Business misalignment often creeps in quietly—one success at a time—until you realize the business you’ve built no longer fits the life you want. In this candid conversation, Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo talk about recognizing when your work feels out of sync, why that’s not failure but a sign of growth, and how to realign without tearing everything down. Through personal insights and practical reflection, they show that sometimes the most powerful move forward is a thoughtful redesign, not a total rebuild.
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When The Business You Built Isn’t The Business You Want
The Restless Entrepreneur: Recognizing Misalignment
You’ve built a successful business on paper and it looks great. People want to be you. They want to write songs about you but if you’re honest, at least with yourself and you think about it long and hard. It may not be the business you want anymore. If you’re feeling restless, resentful or boxed in by what you’ve created, this time of year, you’re probably not alone. A lot of people are reevaluating how they got to where they’re at and whether they want to be there.
In this episode, Gwen and I are going to talk about how you can recognize misalignment in your business, why it happens, and how to shift without burning down everything that you’ve built. Gwen, I want to kick this off with you because when it comes to successful business owners who are trapped in their own companies probably have a list of examples a mile long.
It’s interesting because yes and no. A lot of the people I work with come in thinking that and often, it’s a small change that makes a big difference. Not always. Sometimes, there’s bigger changes that go with that but the issue that we have with this is doing anything different than what has already been achieved or however, we’re defining success. If we make the change, then somehow that’s admitting a failure. It’s necessarily a failure. It was just a success for a different time than where we are now.
It’s one of the things that you know because we’ve talked about it a lot that I talk about often with my clients is, what is the season that you’re in? In this case, I’m not talking about changes in weather kind of season. What is the season of your life? What’s going on now? Often, that’s where we’re starting to feel that discontent. It’s easy to see when it’s very obvious external things that have changed in your life. They’re subtle internal things that have changed in your life that changed the season.
Sometimes it’s because you had this success that you’ve had that the season has now changed and what once felt successful isn’t giving you the same joy, the excitement or the whatever. You’re feeling trapped because it’s like, “If I stop doing this, then what? Am I still successful? What does that look like?” There’s a lot of ways that we can end up there. A lot of it is because we’re just keeping on and that’s what’s going on. All of a sudden, it’s like, “How did I get here?”
I started down a path and I kept walking on the path. I was walking on the path and there was a lot going on. All of a sudden, I was like, “Where am I?” We’ve just walked down the path. We just kept doing the thing because often, we’re good at doing that. That’s why we have our own business because we know how to keep doing the thing.
What I like about what you said is it’s about the season. Ultimately, it’s all about alignment and this is something you talked a lot about. For instance, when you do the 5-3-1 goal-setting sessions. I know you have one coming up. You do that with all your clients and we did one live real time here with me. That was “fun,” but very useful. It’s uncomfortable but useful. One of the things that you make a point to do is bring in all of the different aspects of a business owner’s life that affects their business. In my case, it’s like kicking the can down the road to when I have one in high school, one in elementary school, and on in college.
It's about the season, and ultimately, it's all about alignment. Share on XI’m thinking, “What needs to be true then? What am I going to want to be doing?” Even now with one in elementary school and one in high school. I had to come to terms in 2024, that being the marketing department of one where I do everything from strategy, to writing emails, to customer service to social media, to this and that. It no longer fits in with the life that I have. I only go too much. I can’t get six hours of deep work and five days a week.
One thing that I was thinking about as you were just speaking because it is very difficult to have that level of success, be making your income goals especially, and go, “This isn’t how I want to spend my day, or this isn’t what I want to be doing.” Maybe even like, “It’s not that I can’t do this, but I’m no longer the best person at this price point to be doing these things.” It’s a trap because you’re boxed in by your own success. If you’re a good service provider especially or you have a good product. Everybody wants it. There’s a line out the door of people who want what you got.
For you to have to look internally and go, “I want them to go line up at somebody else’s door, or I would just like to close the door, pull down the shutters and pretend that nobody’s home.” That’s not a good place to be. I’m going to ask you, Gwen. If somebody is sitting there and they’re thinking, “Maybe it’s been a good year or it’s been okay year but I can’t do another year like this for some reason. I can’t be this busy again. I can’t work this many hours. I can’t run my margins this tight. I can’t skip paying myself.”
Temporary Or Permanent? Assessing Your Discontent
They don’t want to repeat going into the next year. What are some questions they can be asking themselves? This is something that you said. You have recognized that most business owners, especially the successful ones. They do not need more information. What they need is to start asking or be asked better questions. What could they be asking themselves now?
The first thing is, is this permanent or is this temporary?
Explain to me how I would know the difference because as a mom of a teenager, it feels permanent now.
It is because it’s most of the year. If you are asking the question over summer, is this permanent or is this temporary? You and I are close enough friends and physically close enough to know, so I can talk about this for you. Your life is different in the summer than it is during the school year. There are positive things about it and there are negative things about it.
Part of it is like, has it just gone on long enough that it feels like it’s always this way or is it always this way? Will it feel like this in a month or two from now? We’re projecting. We can’t know what we’re going to feel like a month or two from now. We can often say, “In two months, these other things will be going on and maybe this isn’t such a problem anymore.”
That’s what I mean by permanent or temporary. Has this been going on for a long time? Is it something that’s been either building up over time or eating at you or is it something that just feels like, “I hate this.” Is that now? Will you still say that tomorrow or the next day or next month or next week or whenever?
The first question is, is it permanent or temporary, because often as entrepreneurs it’s part of our superpower. We can switch quickly and sometimes we switch too quickly. It’s like, “This is bothering me. I’m going to go do something else.” We start doing something else and it’s like, “I wish I was still doing this thing.” One of the other questions is, can you reframe it? What I mean by that is instead of it being the thing that was lighting you up because it was doing all the things. Can it be the thing that you do so easily, you can do it in a relaxed state?
There’s a lot of us. When we start our businesses, the things that we’re doing in our business are the things that we’re super passionate about and we’re excited to learn more things. It’s all of this energy around the newness, the curiosity and the learning. Depending on what we’re doing, if we’ve done it long enough, there may not be that much to learn anymore. That excitement of the energy of the newness often will dissipate. It’s like the nature of things.
We just go after the next thing, which isn't necessarily the right thing. Share on XIf we are disappointed in it because it’s not giving us that energy, one of the questions is, can we reframe it and say, “This is now the thing that is super easy for me to do in the business.” Instead, I’m going to put my curiosity energy into this other aspect of the business. Often, it’s hard for us to do that switch because it was always the place that we got all of our energy and our excitement and whatnot. If it’s not doing that, then it must be failing.
Maybe it’s not. Maybe we can reframe it and say no. It can also be, “I hate this. I don’t want to do this anymore.” For whatever reason it can be. If you’re continuing to be a human that’s growing and developing, you can grow past the things. It’s like, “This is not my thing anymore.” Part of the question to ask is, if not this, then what? If I’m not doing this, what would I be doing? What would I want to be doing? What could that look like ahead of time? That’s the other thing. We just go after the next thing, which isn’t necessarily the right thing.
If I’m not doing this, what could I be doing? What would I want to be doing? What would that look like? In some cases, we’re talking about a pivot. It’s like, “Instead of doing it this way, I’m going to do this thing.” For others, it is not a pivot. It is a, I’m shedding the door or pulling down the screen just like you said. I’m going to go off and do this other thing that has nothing to do with what I was doing before. Doing that in a mindset of curiosity and pro-activeness as opposed to reactiveness.
If not this, then what? For example, you always call my entrepreneurial side quests a great example. I had been doing things in project management, IT, leadership, corporations and big things most of my life until a point that I got laid off. When I finally said, “What do I want to do?” I said, “I’m going to go be a professional knitting instructor.” It wasn’t quite that linear, but it was relative to that. That was, I’m shutting down the curtains. I’m closing all the doors. I’m doing all the things.
Now, once I was in there not very long, it was like, “I still like doing the business stuff. Let’s start reopening these doors,” and dealing with some of those things, but it was completely shut down. In this case, it wasn’t a business. At that point, I was working for somebody else. I was completely going to go in a 100% different direction than where I have. It wouldn’t have made sense to try and maintain that and that other business at the time. There are options but knowing the, if not this, then what is another important question. Those are three. You probably want to reflect. I could probably keep going on forever.
The Pitfalls Of Permanent Decisions In Temporary Challenges
You could. First, what I want to say because I love all these questions, especially the, is it permanent or is it temporary, because I’ve seen a lot of people make permanent decisions in the face of temporary challenges. I’ll give you one off the top of my head. They want to shut down Facebook. They are leaving Facebook. They don’t like some decision that Mark Zuckerberg made or whatever.
Too many make permanent decisions in the face of temporary challenges. Share on XThe list goes on.
They’re shutting down Facebook and now, they’re only on Bluesky for business purposes. Except that they never stopped to think of whether they’re how much business they were getting off of Facebook, number one. Their assumption, because everybody hates Facebook now or whatever day we’re talking about. That all their people left Facebook too, and because everybody’s talking about Bluesky. They’re all going to be on Bluesky. They go to Bluesky and it’s crickets. It’s crickets because it’s a brand new social platform. People are still trying to figure out what to do there then they have to make that decision, do they go back and have to go, “My bad.” Do they just say, “I made my bed. I’m going to lie in it,” and cut out a huge source of revenue?
That’s an example of a semi-permanent decision made off a temporary circumstance. That’s an important question to be always asking. Anytime you find yourself discontent with your business or in frustration. It’s like, is this temporary or is this permanent? It’s always a great clarifying question. Also, in a number of ways, we have talked about a lot of different signs that you’re operating out of misalignment. Either there’s no alignment between your values and your business or maybe the life you want to be living and what your business requires of you now or at least what you think your business requires of you now.
What I heard is you’re dreading the work. You aren’t excited anymore. You’re not excited by the clients. You pointed out like not excited by the work that used to excite you or used to light you up. There’s no excitement in that. You didn’t say this but under the surface. Sometimes there’s just too much reliance on you. Everything is fine but you’re starting to feel like you’re the end, all be all. If I take a day off, it’s all the house of cards that comes crumbling down and people love to blame their people for that. It’s like, I have a bad team. I don’t have good workers, but it is always a misalignment.
Why Misalignment Happens: Chasing Revenue And Outgrowing Visions
If you are hungry for a day off that you don’t feel like you can afford to take. That means you built a business that doesn’t align with your values. It’s just important to call those out specifically for people who are reading and not jotting down notes and don’t want to connect the dots. Now, I want to turn it back to you and talk about why this happens. I will say one reason that I say or how I see this turn up sometimes is the business owner isn’t thinking too far ahead or far enough ahead and they’re chasing revenue.
If you crave a day off you can't afford, your business doesn't align with your values. Share on X“Everybody’s asking for this, so I’m going to go create this offer because people want it. I’m going to sell this offer.” Before they know it, that becomes the business, versus what they want their business to be, or that becomes a bigger percentage of the business they were prepared for. I’ve seen a lot of people where it’s just like, “Somebody hired me to do this and I said yes. That led to this person who wanted me to do this and I said yes. Pretty soon, I’m 5 miles away from the business I wanted to have.”
That’s an interesting example and I do think that happened in some. I also think it happens that what we have as the vision of what we’re capable of when we start the business is not what we realize that we are capable of once we’re in the business. We designed the business for Gwen years ago. The business becomes the business that would support Gwen years ago. In those years, all of a sudden, it’s like, “That’s not what I want to do, incapable of doing, etc. What I want to do is blah, blah, blah.” There is no way to know it without having gone through the process of building the business years ago Gwen.
In that case, it’s also a situation where we don’t acknowledge that the work we did is what got us to this place but this place is a place of discontent. We got discontent by a very healthy way. It wasn’t accidental but we don’t see it as intended because we’re now in the discontent spot. Being able to say, “It’s okay that I went down this path,” that then got me to this place that realizes I need to be way over here and to not call it a failure in any way. That’s the challenge. Often, we ultimately then call it a failure when it wasn’t. That failure thing is hard for us and so staying in a place of discontent.
That’s another way that we get there. This was part of the journey. We had to do it. It’s what happened. I think that we’ve already touched base on this quite a bit. The other thing, and it’s a version of what I was just talking about. This was right for the season, but this is right for this new season. The new season sometimes is about things that we weren’t anticipating. We are anticipating that Lily will continue through high school. The girls will go through the thing that they’re doing, but what we don’t anticipate is things that we would never dream, want or wish to happen.
What happens when your husband all of a sudden gets an incredible offer in a completely different place and that’s a completely different job? You’re all like, “We have to do this.” It could still be a positive thing, but it could then put you in a place of like, “I wish I didn’t have this business because I can’t deal with all of that and what that takes.” Unexpected situations pop up. Sometimes, it is completely unanticipated for whatever happens. The biggest one is we aren’t recognizing our discontent early in the process. We keep thinking, “It’ll be better next week or next month or whatever.” To me, this is the piece where we’re missing that outside perspective.
What it is, and this is the problem. People tend to just swim along until they can’t or until they don’t want to. What all of us need to be doing to make sure that we are always building the business we want, that we are doing something that is sustainable for us. You have to reassess at every stage. The question I will always ask myself is not just, can I do this? Do I want to do this? It’s, is this what I should be doing now?
The Power Of Regular Reassessment: Building A Sustainable Business
It’s like, does this now get me to where I want to be in January? Does it get me to where I want to be in June? Will this get me to take two weeks off to go do something with Lily or whatever? It’s that reassessment and here’s what I want. I want to ask you like, how can somebody do that? That’s not what I want. What I want because what is most useful to a reader is not to be given four questions to ask to reassess at every stage, but it’s to address the core reason of, why don’t we do that?
We talked about this at every quarterly review that we do with our people. That is, we don’t take time to review. When I use the term review, I’m using it on a very broad basis. What I mean by review is looking back to notice where we’re coming and this is completely the concept behind The Gap And The Gain by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. We focus on where we’re headed. We’re always focused there, so we’re not taking a moment to look back and see where we’ve come. Part of where we’ve come includes, is that the path that we want to continue down?
There’s also a celebration piece in there that we focus on when we’re doing the quarterly review. It’s also, is this where I want to be? Do I want to take time to self-reflect and say, “Is this where I want to be going?” Not just want to be but as you said, does it align with where I am now? Is it all of those things that line up? I have been very happy with my business model for years now, but rain went to a different place. I’m looking at shifting elements of my business model. It wasn’t just like, am I discontented with what I was doing? Before the answer is zero. No. I love what I was doing, but I also see this is important.
It’s something that I am particularly suited to be able to do. It aligns with so much of my history, decades of my work history. To me, it’s about, are we taking time on a regular basis to ask ourselves to do the reflection piece and/or are we having someone who’s helping us reflect on it? That’s the piece we often think we can do all of this reflection ourselves and we can do some amount of it ourselves. At some point, you usually need someone on the outside to help you with that reflection process.
I’m going to just say it bluntly. When you get to a certain level of success you can talk yourself into anything. If you don’t want to face the fact that you need to do something different, you just talk yourself out of it. When you’re reflecting with somebody else, provided that person has your best interests at heart and it isn’t trying to shove you in their own predetermined box. They’re going to look at everything.
When you reach a certain level of success, you can talk yourself into anything — that’s why outside perspective matters. Share on XThey’re going to listen and say, “What you’re saying and what I’m seeing aren’t matching.” Which is wrong or what am I not seeing? They’re going to have that conversation with you to help you come to terms with where you potentially have been lying to yourself, what blind spots you may have or the curtains you don’t want to look behind.
You’re taking an easy choice because it’s an easy choice.
Those are the main reasons that whole, where I got to is not where I want to be, or how did I get here if I’m not happy here? Those are the main reasons that we end up there. Now, we don’t want to leave people in their pit of despair. Nobody keeps reading to show. They just leave them feeling miserable. We got to leave people with some hope here, Gwen.
There’s a lot of hope here.
Shifting Towards Alignment: What Do You Really Want?
Not fake hope, but real hope. Somebody is sitting there going, “I’m not happy. I don’t like this. Everything you’re saying sounds fine and all, but I’m still miserable.” What are some steps they could take to realign so that they don’t have to burn everything down, rebuild from scratch or blow up the bridge? Whatever the words are. There’s euphemisms out there but what is it that they can do to realign the business with what they want?
The first piece and we’ve talked about it a lot because it’s the title of a show, the Business You Really Want. The first piece is to have real conversations with yourself and potentially other outside folks that meet your criteria to figure out what you want. Knowing what you don’t want is way easier than knowing what you do want. The problem with just focusing on what you don’t want and I’m going away from that, is potentially going to a whole lot of other things that you also ultimately don’t want.
It’s not just about what you don’t want. That’s a great place to start. I know I don’t want this, but getting clear what I want? Where is my focus? What is an alignment? What are those things? It’s the classic example of, this is a simple answer that’s hard to do. You have to have self-reflection. You have to have the honest conversation with yourself. Maybe with the assistance of somebody else, but to have that conversation and say, “What is that going to take? What do I need to be then?”
The next question from there once you have any clue. It doesn’t have to be a picture perfect every line, everything is just as so. Once you start seeing what that is, it’s to say, what doesn’t align and what does align? There’s probably elements in your current business that do align. You probably don’t need to burn the whole thing down. If you’re going to go from being an IT person to being a knitting instructor, you may need to burn the whole thing down. It can happen.
Most of the time when I hear the stories of people burning down their business, they burn way more down than needed to. They needed a serious remodel, not a complete burndown. This is not a tear down situation. This was just a remodeled situation, but we get so focused on certain elements that we think the only way we can get rid of that is to burn everything down. Most of the time that’s not true. It can be true. I’m not going to say it’s never true, because that is also too extreme.
Most of the time, figure out what are the things that do work that are in alignment. It could be your culture, your customer service piece, the business model but not the service, or the service but not the business model. There’s all sorts of pieces. Where are the pieces that are aligned? Once we start there, then say, how do we start amplifying those and then figuring out where the gaps are and how we fill the gaps.
Where are those gaps? Once we know where we are aligned, how do we fill them? Sometimes, that’s new service offerings, but sometimes it’s the same services just delivered a different way and with different expectations. Instead of doing lots of group programs, I’m going to do more one-on-one. Instead of doing lots of one-on-one, I’m going to do more group programs. Instead of talking about this, I’m going to talk about that.
I had a conversation with someone and we were talking about, if you’ve used to working with individuals and you want to start working with a corporation. You just need to know how to reframe it, because the skill is the exact same skill. In my case, because I work with the executives in business advisory. If I want to frame that into corporate speak, I’m an executive coach. I’m not doing anything different but now I’m working in a different world.
Refining Your Business: Vision, Offers, Delegation, And Simplification
This would be a case of, I was discontented with who my clients were. Not true, but if I was and said, “I want to be working with a different type of person.” That’s a way to do it. It is, where am I aligned? What pieces am I aligned on? We start working from there and then building out and letting go of the places where we’re not aligned whatever that might be.
What I heard is step one is revisiting the vision and getting clear and doing that work. There is some aspect of evaluating the offers. As you said, sometimes it’s instead of one-on-one, group. Instead of group, one-on-one. Sometimes it’s just a different delivery. We go from meeting every week to, we just need to meet twice a month. Shorter or longer. There’s no shortage of ways you can revisit your offers. If you sell products, you can revisit how you package those products and how you deliver those products.
There could be an aspect of delegation. Sometimes it’s just about shifting the workload to other people. Sometimes, it’s about hiring people or about letting go of the people who got you to where you’re at, but they can’t get you to the next place you want to be and that’s part of that discontent. Ultimately, by the end, it’s simplification. It’s looking at all of those things and going, “How do I make this feel as easy as possible?” Anything missing there because in my effort to simplify, I don’t want to oversimplify.
The only thing I would add is when we’re doing that vision, make sure that it’s aligning with where you are now and/or where you will be soon. The other thing that I see will happen with discontent sometimes is, I design my business for where I think I’m going to be in ten years. If we took down and wrote down exactly what we thought ten years from now was going to look like, when we got on ten years, if we read that, most of us would laugh because there are things that we know. We know how old our children should be. We know how old we’re supposed to be. There’s things that we know, but there’s so many things that we don’t know. Trying to make that vision too far out is also one of the challenges of saying, “Is it aligned with where I am and what I can do now?
If you take nothing else away from this episode, it should be that feeling this way doesn’t mean you have failed at anything. As you said, it’s a sign of growth. You’re not in the place you used to be.
It probably is something that you haven’t failed.
Most likely yes, and growth is uncomfortable. It just is.
Always.
That brings us to the end of this. Thank you for walking us through this, Gwen. I took some notes because this one was pretty eye-opening, especially that process of evaluation. I think that clarity of the limits of what you can do independently all by yourself and where you do need to reach out to some outside or to help you not talk yourself into the things that aren’t necessarily true. What I would say just to sum it up, back to you’re not a failure.
The business that you’ve built got you to where you’re at now. The business that you want is probably going to take you further, but in order to get from here to there. You have to give yourself permission to reimagine it, redesign it, and make some different decisions to get some different outcomes. That doesn’t mean you have to blow it up. It just doesn’t. If you’re feeling like, “I don’t think my business fits my life now or this is putting words around this feeling I’ve had that I couldn’t name.” You should talk to Gwen. You should talk to us.
You can have a call with Gwen. Gwen doesn’t like smarmy, sleazy, sales calls or anything. It’s just going to be a conversation to help you identify what’s misaligned and help you figure out how to shift toward the business that you want. If you do need to burn it all down, Gwen’s the person. She’ll tell you that. She will not spare your feelings, but she does it in such a nice way that you won’t even know it hurts her feelings. Go to EverydayEffectiveness.com/Clarity and book that call. Get one step closer to feeling good about what you’re doing day in and day out.
Mentioned in This Episode
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
