To wrap up this Maintenance Mode theme, I wanted to take you behind the scenes with my executive producer, Sean McMullin, and talk about what I learned from all my interviews over the last few months and what I experimented with and tried out in my own business.

Marie and I talk about consistency and how critical it was to her success with Notion, her course, and community. And how discovering she was neurodivergent explained so much about how her brain worked and has helped her figure out how to set up systems that work the way she does.

Margo and I have both quit businesses. And in this interview that we originally recorded in September of 2019, we explore what it meant to quit and how we each realized it was time to let go.

If consistency is the goal, building habits is how you accomplish it. Sarah Von Bargen uses habits to make sure they're sticking to that purpose. Habits have been a critical component in her own business success and in the success of her students, too.

The point of maintenance mode is to give you time and space to take a REAL break. Not a vacation where you're checking your email or you're stuck on your laptop kind of break. But a real, genuine break.

India and I talk about her evolution as a leader and how hiring and finding the right fit was critical to the growth of her agency and for her to be able to step back from doing all the things.

In order to get your business into maintenance mode–and build a stronger business while you're at it–you have to answer the question, "What if I'm not here?" Ideally, the answer is that nothing changes. That's the goal of maintenance mode, to me.

While sales are one of the first things business owners seem to want to outsource, sales are probably one of the very last pieces of your business operations that you should be handing off to people. Allison Davis is my go-to when it comes to sales and creating sustainable sales processes.

Consistency in your messaging means that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every quarter. It means you know what you need to say and you know to whom and how you need to say it. And it’s the first part of being able to prepare your business for maintenance mode.

Instead of shutting his business down and starting over when he realized that something needed to change for him, Mark Butler created a complementary business with a different business model–one that was designed for maintenance.