The Lifestyle Freedom Plan Every Solopreneur Needs Before 2025 Ends

All right, we are live. A little pop-up righteous hang for everyone today on just reflecting on Q4 and doing a little Q1 planning. I'm gonna give folks a chance to receive their email notifications and join in. Hello, Bob, great to have you here. We're going to start for real in just a minute. Um, if you don't mind, just chit-chatting for a minute. I'd love to hear where you're tuning in from. Hello, Alice. I don't know, Alice, you must have some sort of super app for getting notifications about these random pop-up lives that I'm doing. I appreciate you being here, paying attention. Hello, Yuta. I hope I'm saying your name right. We're going to give folks just a minute to jump on, but, um, I would love to hear where people are tuning in from. Don't have to be too specific. If you want to tell me what country you're in or what state or province you're in, it's always just interesting to me to see how international or not these gatherings are. And yeah, I was on Bree's, uh, live as well. In fact, I was going to go live at 2:30, and then I saw Bree going live, and I decided I'd rather go to Bree's live than go live myself. So, all right, Alice is in the UK. I am here in the center of the universe as far as I'm concerned— Floyd, Virginia, right in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Oh, Alice, I think that would be awesome. You're, you're already really proficient at doing that on Facebook. I think, I think that you'll find more of your people here on Substack, to be honest. All right, so we're going to go ahead and just kind of get going. This is what I call a righteous hang. It's just a pop-up invitation to my subscribers to the Creative on Purpose Substack free monthly, annual, and founders, where I usually just pick a topic to jam on. These things always go way better, at least for me, when you are inspired to ask questions or to share your perspective on the things that I'm talking about. But for those of you that have been following the posts on the Creative on Purpose Substack, you know that this is one of my favorite times of the year. It's that time after the holidays when and before the, the New Year starts, where it just feels really spacious to me and quiet and a time when I can do some reflection on the year that is passing in just a few days and start to think about my planning for the first quarter of the New Year. And so for those of you that haven't already seen it, we are doing a free live workshop for all subscribers, free and paid, on Tuesday, this coming week. And I think it's the 30th of December at noon Eastern Standard Time. And we are going to talk about some of the principles and practices that I have found to be best practices for getting clear about what your number one business priority is and crafting the most effective and efficient plan for closing the gap on that priority over the course of the first 3 months of, of the new year. And so I thought I would just jump on and give an overview of some of the things that we're gonna do a deeper dive on, on Tuesday. If anybody here is not already RSVP for that workshop, just dash me a DM on Substack. I'll be happy to add you to the guest list. Uh, it— an RSVP is required to either attend live and/or receive access to the replay, or at least immediate access. The replay will probably be shared at some point publicly on the Substack, although often it's not. Uh, entirely, uh, available for free subscribers. I usually reserve the, the entire replay for my Circle and Inner Circle paid subscribers and give it a, an extended preview for the, for free subscribers. Um, so here's, here's the way that I think about my audit of the, the, the year that is passing and planning for the the next quarter of the year. And it basically happens in 3 steps. The first step is, what is the vision of lifestyle freedom? My current vision of lifestyle freedom that I want my business to fund and fit around. So this is something that, you know, it's important that we have a destination that we're heading to. And the more specific, relevant, and achievable that destination is, the better plan we can craft and the more likely it is that we'll make real measurable progress towards building that business that will fund a bit our current ideal vision of lifestyle freedom that we all are building our business businesses to fund and fit around. So that's step 1. What is it that I'm actually trying to accomplish with my business? Because it's business for business sake doesn't sound very exciting or fulfilling to me. My business is designed to provide me with an opportunity to do fulfilling, meaningful work, work that matters with people I care about, that enables me to make a better living and a bigger difference., but also to fund and fit the lifestyle that I want to live. So step 1 is what's that vision of lifestyle freedom that you're building your business for? The 2nd step is auditing your current business system. I'll get into more detail about that in just a minute. And then the final step— excuse me— is defining your number one business priority, your one and only one business priority that is going to— that if you accomplish it, will help you close the gap with the greatest velocity and ease towards funding and fitting that lifestyle vision that you did in step one. And then with that priority comes your ability to craft a success path made up of just the necessary things that have to go right enough for you to make measurable progress. Hey, Bree, I was just talking about your live. You went live right before I was about to, and so I decided to go live later and sit in on your session, which was really good, by the way. Hello, Nostalgia. Good to have you here. Okay. So again, this is just a hang. I'd love to jam with you all. So if you have questions that you want to ask about about auditing your previous year's, uh, business or your previous— the current Q4 business plan, or establishing your Q1 business priority plan, or how, how you think about, uh, defining your vision of lifestyle freedom that you want your business to fund and fit around. Just drop your questions here if you have a perspective of your own that you want to offer. Please feel free to do that. So again, if you haven't already, everyone that's attending now or listening to this replay is welcome to join us on Tuesday, December 30th at noon Eastern time for a deeper dive into these 3 steps on creating your Q4 pro— or I'm sorry, your Q1 2026 priority and success plan. The first step, as I shared, is what is it that you're actually wanting your business to fund and fit around? What is your current vision of lifestyle freedom that you ultimately want your business to fund and fit around? Most of the time, the folks that I am working with— and this was very true for me for too many years, we don't have a very— we just have this vague notion that we want a business that makes more money or gives us more free time to do the things that we want to do. There's no actual specificity. We haven't made anything that's actually relevant to our lives or important to our lives. And if you don't have a specific destination in mind, any road will get you there. So the more specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound we can make our ideal lifestyle vision, then the, the greater the chance that we can identify the number one business priority that will help us make the most progress if we accomplish it and craft a success plan of just the necessary steps that need to be taken in order to make progress in achieving that quarterly business priority. So one of the tools that we use is a variation on a success statement that I learned from Nick Peterson's book Bumpers, which I think his original question is, I know I'm being— I know I'm successful when— and then you just articulate what it is that success looks like, feels like, means to you. And what I've done is I've crafted a template that brings it more into the present. I know I'm being successful when— and then what does success look like, feel like to you? And then the second part is to accomplish this, I will need And then you're specifically saying, what are the resources? Might be financial, it might be time, it might be attention, reputation, might be revenue. And then when do you want to accomplish that by? So those— a lot of the folks that are here are members of the Circle and Inner Circle community of paid subscribers to the Creative on Purpose Substack. So they've— they're familiar with my backstory. But for many, many years, I had a business that was kind of just, you know, lumping along, always making enough to justify doing it again for another day, week, month, year, but never really giving me any kind of lifestyle freedom. And a business where I invested way more time, attention, money, and effort than I really wanted to, to get a meager return on investment that just barely allowed me to eke out a living doing work I did love. But I was doing too many things. I was doing all the digital marketing BS that I've come to learn is unnecessary. So I spent 80 to 90% of my time in my 10-hour days, 7 days a week, just on all the digital marketing stuff that we all think we have to do, and maybe 10 or 20% of my time in my business actually making a difference and helping clients achieve their priorities. And then our kids, my oldest son and his wife announced that they were pregnant. We wanted to be the daycare providers and I realized I can't provide daycare for my grandson for 9 hours a day if I'm actually working 10 hours a day. So that's when I kind of came up with my life, my ideal lifestyle freedom statement, which is I know I'm being successful when I can spend my weekdays from 7 AM to 4 PM caring for my grandsons. I now have 2 grandsons that we take care of. And to accomplish this, I need to work fewer than 10 hours a week and earn at least $60,000 a year. So again, the two parts to your lifestyle freedom, your vision of lifestyle freedom statement is, I know I'm being successful when— what does success look like to you? To accomplish this, I will need— what are the resources that you would need? So my vision of lifestyle freedom is I could take care of my grandsons 5 days a week for 9 hours a day. And in order to accomplish that, I need to be able to make $60,000 a year and work less than 10 hours per week. Now I know what I'm shooting for. Now I know what I want my business to fund and fit around. Which brings us to step 2, which is auditing your current business system and again, Bree and Alice and what I see here, I think, I think I might have seen Penny hop on, but I don't see her now. They're all familiar with, you know, what I see is the first principles of any successful business has nothing to do with ideal customer avatars or niching or niches or funnels or social media strategies or content strategies or email sequences or writing a book or creating a podcast or any of that. You don't necessarily need any of those things in order to have a successful business. You have to have an irresistible offer, an eager audience, and a Plan for putting that offer in front of that audience. And if you can accomplish those 3 things at a sufficient level, you will have a viable, sustainable business that you can then optimize. Those are the 3 core components of any successful business. Operating from first principles, reasoning from first principles. That's what a business is. Everything else is strategy, tactics, and tools. And we can, we can choose to do the things that actually align with our personality and preferences. We don't have to do any of the things that the digital marketers and online gurus might be telling us. And so in the Purpose-Driven Prosperity Model operating system, which is what we teach at Creative On Purpose through the Transcendent Solopreneurship content is how do, how do I define what we call a forever offer, an offer that is based on our positioning in the market rather than trying to force ourselves into a niche in the market? How do we stand up in our market in a way that reflects who we are, what we're great at, and where we belong? And then if we can create that positioning, that forever offer based on positioning. And we can create an offer that is perennial. We don't have to change it all the time. We don't have to create power offers or go through endless offer launches. We can actually just have a core promise of what we can help someone accomplish or the problem that we can help them solve. And we can put all of our effort into becoming preeminent being the best in the world at doing what we do in the way that only we can do it with and for people who share our values and need our talents to enhance their lives. And so we'll talk more about this on Tuesday's free workshop. But, you know, we audit the offer. How, you know, is the positioning clear? Is who it's for clear? Is the promise that we're making clear? Is the problem that we solve clear? Is the method that we use, the process that we use clear? Do we have proof? Do we have credibility? These are some of the considerations for the audit of your offer. Again, what we call a forever offer. The second component is how do we, how do we, what does our marketing web look look like? How do we talk or be— get ourselves in front of an audience that we can create awareness, attention, trust, and permission? All marketing activities. And so that we can build a bridge into the sales component, which is earn their interest, earn their enrollment, earn their investment. And so when we're talking about the marketing piece, we call it Be a Blessing Marketing, which is rather than trying to be everywhere all the time, all at once on all the platforms, social media or your website or podcasting or YouTube or being a book author or what have you, how can we set up a marketing instead of a marketing funnel? Which are inherently leaky and very ineffective and inefficient. Most marketing funnels have like a 2 to 4% conversion rate if they're good in terms of people becoming aware of who you are to moving through your funnel, your leaky funnel, until they buy a thing. 2% of people that become aware of you will actually end up buying your thing, whereas a marketing web, the which I've demonstrated in several over-the-shoulders over the last year. My marketing web has an almost 50% close rate from someone becoming aware of who I am to buying a thing from me. And that— and I don't do any social media. I don't do any funnels or ideal customer avatars. I don't define a niche. I don't differentiate on demographics, psychographics, features and benefits of my offer. I simply show up on Substack, my one and only platform, and I do my thing. I show up as I am with what I have. I do my thing with and for whoever's around and let people watch. And I trust that I can create conversations with the people whose lives would actually be enhanced if they collide with me and the difference I can help them make. And we have a— we, through what we call a conversation engine, get them more enrolled, interested, and invested in the difference I can help them make. And so when you're auditing your marketing system, whatever your system you're using, what we're usually looking at is what's the return on investment. You need to act like if you're spending a lot of time on Facebook, on direct messaging strategies, whether that's organic or through ads or video marketing strategies, What are the numbers? How many people are watching your videos? How many of those people did you have a sort of conversation with? How many of those people jumped on a discovery call or whatever mechanism you're using to convert? And how many of those people actually converted? You have to know what the return on investment is for your time, attention, money, and effort that you're spending on all these platforms. What we generally find in an initial audit of, of community members and client marketing systems is that they can stop doing at least 60 to 80% of what they're doing, sometimes a lot more, that you can stop doing 80% of what you're doing and it will have no impact on your current revenue, which means that you have just recaptured 80% of your time, attention, money and effort that you can immediately invest into living the life that you want to live. And if you want to take a little bit of that and invest it in the, the, the 10 to 20% of the things that are actually delivering a return on investment to make them deliver a better return on investment, you can do that as well. So we audit our offer, we audit our audience, where we're Connecting with our audience through our marketing web. And then the third component is how are we moving people through the marketing, the marketing process and bridging over into the sales process. Marketing is awareness, attention, permission, and trust. How am I earning prospects' awareness and attention? Their trust and their permission, their email address, so that I can have a more personal, direct, anticipated, relevant conversation with them so that I can move them into a sales conversation where I am earning their interest, their enrollment, and their investment in the difference that I can help them make. And so we use a process called Close the Gap. And the conversation engine approach. The fastest path to cash is conversation. Always. It's the way businesses have always operated. And, you know, we can try to shortcut and automate and do all the things that the digital marketers tell us to do. We're actually just creating friction and unnecessary complication and wasting our precious time, attention, money, and effort when we are trying to automate and put everything into a funnel and trying to funnel hack and hack the algorithms. And we're getting a very low return for our investment of time, attention, money, and effort through the usual digital marketing tricks and hacks. If we actually just believed in what we do enough to make promises that we can keep to people wherever they are in, in the journey of their awareness, attention, trust, and permission. We will earn their trust. We will earn their permission. We will prove our competence. We will increase their confidence that we are the one and only choice for helping them make the difference that they want to make and the way that only we can help them make it. And we will actually in many ways eliminate the necessity of any sales. You don't have to do discovery calls. You don't have to create sales pages. You don't have to try to optimize your CTAs and your button colors and your bonus stacks and, and all that sort of thing. You just make a short series of promises that you keep, and as you do that, you will earn people's permission, their trust, their attention, their awareness, their interest. And as they increasingly feel enrolled in the journey that you can take them on and in your ability to solve the problem that they have or achieve the aspiration they have, they will ask you, how can I get more proximity and access? To you or your product or service so that I can accomplish the things I want to accomplish and solve the problems I want to solve. So that's all the audit process. So again, just to review the first two steps in the first step, what are we actually aiming for? What is the lifestyle freedom, the vision of lifestyle freedom that we are actually building our business to fund and fit around? Once we have enough clarity on that— specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound— then we can move it to auditing our current system. And if you don't, if you can't audit your system, then you don't have a system. So the first thing would be to get a system together. I can't think of a better place to get started than the conversation engine. It's super simple to implement, super simple to get going, and you'll be collecting data. Right away from day one, you'll have a system that's got the fewest components necessary that you can optimize very quickly and easily. And then the third step is, is, is our pri— quarterly business priority setting and success planning. So in that third step, what we are doing is we are establishing what's the number one thing in my business that if I fixed it or found it or fine-tuned it would help me close the gap between where I am and where I want to be with my business with the greatest ease and velocity and have the biggest impact on saving time, earning revenue, making a difference with and for people I care about, doing work that matters. And do, do that in a way that has the least amount of risk. So when we're looking at our priority, what's the thing that if I accomplished it involves the least amount of risk to burning out or blowing up while providing an outsized gain in making progress towards the vision of a business that fully funds and fits that vision of lifestyle freedom that I built it for in the first place. So we'll talk more about this again on Tuesday, but there's a series of questions that you can ask here that will help you identify what your next business priority should be. It may be optimizing the business priority that you made progress on in the previous quarter. I'll demonstrate— excuse me— how I'm adjusting the priority that I'm going to be working on in the queue first quarter of 2026. I spent the last year optimizing my client attraction system, my conversation engine. My conversion numbers are almost unbelievable at this point. They're so good, especially when you compare them to traditional digital marketing funnels. So I'm going to, I'm going to create for the first time, instead of optimizing the end of the funnel where I'm converting paid subscribers into clients, I'm going to actually be optimizing the front of the funnel where I'm trying to optimize earning the privilege of having more of my free subscribers upgrade to becoming paid subscribers. Because if I have a bigger community of paid subscribers, since all of my clients come from my paid subscriber community, I will have the ability to serve more people as as one-on-one clients. So the, the quarter setting your priority is the first thing. What's the thing that will have the biggest impact on helping me build a business that funds and fits the vision of lifestyle freedom I designed my business for in the first place? And then when it comes to the success path, again, just like we talked about in the audit of our current business system, we want to make sure that we eliminate all the things that we don't have to do. Because all the things that we don't have to do that we're investing time, attention, money, effort, reputation in, they're creating unnecessary complexity, which is driving down the efficiency of our system, the effectiveness of our system. It is draining precious resources as solopreneurs, which is what most of my audience are— creatives or freelancers or solopreneurs of some type. You have a limited amount of time, you have limited amount of energy that you can invest. You have a limited amount of revenue that you can invest. We are not entrepreneurs. We do not have teams that, you know, are differentiated and dedicated to specific elements of our business, like product design and marketing and sales and all that. We don't have venture capital that we're playing with as we put together our offer. Or product or service. We have to stop acting like we're Goodyear and that we're going to float a blimp over every game in the digital universe in order to get the word out about who we are and what we do. If we get clear about who we actually are serving and if we focus our limited time, attention, money, and effort at having conversations with those people, then we have the best chance of crafting a business that gets us closer to that vision of lifestyle freedom that we're building it for in the first place while we're doing the least amount of work with the least amount of effort, with the least amount of expense in terms of revenue and energy and time and attention. And we'll have a life that's plenty good enough. And if we decide that we want to optimize and maximize after that, we can decide to do that. So just again, to kind of wrap it up here, and I'm not seeing any questions come in. So unless someone has some questions or wants to offer a perspective on this, I'll be wrapping it up here shortly. I'd love to have a little interaction if anybody has anything that they want to share or a question they want to ask. But when you are thinking about what you want to accomplish in the first quarter of the new year, the first thing is that you have to have a destination, and that destination should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. So that lifestyle freedom statement that I talked about. I know I'm being successful when— define what lifestyle freedom looks like to you, feels like to you, means to you. I will need— what are the resources that you will need? What's— what are the constraints? So again, mine was, I know I'm being successful when I can provide daycare for my grandsons 9 hours a day. 5 days a week. To do this, I will need to work less than 10 hours a week and earn at least $60,000 a year. Now I know what I'm aiming at. Second step, audit your current system. If you can't, if you can't get the numbers for how many customers or clients you are acquiring through Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, X, maybe it's time to think about not investing any time, attention, money, and effort in those, in those things. If you can't collect some information about how many prospects, leads, and clients you're getting from the book that you wrote or the book that you're writing or the podcast that you're doing or the YouTube channel that you've created, it might be time just to rethink your approach. You can build a very successful business without any social media, without being on all the platforms all the time. My business earns my annual revenue number in less than half a year, and I'm doing it exclusively right now on Substack. And I'm not worried about whether Substack's gonna be around for the long haul or not, because I could take all of my subscribers and move it wherever I want to move it when I'm done. For right now, Substack provides me with everything I need to speak to people who have already given me permission to speak to them and deliver anticipated personal and relevant content to them that earns their trust and earns their interest and enrolls them on the journey I can take them on. And enough of those people become paid subscribers and enough of those paid subscribers reach out to me to become members of the Voxer Velocity or Cornerman coaching program so that they can build the business that they dream of to fund and fit their vision of lifestyle freedom. So audit is your second step. And if you can't audit your system, then you better build a system that you can start auditing. That would be a priority. Then finally, close the gap. What's the number one business priority that if I accomplish it moves me the furthest and the fastest towards building a business that funds and fits the lifestyle freedom that I desire? Where am I and what am I starting with? What can I stop doing? And then where, what are the two or three things that if I make them, if I, if I help them to operate good enough, start to collapse time to target between where I am and where they want to be, because now you know what you need to work on, what you need to optimize, what you need to do every single day in order to get the 2 or 3 things that need to go right, go right enough to accomplish your priority. If you accomplish your priority, you've made progress towards your lifestyle goal and you have made your success inevitable. You will definitely make progress. So, uh, Kira says, it's so helpful to have these kind of— this kind of focus. Creative souls tend to wander off the path. Yeah, that's for sure. So I often, uh, call my first 7 years, uh, in as a someone that didn't even know they were building a coaching business at first, but It took 7 years for me to build a business that had any viability. I call that process, some people would call it the time spent in the wilderness. I think of it as a cottywample. I was heading very purposefully towards a very vague destination. And now over the last 2, 3 years, I have been able to, through this process that I've developed that I'm sharing with you all here, able to get very clear, specific about what I want my business to fund and fit around, what is necessary to have a business that can accomplish that vision of lifestyle freedom, provide the funds that, that make that possible, and business systems that fit around the life that I want to be living, building a business on my terms. Based on my personality and preferences. I don't do anything that I don't want to do. I don't show up in any way that feels dissonant or out of alignment with who I am and how— who I want to become and what I value and what my boundaries, guardrails, and non-negotiables are. And I get to spend a couple hours a day doing work I love with people I care about, work that matters and makes a difference. So I hope that's all helpful. Again, for anyone that has not yet, if you would like to attend our free workshop where I'm going to go into a deeper dive into all of this, that is Tuesday the 30th. This is that— this coming Tuesday at noon Eastern time. You will need to drop me a DM in order to RSVP. The RSVP gets you a seat at the live workshop and also gets you access to the replay. So if you can't attend at noon, but you want the replay, you're still going to have to RSVP. And I'm going to give you all the details as to how you can implement this very simple 3-part approach to defining your next quarter's prioritized success plan and activate it and engage it so that you can make real progress in the first quarter of 2026. So I I know I'll see some of you that are members of the Circle and Inner Circle community. That's Kyra and Bree and Alice and Penny. I'll look forward to seeing you there. And for Candace or Blaine or Stuart or anybody else that I can't actually access in the chat right now, if you're interested, just DM me and I'll send you all the details. So it looks like no further questions or comments are coming in, so I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up. I look forward to seeing some of you on our Monday on Purpose call for Circle and Inner Circle subscribers. And I'll see some of you on Tuesday. And until then, be well, do good, have fun.