream business blueprint in the show notes if you haven’t already. Until next week, remember, it’s never too late to build the business of your dreams. We’ll see you next time.