I’m all about having a business that sustains you, and being able to live your life and enjoy it rather than feeling like your work is sucking out your soul.

As we forge our way into a new year, I’ve been doing some reflecting on the past – specifically why I started my own business. So let’s take it back to the beginning.

And maybe you’ll find inspiration for the future, like I did.

I am such a dork for planning. I love it. I love planning stuff.

But I do my business planning a little differently than I've seen some people do it.

Let me guess. As a woman running your own business, managing your to-do list is a huge source of frustration. It never seems to end, and it’s so hard to get everything done without sacrificing all your free time.

But it’s totally possible to manage a neverending to-do list without working 24/7.

If you’ve followed along with me for any amount of time now, you know that I am all about earning more revenue in fewer working hours -- and that I am so not here for hustle culture or anything that promotes burnout.

It's completely unnecessary. It's a harmful way of thinking. It’s not sustainable in the long term.

You should be able to have a business that you love.

When you're ambitious, when you're high achieving, when you're a real go-getter, it can be very, very easy to slip into a pattern where you equate your worthiness with how much work you are getting done.

And I know that when I talk to my clients, there is a fear that if you step away, it’ll be worse when you come back. Or that you’ll lose the chance to do business with someone.

It’s really important for me to teach women how to grow their business so that it’s kind of burnout proof. To me, that means being able to take time off and 1) don't backslide in your progress and 2) avoid burnout.

To this end, I'm all about sustainable growth over the long term, rather than a boom and bust cycle, because that's not fun. I've been there and I will just tell you that if you haven't experienced it already, it sucks as bad as you can imagine.

For some people, planning can feel awesome. But for a lot of us, “goals” and “plans” can feel very constricting and anxiety producing.

And I think that a lot of that stems from the fact that broadly, we have a way of goal setting and work planning that is not always the most helpful for all people.

If you’re really over the whole idea of “hustle culture” — i.e. always having to set these astronomically terrifyingly huge goals and then chase after them like a maniac during the year, to the point that you feel super stressed out and unfulfilled and disappointed — it can be hard to know what goals you should set for yourself.

But it doesn’t have to be like that!

There are lots of different ways you can set goals for yourself!

With resolutions, people are either like, “Yay, resolutions!” or they're like, “Oh, screw resolutions.” And I think a lot of the time, it's because we view resolutions as “going to the gym” at the New Year when everyone else also shows up for two weeks and then quits.

It sort of feels like, if I make a resolution, I'm just setting myself up for failure. So why even bother, right? But I think there's a better way. Instead of resolutions, I would encourage you to think of setting goals.

Have you ever had a conversation with somebody about potentially working together, or even collaborating together, and then all of a sudden it's radio silence? And you think to yourself, “are they ghosting me?” If so, this post is for you. It can feel really weird when you are having a conversation with somebody and all of a sudden you aren’t hearing from them anymore — including in business.

There’s a lot of bad selling advice out there. Like, reeeeally bad. The kind of bad selling advice that can actually hurt your business instead of helping it. I want to make sure you know that you don’t have to do these things, and I want to make sure you know that you can stop doing these bad selling practices, even if someone else out there has led you to believe that this is how to do business. So here are 5 really bad selling practices I commonly see being taught, and why you reeeeally shouldn’t do them.

Having sales conversations can be super intimidating, especially for those of us who don’t want to feel gross or sleazy. But having sales conversations with zero-sleaze involved is absolutely possible! It’s an art, and a skill — just like knitting or playing the piano. It’s something you can learn and get better at. And I promise, it’s way easier to learn than those things!

Dealing with objections or rejections in business is such a real fear that a lot of times it actually holds us back from putting ourselves out there. We don't want to hear people say no, or even the hint of a possible no. It’s something that every entrepreneur struggles with at one time or another. Here are some practical tips and important mindset reframes to help you process and approach objections in your sales conversations. I don’t want the fear of hearing “No” to hold you back from showing up bigger and putting yourself out there more.

I think for a lot of us, we either don't think about following up at all, or it's really haphazard, or we think that it's completely annoying to the other person. And so we avoid or just flat out don't bother following up with leads for our business. We have been conditioned to fear selling because there's so many bad examples of selling and horrible examples of follow up gone wrong.

Referrals are great. Until they are not. I hear this from so many different businesses, from the ones struggling for consistent revenue to those making multiple six figures. If you’re trying to grow your revenue and scale your business OR if you’re trying to shift from corporate gigs to individual clients, referrals won’t get you there. You still need a marketing system that generates ongoing leads and doesn’t leave it up to chance.

This one is for my introverts, my socially awkward friends, the ones who get so nervous about being more visible -- who also know that visibility is important for your business. Any other tactics I’ve shared? You just go, “I just don’t want to do them, Erica, but I don’t know what else to do.” I’ve got you.

Coffee chats are so fun. They can be a great, intentional way to learn about somebody--about who they serve and what they do and anything else that you might have in common. Today I'm going to be talking all about using coffee chats to grow your business organically. But before I dive into how you can make the most of them, let me just tell you a little bit about what they are in case this is your first time ever learning about them.

Income ceilings can be really frustrating. It’s really exciting when we start to make money and it starts to be consistent. You can feel like, “Oh my gosh, it's finally happening. I'm getting traction! I can actually count on this amount of money coming in every month!” And then it comes to a stall. The growth plateaus. You can’t seem to make it to the next level.

I literally can't even fathom how many times I've said it and I've heard it from other people: “I want to make sure that my work is accessible.” And usually what we mean is “affordable.” But that’s not what accessibility is. And that’s not the way to be equitable in your work. Let’s talk about what accessibility actually means, why affordability isn’t the way to go in order to be equitable in your business OR to grow your business, and let’s reframe how we think about affordability so we can go about this the right way.

Pricing is a really, really, really sticky subject for a lot of entrepreneurs. Not only do you kind of have carte blanche to charge whatever the hell you want, but it also goes hand in hand with how we value our (and/or our work’s) worth. It can be really challenging to balance that, and to simultaneously make sure that we are pricing accordingly, and making enough money to stay in business.