T.H.R.I.V.E. – The 6 Step Framework to Building a Successful Business that Works for You

It’s really important to build not just a successful business, but a thriving business.

I talk a lot about living your truth in your business. Or about prioritizing rest and not glorifying productivity.

These are actually just two parts of my six-part thriving business framework that I use with my clients to help them build a business that works for them.

It’s all represented by the acronym T.H.R.I.V.E. Let’s get into it!

What’s the difference between “successful” and “thriving”?

Having a successful business is one thing. Having a thriving business is another.

The main difference is that thriving is more holistic. 

It's not just that the business is successful. It's that you aren't on the brink of burnout, you aren't doing anything that feels like it goes against your values, and you are getting to work with people who light you up.

I think sometimes it’s easy to think of success in black and white, short-term ways. Like you can make a lot of money and hustle really hard and be successful – but is that sustainable for the long term? In order to have sustainable success, you need to have a business that really works for you.

1. Truth

This is living out your truth. The truth that your business speaks to. And this doesn't have to be all of your personal truths. But the loud-and-proud core of your business.

Don't worry about fitting in. Don't worry about not ruffling feathers. 

You don't just want to make money, right? You want to make a difference. You want to have a business that positively impacts the people that you work with, and possibly even your community and the world. You want to make enough money that you can give back to the organizations that you really care about.

You can do this more easily by speaking your truth.

So whatever that thing is that makes you say, “This is how I want to address a problem in my industry – I see people approach this thing one way, and I think it can be done this other way.”

That is your truth. That is something that makes you stand out, that makes you different from the crowd.

It doesn't mean that you have to be super negative. You just see a better way to problem-solve and put your own idea out there with confidence.

Put that in your brand. Let it seep into all of the areas of the outward-facing parts of your brand.

Because when you are different, you grab people’s attention.

Seth Godin's book Purple Cow describes this really well. Basically, if you're driving past a field and it's just a bunch of black and white cows, they’re not going to grab your attention. But if you're driving past a field and there’s a purple cow, you would notice that cow.

So it's important to speak your truth. It naturally allows you to be a purple cow. 

You’re not something fake or manufactured, like a gimmick. This is your truth. Your deep belief. The thing that you want to bring to your industry and to your people.

So live your truth. Live it out loud through your brand. And know that it will attract the right people and repel the wrong people.

2. Health

So next up is health, both personal health, and business health.

pErSOnAl hEaLtH

A lot of times, unfortunately, when we build our businesses, we don’t look at our personal health, or personal health challenges, or obstacles, or the health of people that we might be caregivers for. This can include our kids, older parents, our partners.

This is essential. Because there's a difference between something being a mindset issue or excuse, and something being a real obstacle.

I've had this conversation with a friend of mine who has four kids with special needs. So this is not something that she made up, this is not a limiting belief or a mindset block – this is her real life and a real need she has to accommodate in her life and in her business.

She needs to have a business that is structured in a way that if shit hits the fan and she needs to step in and help her kid, she can do that.

Same thing with any health challenge that could potentially impact your business.

Let's say you have an autoimmune disorder and you never know when you're going to have a flare. When you do have a flare, it's gonna be really hard to do one-to-one client calls.

You can structure your business in a way that doesn't necessarily have one-to-one client calls.

It’s doable. This is possible.

And I think far too often, people give this prescriptive advice like, “Oh, well you have to do certain things to make all this money.” But if those things don’t work for you, you're not setting yourself up for long-term business health.

So be mindful of personal health. It ties into your business health.

bUsInEsS hEalTh

And speaking of business health, by this I mean the numbers and the data behind your business. It’s important to pay attention to these and be aware of them.

It's so easy to get our emotions wrapped up in our business. It's so easy to want to avoid looking at money and numbers, because we just want to feel and judge our business for ourselves and run it from our gut.

That was me for years. In my past business, I sucked with my finances. And my business health was the worst. 

I think about it now and I'm like, “What?! I can't even believe I had the success that I did.” I would spend one Saturday in January, bitching and moaning, doing all of my expenses for the whole past year to prepare my taxes. I would do this to myself every year.

It wasn't because I didn't know how to manage my finances better and it wasn't because I was lazy.

It was because I didn't want to look at the health of my business. 

I was telling myself stories instead of just looking at the truth and making decisions from there. 

When you look at the actual data, and you look at it objectively, you get to be proactive instead of reactive. You get to make better decisions because you are making decisions based on truth and not a fairy tale.

If you keep saying, “I am exhausted. I hate doing all of this. All of these tasks in my business week after week – they are tiring. I absolutely despise doing them. I wish I could have a VA but I can't afford one.”

Where is that attitude coming from? Have you looked at the data? Do you know how much a VA could cost? Have you researched? Do you know the amount of money coming into your business going out of your business?

You need to break the numbers down to figure out what’s really going on.

And maybe the numbers confirm that you’re right. But at least if, say, you know a VA would be $250 a month and you can budget for that monthly, you are making a decision based on truth.

You can make better decisions for the health of your business.

3. Rest

Next up, build yourself a business that prioritizes rest.

I’m not saying that you should aim to only work two hours a day and lay around the rest of the time.

Some people – like my friend Tasha who’s been on my podcast – love working 40 hours a week. Tasha loves it. She’s not aiming to work fewer hours.

You might be somebody who has the time and the space and the mental energy to work a 40-hour workweek too. And you might love it. It might make your heart sing.

And somebody else might be like, “I really only have the bandwidth or the space or the current situation for 15 hours.”

That's fine. Either way is fine. One is not better than the other.

We're not cookie cutter versions of each other. So what rest looks like is going to be different for different people.

But it's important to give yourself boundaries and parameters and all of that, no matter what your ideal week looks like.

This is one of those things that so many of us do for other people – something we would suggest our clients do – but it’s hard to tell ourselves to rest. And we need to do it for ourselves.

Right now, I’m working 20-25 hours a week. If you only want a 20-hour work week, optimally, figure out a way to build your business around that.

That might mean a change in your offers or in your marketing. There are a lot of different things you can do. But build out your schedule from what the ideal is, from what would give you enough white space for the other stuff you love.

Even if you're not exhausted by your schedule, if you don't have time for other things that light you up, you’re not going to have the time to do things that are restorative.

So give yourself a schedule that allows you to do that right and to do it without judgment.

Prioritize rest. Build out your schedule around your energetic capacity – which could look different from week to week or from year to year.

I’ve talked before about how I have my weekly workflow, my CEO Monday and all of that. My weeks are set up with intention based on my personal energetic patterns.

I strongly suggest that for long-term sustainability of your business, map out your energetic cycles and patterns and then frame out your business around those things.

4. Impact

Your impact is how you affect people through your offers – the ways that they can work with you.

It's important to be intentional about this. Just because everyone and their brother says you need to have a course doesn't mean you need to have a course.

If you want to have a course, you can. If you want to have a membership, you can. If you want to have a mastermind, you can do that. If you just want to do one-on-one work, you can do that. Or you can have a combo.

There are so many different offer types that you can do. 

But be intentional about the impact that you have with your work.

And the impact goes both ways. 

Your offers should positively impact your clients, obviously. But they should also positively impact you. 

They should be able to get you to your goals. They should be able to honor that restful schedule. They should enable you to lean into your strengths and leverage them to get people great results.

5. Voice

This is where you take everything I've already been talking about and you get it out into the world.

This is your content. This is your messaging.

• How do you use your truth?

• How do you carry out the impact you want to make?

• How do you look at your restful schedule, the health of your business, and your own personal health and create a content plan that works for you?

Whether this is through podcasts, blogging, YouTube, microblogging, social media, or a combination – this is where you get your message out to the world and to your people so they know about you.

Use your voice to nurture them and build trust.

You can change this all the time. My first year, I did a lot of blogging. Now I'm more focused on my podcast.

So use your voice, trust it, get it out there. You're perfect. People want to hear you.

6. Exposure

I've saved what is quite possibly one of the most important and terrifying things for last. 

Exposure is your marketing plan (not to be confused with your content). It's how you get noticed by people who will be perfect clients, collaborators, or colleagues.

But it also feels vulnerable. It feels terrifying.

This is where we worry that we are going to be judged, or that we are going to get it wrong. People are going to laugh at us. People are going to say “no” and decline our offers.

But exposure is necessary. 

This is where we make all those other things – our truth, our voice, our health – mean something.

You might be thinking, “What about sales, Erica? Talk about sales. And what about systems?”

Here's the thing.

First of all, as you're building out, all of these systems should be baked-in. 

They allow you to have that restful schedule, honor your health, and get help – because I view outsourcing as really helpful. We should not always just be a business of one forever and ever and ever. It doesn't mean you have to have a huge team. But we should get help.

When you are mindful and methodical about these six steps, and you systematize them along the way, it is easier to be consistent. It is easier to get help. Systems are important. They're super important. But I feel like you can set them up as you go.

And second of all, here's the truth about selling:

Most people do not have a sales problem. They have a marketing problem.

Sales are still very important, obviously. And selling skills are extremely important. That's why I love to help people with selling and feeling comfortable and confident with selling and doing it in a non-sleazy way.

However, usually the problem is not that you’re receiving a million discovery calls and people just aren't saying yes. 

It's that you're not even getting discovery calls. You don't have enough eyeballs on you.

This is a marketing problem.

Oftentimes, content and marketing get lumped in as one and the same. So we spend a ton of time blogging and creating content. 

But the thing is, all of this content is just one part of marketing. When people know about you, they can look at your content and go, “Does their truth speak to me? Do their values speak to me? Does their persona and mission speak to me?” If so, they’re going to hang around and pay attention to you.

But often we are not getting ourselves out in front of enough people for them to even find our content. And so therefore, we're just busying ourselves creating content. It's going unnoticed because we aren't visible enough.

Now Go THRIVE

This is how you thrive in business. And when you do all of these six things, the sales will come.

When people are resonating with you, then they're binging your content, and then they're like, “Oh my God, I know I can trust this person now. I want to work with them” – that’s when the sales come so much easier. 

There's no convincing, because you have shown up in a way that is perfectly aligned with your perfect people.

And then it just flows. And it's amazing and wonderful.

I've had to learn this stuff over the years of many different businesses and really excavate it myself and lean into it. And you know what? Sometimes, because I'm human, I get off track. Sometimes I get shiny object syndrome, sometimes I get FOMO. Sometimes I get comparisonitis.

But I always come back to this framework.

When I do, I ask, “What do I need? Where is there an actual problem?” 

And then you can ask yourself these six things. You can ask yourself if you’re clear on your truth. And you’ll be able to say, “No, I'm hella clear on my truth. And I'm leveraging it and using my voice to spread it. I’m doing consistent content and being authentic. I'm showing up. I'm not overworking myself. I'm tracking data in my business. So where is the issue?”

You can ask yourself these things and more clearly define the answer from which of the six steps may be missing. Maybe it's an exposure issue. Maybe it’s that you need more mindful marketing. Or whatever it may happen to be at that time for you.

This is also where you can ask if you need help.

It could be that you are doing all of the right things for you. And you're getting results. But you need or want more. 

Maybe you know what your voice is and what your truth is but you don't want to spend your time creating content. Outsource that. Blog posts, social media content – you can outsource that. That’s cool.

And sometimes it will be difficult to determine if something is the right thing to spend your money on. 

Especially in this industry where it’s easy to look at influencers and big names who have certain courses or memberships that they say get these great, proven results, and you can get swayed by slick marketing.

But when you use this T.H.R.I.V.E. framework, you can stay focused and say, “Hang on, let me look at my six things. Where are the gaps? How do I want to fill them? Is it with a course or is it something else?”

And many times you might realize it's something other than what shiny marketing says you should do. 

And other times, what is being sold to you might be the exactly the right impactful thing you need. Say, if you’re at capacity but would love to create a course, and this person is going to teach you how to do that beautifully and it’s something worth investing $2,000 in.

Whatever the right choice is for you, with this framework you're empowered. You’re empowered to make better decisions because you actually know where your gaps are.