This episode explores three business mistakes Sara sees spiritual women entrepreneurs make repeatedly as they build and grow their businesses. The mistakes involve profit margins and reinvestment, the relationship between ambition and burnout, and how women use business coaching and support. The episode offers a practical perspective on building a business through sustainable seasons of work and rest, intentional investment, and active participation in coaching.
In this episode, we explore:
- Why an unusually high profit margin can indicate that a business is not reinvesting enough in its own growth.
- The role of business investment, including coaching, support, software, and assistance, in becoming a stronger CEO.
- Why ambition and burnout are not the same thing, and how business growth can happen through different seasons and rhythms.
- How unclear strategy, excessive effort, and trying to figure everything out alone can contribute to exhaustion.
- Why asking focused questions and being fully coachable can help women make better use of business coaching.
Key takeaways
- Profit margin is calculated by subtracting annual business expenses from annual business income and looking at the resulting profit as a percentage of income.
- A very high profit margin is not necessarily a sign of business health. Sara describes reinvestment as an important part of supporting growth.
- Ambition does not inherently lead to burnout. Periods of intense work can be sustainable when they are temporary and balanced with periods of rest and slower activity.
- Having clear strategy, direction, skills, and support can reduce the flailing and trial-and-error that often make business building unnecessarily exhausting.
- Joining a coaching container is only part of the investment. Asking specific questions, participating, and taking up space are important ways to use that support.
- Other people can help identify blind spots that are difficult to see from inside one’s own work.
Resources
Episode FAQs
1. What are the three business mistakes discussed in this episode?
The three mistakes are not reinvesting enough in the business, confusing ambition with burnout, and failing to ask enough questions or be fully coachable inside a business coaching container.
2. Why does Sara argue that a high profit margin can be a problem?
Sara explains that a very high margin can mean that too little money is being reinvested into the business. She describes reinvestment in areas such as support, software, and coaching as part of creating the conditions for growth.
3. How does the episode distinguish ambition from burnout?
The episode presents ambition and burnout as separate. Sara describes business growth as involving different seasons, including periods of more intense work as well as periods of rest and slower activity.
4. Why are questions so important in business coaching?
Sara argues that the quality of the answer depends on the quality of the question. Preparing one specific question before a coaching call can help someone use the coaching container more actively and leave with something concrete to implement.
5. Why is outside support useful when building a business?
The episode emphasizes that people cannot fully see their own blind spots from inside their work. A coach or community can provide other perspectives, practical guidance, and a place to work through questions that are difficult to resolve alone.
Read the Full Transcript
This past spring, in the span of one month, I spent $20,000 on business coaching. And I worked with one of those coaches privately from May through July. And this past week, I started my work with another one of those coaches, and I’m working with her both one-on-one and inside a group program this fall.
And while these two coaches have supported me with different things, they’re also related things, and all of it is helping me to bring my work out into the world in bigger, more streamlined ways, to learn the nuances of the skills that I need to do that, and also to not feel so alone in the process, to be able to bounce ideas off of a coach and be inside a community of other women who are up to big things.
And I’m sharing that number with you right at the start, not to impress you or to make you wince, though I know that a part of you may be wincing a little, because it points so directly to the very first of three mistakes that I see spiritual women entrepreneurs make over and over again that really stunt their growth.
And I say that having worked with hundreds of women in this field over the years, watching these same things come up repeatedly as they try to bring their work, their very real and sacred calling, into physical form in the world.
So today, I want to talk you through all three of these mistakes that I see spiritual women entrepreneurs make.
And I want to be really clear that I am most definitely not naming these so that you can gather them up into a pile of evidence about everything that you’re doing wrong. No. I’m naming these because, as I so often say, awareness itself is curative. Simply to become aware of what’s happening is the beginning of change.
Because once you can see a pattern clearly, then you have the agency to begin to shift it.
Now, the first mistake is that I see most of the women that I work with don’t actually know what their profit margin is. And then when they do find out what it is, more often than not, it turns out to be far too high.
And you might be having questions about a lot of what I just said. So let me back it up a little bit. Because most women, when they start their work with me, they don’t know yet what the term profit margin means, much less what theirs is.
So let’s break that down together.
Your profit margin is something very simple. You take your total business income for the year, and from it, you subtract your total business expenses for the year. And what you’re left with is your profit. And then you look at what percentage of your total income that profit actually is, and you get your profit margin.
So, for example, if you made $100,000 in 2025 and your business expenses were $20,000, that means that you kept, the business kept $80,000. And so your profit margin is 80%.
So often the women that I’m sitting with are running their margins right around there at 80%, some even 90%.
And on the surface, that can feel like a good thing. Like, hey, more money is staying with me, less is going out the door.
And please hear me, I’m all for budgeting, I’m all for saving, for investing, for paying yourself first, for having a solid financial base.
But in business, past a certain point, when you’re not letting the finances flow, when you’re not reinvesting money that you’re making back into your business, a margin that high, it actually isn’t a sign of health. It’s a sign that you’re starving the very thing that you are trying to grow.
So a healthier margin is somewhere between 50 and 70%, and I like to aim for around 60. And if I’m in a really intentional growth year, then it’s closer to 50.
So when you’re not putting money back into your business, whether that’s through hiring a virtual assistant, getting a new kind of software, investing in coaching, you are significantly blocking your own growth, your own progress.
And there’s a cost to that.
Because when you don’t invest in your business in these ways, it ends up taking a lot longer to do things. It ends up being a lot harder, and honestly less enjoyable, and ultimately more expensive than it needs to be.
And where does this really come from? Because it’s rarely about the money itself.
There’s a real squeamishness around investing in one’s business, around investing in oneself, around putting real resources behind your own dreams. And that squeamishness is something that I’ve sat with many times as I continue to up my investments in my business.
And the bigger game you want to play, the bigger investments you need to make.
This is something that I’ve learned from my mentors. I only work with coaches who have significantly invested in themselves, and those investments have allowed them to reach a certain level of success so that they are further down the path than me, and they have accomplished things that I also desire to accomplish.
And so this past spring, when I was looking at spending those $20,000, I didn’t feel as squeamish because I have strengthened that muscle in myself, and I have that trust.
If I invest, if I invest in this and I’ve done my research about who I want to be coaching with and clear about why I want to be coaching with them, and I know that when I get into that container, I’m going to make the very best possible use out of it.
And I could feel where I wanted to go. I knew I didn’t want to get there all by myself, by guessing, by isolating, by reinventing the wheel, trial and error.
I wanted people I could ask questions to in real time. I wanted to be in a community of other women who were doing similar things so that when fear came up, when questions came up, when doubt came up, when a stuck point came up, I wasn’t sitting there just trying to figure it out all by myself.
And I know a lot of women can feel okay and good about paying for a training or a certification to expand their expertise, their credentials.
A lot of times you don’t even think twice about that.
But when you ask them to invest in becoming a better business owner and becoming the CEO of the whole thing, something just freezes up.
And yet, that is the skill that carries all of the other skills. That is the skill that takes your gifts and actually gets them out into the world to the people who need them.
It’s what builds the systems, the income streams, the visibility, the structures that let your work reach so much further than your own two hands ever could.
So when you invest in your business, when you invest in yourself as a CEO, everything downstream of that gets easier, and it actually helps you to get where you want to go more quickly.
Now, the second mistake that I see spiritual women entrepreneurs make is confusing ambition with burnout.
And because many, if not most of the women who find their way to me have burned out before, they come to me with a kind of a personal vow saying, “I absolutely do not want to ever do it that way again.”
And I honor that completely. I get it. I operate in the same way.
And I want to offer you a perspective that’s maybe running in the subcurrent underneath that vow. And to maybe reframe it slightly for you, because the choice is not actually between burning out and taking care of yourself, between running yourself into the ground and self-care.
It’s not an either/or.
And for those of you who’ve been here for some time, you know that I really take a stand for the and. I take a stand for the both/and.
So again, it’s not about burning out or practicing self-care. Rather, it’s about finding that middle path of finding the rhythms of sustainability.
What I teach, how I try to live, my very first book, The Way of the Happy Woman, is all about this, about rhythms, about seasons as women, and that includes in our businesses.
Because to grow a successful business, there are going to be times where it’s the spring and the summer season, and you’re planting, and you’re out doing, and you’re hustling, and you’re making things happen.
And to do that, you need to be moving at a faster pace than you would like to maybe, faster than what feels entirely sustainable for the longer term.
But you know that you’re doing it for a temporary period of time.
And I have operated in a lot of those seasons. That’s how I’ve brought my three books into the world. That’s how I’ve brought any of my programs into the world. That’s how I’ve been able to grow my business to the level that I have.
But then you balance it out with a season of more slowness.
Like, I just took the month of August off. I took five weeks off, and in that time, I rested considerably.
And this is how professional athletes train. There’s the sprinting, there’s the walking, there’s just laying flat on your back and resting.
And an athlete needs all of these stages, not just a single one of them.
And your business is no different. It needs the winter, the spring, the summer, and the fall.
So if you really want to grow your business, you need to decouple burnout from ambition, to not see hustle as a bad thing, as some seasons require hustle, and to know all the way down that you can be ambitious without burning out.
You can have a genuinely successful business without burning out.
And yes, you are going to need to roll up your sleeves and really do the work at times, but that is not burnout. That is the planting and the tending of the garden.
And this is where this loops right back to that first mistake, right? That piece about not investing in yourself, because the more you invest in yourself, the less you’re going to be spinning your wheels, and spinning your wheels is often what burns us out.
We don’t have a clear strategy. We don’t have a clear direction. We’re trying to do too many things.
It isn’t the ambition that does that, it’s the flailing.
But when you have the support, the skills, the strategy to give you the clarity on what exactly to hone in on, to allow you to actually implement the things that are going to work, to take the real steps instead of just exhausting yourself and just throwing darts in the dark, right?
And none of this means that you’re going to get it right on the first time. You won’t. I certainly didn’t.
Failure is not a destination, and many of us can just fear failure. But failure is a stop. It’s a stage along the continuum of success.
So we need to be willing to roll up our sleeves to do the work, to experiment, to iterate until we get something working well.
And that requires a stick-with-it-ness to show up, to keep doing the work season after season, and to flow with the rhythms as we do that.
And then the third mistake that I see spiritual women entrepreneurs make when growing their businesses is not asking enough questions, not being fully coachable once they’re actually inside a business coaching container, whether that’s one-on-one or group or a combination of the two.
So it’s one thing to make the investment, to hire the coach, to join the program, to get yourself into the room. That’s the first mistake handled, which is well done. You’re investing, you’re putting real support around yourself.
But then, so often what I see is that women, they get into the container, and then they don’t actually utilize it to the extent that they could.
They go quiet, they hang back, they don’t ask the questions that can really shift things for them. They’re afraid to take up space. They’re afraid to speak up in a group.
So they sit and they listen and they observe while their peers do that, while their peers who are more extroverted or feel more confident about what they’re doing, they step forward and they speak up and they take up the space.
So I want to show you what it looks like to use a group coaching space well, and I’ll tell you how I do that when I am in a group container, which I’m in again this fall, the one that I mentioned earlier.
So you better believe that every single one of those group calls, it’s already on my calendar, and I adjust things as needed to be able to make the majority of those.
And before each one, I sit down and I get really, really clear on the one specific question that I want to bring to my coach in that call, and I spend real time crafting that question. I sit with it.
And in fact, inside my business coaching program, Herself CEO, I have an AI prompt that helps women to clarify and to craft this exact question because this matters so much, right?
The quality of the answer that you get, it depends entirely on the quality of the question that you ask.
So I think of it as one question and one answer in one coaching call, and that’s it.
Because in this group that I’m in, we have two of these group calls a month, and I want to get the most out of them that I possibly can so that I walk away with the right thing to actually go and implement in the weeks in between those calls.
I would love to see more women coming to their calls really prepared, really sitting down beforehand and thinking it through.
Like, “Okay, what is the crux of this for me right now? What is the core question that I could ask that would open something new for me?”
So being really proactive, being really participatory, being really coachable.
Because this is also where it loops right back around to the first mistake, and even the second mistake.
You know, you have to have some level of ambition to say, “I’m going to go in and I’m going to use my voice. I’m going to make myself seen even if it feels uncomfortable, even if I feel scared.”
Because you’ve already made the investment. You’ve already put the support in place, so don’t leave it sitting there unused or underutilized.
Come get everything out of it that you possibly can.
Aim to be the best student that you can in the class.
And here’s part of why this matters so much.
We simply cannot see ourselves fully. We can’t see the backs of our own heads. We cannot see our own blind spots by their very nature.
We can’t stand inside of our own work and see it clearly to pull out exactly what we should be focusing on next.
We can’t do that all on our own.
We need other eyes for that, and a really good coach met with a really good question is how you get access to those other eyes.
Because we come into fullness through relationship, and that isn’t a flaw. It’s the design, right? It’s the design of our humanity.
