How to Find a Business Strategy That Actually Fits You

I got a comment on my YouTube video the other day about how it feels like everybody that you're following, the business gurus, fall into camps. In fact, I would say it's 3 camps. Camp 1 is the get up at 5 AM, crush your day, do your morning routine, post on all the platforms all the time, and go, go, go, go. Kind of that hustle culture. Camp 2 was kind of the complete opposite, and it's a little woo-woo. It's all about manifesting and visualizing and raising your vibration will help you make more money in your business. Then I would say there's a camp 3, and honestly, I would say this one is the sneakiest because these are the people that did well in their business like 4 or 5 years ago, and they're still trying to tell you what helped them grow their business 4 or 5 years ago can still help you grow your business today, and that just is not true. And maybe you've been watching this and you've been trying their strategies and it just feels like nothing's working. And it's because it's not. 2026 is a totally different beast in online marketing than it was years ago. I would say it's even completely different than it was 18 months ago. Now I'm in my 11th year in business and I'm still here today, still making money. And in fact, had one of my best business years ever in 2025. And I can tell you it's not because I'm sitting in either 3 of those camps. And the coaches that I work with on a daily basis in my YouTube coaching experience and the ones that are actually making money in their business, they live in a camp that nobody's really talking about much. And I'm calling this camp the missing middle. Even though we have 3 camps, there's not technically a middle, but let's just go with it. And once I get through this video explaining to you what this middle ground looks like, I feel like you're gonna want to come stay for a while. And listen, I'm not here to throw stones from the sideline. I bought all of these camps. It's how I got started in this whole space back in 2015. I sat through a webinar believing the pitch that if I just hustled hard enough, I would be making passive income. I could sip Mai Tais on the beach while I would be making money doing nothing, basically. And then I swung to the opposite direction in that hustle culture. In fact, I did the 5 AM morning routine, uh, with kids, not very effective. And, um, my brain was not very good by 10 AM, but I jumped into an agency mode, believed I needed to scale more team members, more content, more repurposing, being on every platform. And the year I did that, it was the closest that I ever got to 7 figures, but it also came with Panic attacks, rosacea flare-ups, and ultimately leading to burning the entire agency down in 2022. So when I'm poking at these camps, understand I've taken a little bit of time in each of them. And the thing about the 5 a.m. grind, I want to think like who is that really built for? Because I feel like a lot of it comes from people who aren't like me—a mom getting the kids on the bus. Maybe kids are still waking you up in the middle of the night because they had a bad dream, and so you didn't get a full night's sleep. You got to pack the lunches. You're the one that's got to pick them up from school when they're sick, or stay home with them when they're sick. And these are all the things you have to do while they're saying, "Go off in the morning and have your quiet time in journal." If you've got a kid, give me a yeah right if you're thinking that too. And I'm gonna say this as nicely as I can: It's a lot easier to hustle and run off into your morning routine and take care of yourself when somebody else is running the house with your kids. And for a lot of my audience here. That is who we are. We are the default parent. We are the parent that is trying to balance our business, our clients, and our kids and our house. And let's be real, like, not everybody can function at 5:00 AM. Not everybody can get to bed at a decent time. We still have kids in sports and they're not even getting home till 8:00 and then showered. And then you need to have time to decompress. So when it comes to what's a priority in my life, it is always sleep. Because if I don't get enough sleep, my brain's not going to function to actually run my business or have the strategic ideas or creativity from my brain without that sleep. And then when we look at the other end, don't get me wrong, I am totally down into some woo, understanding your human design, astrological signs. I love that kind of stuff. But leaning on just that and your vibration and manifesting isn't a business strategy. A vibe is not data, and you can't run a business on a vibe. You can run your business on data. So if you've been trying to bounce between these two camps and trying to figure out which one should you kind of go all in with, or you're just tired of listening to these two camps, you're on serve because nobody is really speaking in the middle. So what does the middle actually look like? Because it's not really a compromise between the two camps. For me, it's a completely different way of running a business. So I think of this in 3 different ways. So this is how I run my middle business. I like to focus on math instead of manifestation. And I think this is the biggest problem that happens in online business because nobody is being transparent about their numbers. Sure, they're going to tell you they had a 6-figure launch, a 7-figure launch, but they're not really sharing how much content that they created, how much they spent on ads, how much their email list was before they did this. They're not giving you the math. For you to understand how it's all actually working. And listen, I am not a math girly, but one of my business mentors really forced me to get into my numbers. And when I finally sat down and I thought about what is my enough number, I talk more about an enough number in this video, I'll link right up here. But what is my enough number? Okay, how many clients is going to get me to that enough number? Okay, how many people do I need to that sales page to get that many clients? Okay, how much content do I need to create to get that amount of people to that sales page to make that conversion? Once you can break it down like that, you can see how it can happen without living in a hustle culture and without vibing your way to it. And when I do that, it came down to just 10 clients a month, just a little over 2 yeses a week. I'm not vision boarding it. I'm not forcing myself into 7 figures just because some guru told us like 7 figures was a successful business. Okay. The second thing that I've accepted is turtle pace is an okay pace. Listen, a lot of people blew up in 2020, '21, 2022. They had a lot of success. And am I going to say I was jealous? 100%. Because you know what I was doing during that time? I was locked in my house with my kids with no childcare. So I couldn't go into this like head down, full force into my business because a lot of my time was taken away by needing to take care of my kids and doing online school. But a lot of those businesses that were so successful during then and had that huge bump, Some of them aren't even around, and other ones are really struggling to get back to that 2020-2021 pace, and they're having a hard time doing it. But I'm here, year 11, being consistent with what I'm making every single year, consistently growing a little bit every year. As I mentioned, last year was one of the best years, not only in revenue made, but the least amount of stress and the amount of time that I worked. I took off all Fridays. I really stuck my schedule between 20 to 25 hours a week, and I'm okay with not having this blowup moment, this viral moment. I am taking the turtle pace, and that is quite okay for me because I've got consistency in my business. And then the third piece that is really important if you wanna hang out here in the middle is discoverable content is better than volume everywhere. Now, the hustle camp is going to tell you post everywhere many times a day, everywhere, repurpose, use AI, pump, pump, pump, pump out content. And what this is doing is making content online crappier and crappier and crappier. And I don't want to contribute to that noise. I've made a promise to myself. If I am going to post to Instagram, I have to have enough time to actually write the caption. I'm not going to have AI write it. I need to take the time to write it. And sometimes maybe it's just one sentence, but I'd rather it be one sentence of a real authentic human writing it than pumping out more crap from AI. And it's also what led me to deciding to do these car series videos while I'm at my son's golf practice, because this is literally showing you I'm a real human. I'm talking about real topics you wanna hear about, and I'm just doing it on the fly, not even on a hair wash day. And here's the missing piece that both camps aren't realizing. You should be putting the limited time you do have in your business into content that can be actually found, content that can still work for you next month, 6 months from now, next year, instead of feeding a machine with crappier and crappier content that all expires by the next day. That's the entire reason that I can work Monday through Thursday, 9:00 AM to about 2:00, 2:30 PM and still have a successful business because I hung it on creating one discovery Discoverable video a week. So why is everybody talking about these two camps or coming from these two camps, and you're not hearing about this middle? Well, because extremes sell. That hustle culture and huge success is sexy. Do nothing and believe it will happen. Visualize. Create your vision board to get there is sexy. Do a sane amount of work for years doesn't really make a sexy carousel. It's it's like nobody's really building a cult around moderation, but maybe we should. And I know I mentioned that Camp 3, those outdated people, they seem really loud because what they did did work. That's the hard part to like really go against. They're not making the facts up. It's just the way that they grew their business years ago can't be replicated in today's age. It's just not what is growing business in 2026. And yet they're still trying to sell you an old map. But you've got to realize that old map isn't going to help you get to where you want to go. And I want you to know this middle area, it's not missing. It's just really quiet because people like me in the middle, we're just busy running our business instead of trying to perform for it. So let me know down in the comments truthfully which camp really got you or which camp really ruffles your feathers. Is it the hustle camp? Type hustle. The woo camp? Go ahead and type woo. Or the old map? Type old map. And if you're like, you know what, Trena, That middle sounds like a great place to hang out. Go ahead and comment middle. If you want to see some real transparent data from me, the video on your screen right now is where I share the data that I pulled from doing a webinar about 40 times versus a paid workshop one time. And I literally pull it all back and give you exactly what you need to know to see how it worked or didn't work. So check that video out next.