Hey Reader,

Welcome back to Little Leadership Lessons, my Saturday newsletter sharing quick, powerful insights from coaching seven-figure creators. These lessons help you grow as a leader so you can grow your business—with more clarity, alignment, and peace of mind.

Happy Saturday!

I’m just home from a quick trip to Boise to attend an event a client put on and film the next month’s worth of social content. Hiring a great team and creating a system to produce ongoing content has been one of the ways I’ve leveled up my business this year so that I can serve people beyond my 1:1 client work.

It was a fun project and I’d love to hear what you think about how I’m showing up on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Now, for this week, one of the most common stories I hear from founders goes something like this: “If I just switched to a different business model, everything would be easier.” If only!

What I’ve learned coaching entrepreneurs is this: every business model has pain points. Switching models doesn’t eliminate friction… it just trades one set of problems for another.

Let’s get to it.

A Beautiful Photo to Quiet Your Body and Mind

The Situation

A client recently came to me convinced she needed to change her business model. She was running a successful group program, but the launches were stressful and the marketing cycles were becoming exhausting. She thought shifting to an evergreen funnel would make everything smoother, easier, more profitable.

I’ve heard this before – from course creators who want to move to memberships, from community owners who dream of one-off launches, from sponsorship-driven businesses who want products for sale instead.

When you’re living inside the pain points of your current model, the alternatives look shiny and simple.

“This is so hard… maybe I just have the wrong model.”

This is a version of the grass is greener on the other side problem. When things feel hard, you look for ways to solve the pain. And it feels easier to move away from what feels painful than to keep plugging away on the same thing.

The Emotional Blocker

The emotional trap here is seductive but misleading:

• Inside your model, you experience its friction every day.
• Outside, the alternatives look smooth and problem-free.
• That contrast tricks your brain into thinking a pivot will make life easier.

But often, the real motivation isn’t alignment, it’s avoidance. Avoidance of facing hard problems head-on. It’s so attractive to believe that if you change one thing about your business, everything else will get easier.

What this allows us to do is to avoid the reality that building a business is hard. It allows us to imagine that finally, FINALLY, we will feel the ease and earnings that we’ve been hoping for all along if we just _ change _ the _ business _ model.

Unfortunately, this is usually a convenient myth designed to give us hope for the future.

The Breakthrough

The real insight here isn’t about which model to choose. It’s how to think about the decision.

The right choice comes from comparing the upsides and the downsides in a realistic way. That’s exactly what we did in the session. We looked at all of the pain points of her current model. And we looked at all of the upsides.

I asked her to share the dreamy upside of the model she imagined would be the perfect solution to all of her problems. And THEN I shared what I hear other clients say the downsides of that very model are. We completed the picture.

That’s when it clicked for her (and for me): Every business model has pain points. There is no perfect one.

The job is not to remove the pain, it’s to embrace that every business is hard in its own way. Your job is to choose which hard parts you’re willing to accept.

In many cases, the best move isn’t to switch business models. It’s to stay, go deeper, and master the parts that are hard.

Persistence in solving those hard problems often produces breakthroughs that switching business models never will.

Coaching Questions to Apply This to Your Business

If you’re thinking about switching business models to something that seems like it will be easier, here are a few questions to help you work through the decision:

1. What makes changing your business model interesting or attractive right now?
2. What pain points of your current business that you’re hoping to avoid?
3. What are the downsides of the dreamy alternative? If you knew it was just as hard as your current business, would you still want to switch?
4. If you knew that it was possible to build systems that make your current model less painful, what might you try?
5. How might persistence in solving today’s problems actually unlock tomorrow’s growth?

Friction isn’t failure. Every business has friction. The entrepreneurs who succeed long-term learn which problems to endure, which ones to solve, and which ones are simply the price of admission for doing meaningful work.

Much love and respect,