10 Rules You Need to Break in Business to be Successful

"Rules are made to be broken." It's a famous quote from the movie Scarface, and after being an entrepreneur for more than two decades, I've come to believe it couldn't be more accurate. Imagine for one second if Steve Jobs never had any rules about what he should or shouldn't do, Apple would have never been born. The same could be said for Bill Gates with Microsoft, Richard Branson with Virgin Airlines, and even Walt Disney when he started his empire. These are not just business success stories; they're inspirational tales of how these people found their way in life by doing things differently than everyone else.

So you want to start your own business? That's great! You're about to embark on a life-changing journey that will undoubtedly shape the way you think, see and experience everything. But before you get started, there are some rules (or should I say "beliefs") that you need to break to succeed.

Just because something's been done one way for years or even decades doesn't mean you have to do it the same way. The next time someone says "you can't," challenge them and think of a better idea than what they just proposed. They'll be so surprised at your creativity that they might change their mind and let you do it anyway.

Breaking rules is all about doing things differently.

In business, you will face obstacles and challenges designed to stop you from succeeding. It's a rule of thumb in life: the bigger your dreams get, the more people who want to see you fail. So don't give up on yourself just because something didn't work out right this time. If you can't break one rule, then break two instead (but not all of them - just the ones that are getting in your way).

After more than 20 years in business, here are 10 rules I've had to learn to break to up-level, breakthrough, and achieve lasting success:

• Rule 1: Follow the rules.
  No, there is no rule book; that's the thing! It's all up to you. You can do whatever you want in your business (it's yours) and still be wildly successful. It's great to have a few rules to get you started, but once you get the hang of them, use your creativity to play with them, bend or even break them.

• Rule 2: Choose a strategy and stick with it.
  No, strategies are great, but choosing the wrong one can lead straight to bankruptcy and failure in business. You're always one choice away from an entirely new business. Remember that, especially when things get tough. It's not because you decided on a strategy that you have to stick with. Examining, assessing, and pivoting to a better approach is an essential quality to be successful in business.

• Rule 3: The customer is always right.
  No, this couldn't be further from the truth. The customer is usually wrong. It's your job to figure out what they need, not what they want, which are two very different things. Also, the time is gone that customers could treat you like sh*t just because they spent some money on your business. Money doesn't buy your customer a wildcard to be an asshole; it only buys them your products or services.

• Rule 4: Hire for knowledge.
  No, this is not a great rule because people can always learn new things, but you can't change someone's (shitty) character or mindset. Don't hire for knowledge; hire for attitude, value system, and how someone stands in the world. Hiring for attitude will benefit you, your company, and your team in the long run.

• Rule 5: Protect your ideas.
  No, if you never speak about your ideas to anyone, you'll never know if they'll work or get support to work them out. I believe the more you talk about your ideas, the more they're shaped and the easier it becomes to turn them into a business or project. Also, do you realize how hard it is to turn an idea into a business? This quote says that "5% is inspiration and 95% is perspiration". Remember this next time you're questioning whether or not to share what you've been thinking about starting. Of course, if you need to, have them sign an NDA first. But do share.

• Rule 6: You need a business degree.
  No, as a multi-passionate creative, you have everything you need inside of yourself already, so let's get started! An MBA or business degree might kill your creativity and make you less innovative. There are so many great books, courses, and even YouTube mentors around these days. Everything you need to know to become a successful entrepreneur is just a mouse click away. Don't spend your precious money (that you could invest in your idea) and years of your life stuck in a classroom before starting. You go out there and do it.

• Rule 7: Always ask yourself: "What would a successful business person do?"
  Again, no, clearly, this is a rule that needs breaking. Don't ask yourself what someone else with an entirely different business would do. Instead, always ask yourself: "What would a rebel do?" What would someone do that breaks the rules and does business their way? That is the right question to ask - and act upon. Also, I wrote a book for multi-passionate creatives where I talk more about how to be a rebel. You can preorder the Dutch copy here.

• Rule 8: Don't follow your heart; follow the plan.
  This is a tricky one. There may be many reasons not to follow your heart or speak up about what you're doing, but you should still do it. Your heart knows what is good for you. At the same time, I'm sorry to break it to you; you need a plan. Without one, you're navigating blind on your entrepreneurial journey. Never a good idea.

• Rule 9: There's a right way to do business and a wrong way.
  No, there's no right and wrong way of doing things anymore. Of course, there are good decisions and bad ones, like good ideas and not-so-great ones. But there isn't "the only way" of doing things. As you've seen from the rules we broke above, you can (and should) do business in your way and be the rebel.

• Rule 10: There are no rules in business.
  After everything I shared with you above, I want to debunk this rule. Indeed, there aren't that many rules in business, but you shouldn't take that as a wild pass to do whatever it takes to win. Yes, you'll never be able to achieve greatness if you're not willing to break some rules, but never forget that you're in business to serve people, have a great life and hopefully make the world around you a little bit better too.

Breaking rules is a habit for success, so allow yourself to be creative and free-thinking with every step you take. Just because it's been done before doesn't mean you have to do it the same way, so break those rules and be a rebel! Follow your path, and don't let anyone tell you what to do.

Are you looking for a business coach?

My signature 3-month private coaching series is designed to get results, and I have the track record to prove it. When you work with me, I will provide personalized support and guidance that helps you take your business where it needs to go! I'm here to help you achieve your goals.

I know how hard running a business can be, but my clients love working with me because they see their businesses grow in ways they never thought possible. So if this sounds like something that could benefit you, let's talk today! It only takes one conversation before we start getting results together.

Schedule your free session!

The Trust Issue That's Keeping You Stuck in Your Career or Business: Attachment Theory and Healing

We all know lack of trust is a huge hurdle in our relationships. But did you know it can have equally detrimental consequences for your career or business? 

If you have trust issues, this article will help explain how attachment theory and lack of trust might be keeping your business or career stuck! 

Are you able to trust the people you work with quickly? Do you believe a co-worker when she tells you she's got it? Do you trust her to do a good job, or are you micromanaging everything and everyone around you? 

Your lack of trust in business might be because you're anxious and don't want to be hurt (again). What has probably been a great, life-saving defense mechanism at some point in your (early) life could be keeping you stuck in a career you don't like or unable to move forward with your business. It might even stop others from entering into business relationships with you.

On the surface, it doesn't seem like trust issues have anything to do with our careers or businesses, but when we dig a little deeper, it's easy to see how this can affect success and why it deserves attention and might even require healing.

Trust issues are often linked to anxious attachment, one of four types of attachment styles. People who have developed an anxious attachment often have a hard time feeling secure in relationships. They lack trust in almost everything, which usually leaves them feeling anxious, scared, or worried.

What is attachment theory?

Psychologist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby was the first to talk about attachment and formalize its theory in the 1950s and 1960s.

Bowlby theorized that attachment is an inbuilt survival instinct that ensures infants seek proximity to their mothers or primary caregivers. If they cannot do so, infants might fall into a state of "distress," determined by a lack of comfort and satisfaction when confronted with anything other than what they need.

Attachment theory, therefore, examines how the caregiver-child bond develops and its impact on significant development. In Bowlby's words: "Attachment is a deep and enduring emotional bond that connects one person to another person across time and space."

According to Bowlby, there are four attachment styles: secure, anxious-ambivalent, disorganized, and avoidant. 

Secure Attachment Style

Securely attached children feel safe and comfortable with their primary caregivers. They explore the world around them but return to a secure base when needed. Securely attached people tend to have healthier relationships in adulthood because they feel more confident in their interactions with others and don't experience fear of abandonment.

In their career or as business owners, securely attached adults are more likely to rely on others for help and support because they have a more vital trust. They are also less anxious about their lack of control in work-related situations. Securely attached individuals will have an easier time sticking to a job or business idea, trusting co-workers or business partners and making decisions based on opportunity rather than fear. Especially compared to the avoidant and disorganized attachment types, who often have a more challenging time making decisions, and suffer lasting ambivalent feelings about the choices they eventually make.

Anxious-Ambivalent Attachment Style

Anxious-ambivalent children are more clingy, needy, and lack self-confidence. They get anxious when away from their caregivers and distrust them, leading them to explore their environment with fear rather than excitement. 

They constantly seek approval from their caregivers and continuously observe their surroundings out of fear of being abandoned or in danger. This can translate into less ease and more perfectionistic tendencies at work in adulthood because they're constantly dwelling on what could go wrong. The strategic decisions they make can reflect their focus on fear, in which case the results might be missed business opportunities or promotions they want but don't take.   

Avoidant Attachment

Avoidant children lack the attachment bond with their caregivers and show very little interest in exploring or trying new things. They seem uninterested, detached, and lack empathy for others. When they explore the world, it's usually to get away from adults rather than meet them; when faced with a challenge that requires help, they avoid seeking support.

They often struggle with expressing their feelings and find it hard to understand emotions - especially their own. As a result, avoidant adults tend to lack trust in people, reflected in their career or business as difficulty to delegate, trying to do it all themselves, failing to ask for support when needed, and often struggling to work with team members or business partners.

Disorganized Attachment Style

Disorganized attachment is a combination of avoidant and anxious attachment caused by various reasons, such as a lack of bonding with the caregivers or frequent changes in caregivers.

Children with a disorganized attachment style often display intense anger and rage, a difficulty to control their emotions that will affect their relationships later on in life. As adults, they avoid trusting others and have little to no self-confidence when facing challenges. This often leads to accepting less than what they are worth at work, doing other people's jobs, accepting without a fight not to be recognized for their accomplishments. In business, it leaves them prey to their customers and service providers and aiming for smaller goals than they could achieve.

Do you lack secure attachment?

Those with an anxious or ambivalent attachment style (well, hello there!) have had this lack of trust ingrained in us since our developmental years. A lack of secure attachments with caretakers during those times affects how your brain develops and responds to interpersonal relationships later in life. The problem is, we're often unaware of how this influences the way we interact with others as adults, let alone the impact it has on our business or at work.

If you're not sure of your attachment style, click here for an assessment that may help.

Lack of trust in your career or business can express itself in various ways, such as:

• You're exhausted because you feel you need to do all the things, and the help you're getting is (according to your perfectionistic standards) never up to par.

• You're micromanaging everyone's tasks (including your colleagues, business partners, and service providers) because you're not confident they can do the job.

• You never ask for help or accept it because whenever someone offers, it makes you suspicious. You wonder what the ulterior motives are, so you say no, even when you need it most.

• You're always waiting for the other shoe to drop because you're anxious things won't work out. Everything might look good now, but you don't believe it will stay that way.

• You have a hard time making decisions, especially about a career change or new business venture. One day you're ecstatic about the idea; the next, not so much.

To heal your lack of trust, you need to work on healing your attachment wounds. I suggest starting with finding a therapist or coach who knows about attachment theory so they can help guide you through this process. 

You may also want to read or research this critical topic to understand it better. Here are a few resources to get started with:

• Attached: Are you Anxious, Avoidant or Secure? How the science of adult attachment can help you find - and keep - love by Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel S.F. Heller, M.A.

• The Psych Up Podcast.

• Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman.

• The work of Diane Poole Heller, who devoted her life to helping people find secure attachment.

Is your attachment style keeping you stuck at work or in business?

Anxiously (and ambivalently) attached people are generally preoccupied with thoughts about relationships - whether personal or professional ones. They can be cautious to the point of being fearful and may withdraw from a relationship if they have an uneasy feeling that it's going downhill.

This, of course, is bad for business. A successful career or business requires networking and successfully reaching out and connecting with others.

If you lack trust in your business or work relationships, try the following:

• Make sure you're not micromanaging everything and everyone around you. Be a supportive team player instead of always telling others what to do or how they should be doing it. You don't want them feeling like their work is never good enough because this might further complicate your collaboration.

• Trust others by giving them more responsibility and let go of the reins a little bit. Your lack of trust will show if you don't delegate some tasks out, so try trusting someone with something small at first and see how they do before handing over more significant projects or responsibilities.

• Have a candid conversation with your team, business partner, or service providers and tell them that your attachment style has held you back from trusting them. You don't need to give them the reasons why, but it helps to develop solutions together.

• Keep working on developing a more secure attachment. You might never get where someone who naturally trusts others is, but you can get pretty close. It all starts with understanding your style and being willing to work at it.

As people who lack trust in others (or maybe lack it when it comes to the next business or career step to take!), we can't let it hold us back anymore. We have to start healing our lack of trust and release the painful memories from our past and change some thinking patterns. I know because I've been there. And the transformation I've gone through has been magnificent. 

If lack of trust has been an issue for you, I hope this article helped you see there's a way out of it. It's going to take some time and work, but it is possible.

You can do this. 

Do you have attachment wounds?

If so, I'm here to help. You need to work on healing your lack of trust before you can move forward in your career or with your business. The first step is to find someone who understands attachment therapy and getting the guidance you need. Let me know if I can be that person for you!

It's time to start feeling safe again in relationships and stop being afraid of getting hurt all the time. Let me show you how we can do this together! We'll work on healing what's keeping you stuck so you can reach the next level in your work!

Schedule your free session!

How to streamline your business for growth (before hiring a team)

Whether you’re just starting out or have been in business for a while, I’m sure you heard the phrase “don’t work in your business, work on your business.” I always found this to be such an eye-opening perspective on what building a business actually is.

At first, many entrepreneurs are the only ones working for the business so it’s hard not to work “in” the business, that is it’s impossible not to address all the mundane tasks that are required to keep the business going. This isn’t the same as from working “on” the business, which refers to taking steps to grow the business. It’s the difference between focusing on keeping the soup warm rather than making a bigger soup.

Once the foundations are in place it’s important to think about growth. There are different ways growth can manifest in your business. More and more customers might come knocking at your door wanting your products or services, forcing you to work longer hours. Or the profits your business is making might raise the question of investments and where to take your business next. Perhaps it’s your business goals driving growth, or the vision you have as an entrepreneur.  

Whatever the situation, some level of change in how you operate your business will be required to push the business forward. You’ll need to make the switch from working in your business to somehow working on it.

It’s tempting to think that this is the moment you need to hire a team. If you’re a Silicon Valley startup, chances are it is. If you’re a self-employed (online) entrepreneur however, it probably is not.

I know, because I’ve been there. I’d love to tell you I learned the lesson fast and straightened up my act. I didn’t. It took me many years and a lot of money, time, and stress to understand the difference between working in and on my business. But finally I got it. And it changed everything for me.

Before hiring a team there’s one important thing to do first: streamline your business.

The truth is, without systems you don’t have a business – you are the business. It will be almost impossible to delegate effectively, and to let other people work for you. Hiring a team without a plan and clear, documented business systems will do nothing for you except give you more work, more frustrations, and less sleep. Because now you’re not only slaving away for hours on end to keep the business going, you need to find extra time to keep your team at work too.

How to streamline your business for growth?

The magic is in the systems.

Although you cannot automate every aspect of your business, many tasks can be structured, systematized, and put on autopilot. A streamlined business gives you the time and freedom you need to focus on growth instead of maintenance, and allows you to delegate the tasks that can’t be automated in an effective way.

#1 Plan out your business

The first step in streamlining your business is to get clear on what you ultimately want your business to become.

Do you want to keep your business small?
Are you looking to expand and eventually sell your business?
What are your financial goals for your business?
How many employees do you see yourself working with?
By when would you like to achieve your business goals?  

Having a long-term business vision will allow you to get clear on your short and medium term goals. It will help you create a sales and marketing strategy, decide on what products or services to develop, the amount of new customers you need to acquire and so on.

#2 Structure, systematize and automate your business

Once the plan is in place you can start looking at how your business operates. For each business department (sales, marketing, administration, accounting, production, research and development, …) create systems by mapping out how things are done.

For instance, how are clients onboarded in your business?

Every business owner should know the answer to this question. To figure it out, map out all the steps you’re currently taking when a new client signs up with you. This is your client onboarding system.

Now that you have the system you can structure it. Make the steps repeatable so someone else can do this task instead of you. Where needed make sure to finetune the system. If you’re sending out the same email to all your new clients but you’re still typing it from memory every single time, that email needs to be stored as easily accessible template.

By looking at your business tasks as systems you’ll be able to do something else that will make your life so much easier as well: automate. I talked about automation last week when I listed 7 ways to simplify your business for success. There are so many apps that can take over parts of our business systems, and if set-up correctly, do an amazing job for us. Look at your business systems with automation in mind. What parts of the system can apps take over for you?

Once the above is done, you’re ready to hire a team. But not sooner. If you’re in a hurry to build a team, make sure to have at least your most important business systems mapped out and structured before you take anyone on board.

Your team will be grateful for the clarity, and you’ll have so much more time to focus on what really matters to you and makes a difference for your business.

7 ways to simplify your business for success

When asked about the type of business my clients want, most of them tell me they would love a sustainable business that makes money but that also flows and feels easy. Yet most of them, just like many other entrepreneurs and business owners I know, never seem to get it quite right. The majority are often overwhelmed, stressed out, and chronically overworked. With only a percentage of them actually achieving the financial success they’re working so hard for.

For a long time, I used to be like that too.

I would work 12-hour days for weeks on end and not see the needle move an inch. Every time someone would ask me how business was, I’d reply with the all to familiar “busy”. In the end, I can’t say business was bad. I made money, and my business grew. But – and this is a big one – the way I was doing it was unsustainable, and if I consider all the hours, efforts, and energy I put in I have to admit the ugly truth: I did it for peanuts.

When we’re starting out on our own, it’s difficult to resist the urge to try out things, to build as we go, to want to do a million things at once. In a way, and to a certain extend, we absolutely have to. After all, we’re learning how to build our business. The problem is that, as we’re learning, we’re also adding layer upon layer of things we think we need to do. If we’re not careful – and this is what happens in most cases – soon enough we’ll end up overwhelmed by all those to-dos, of which we usually don’t even question the validity.

Finally, because of the inherited dreams of hard work and relentless productivity that our culture has so generously passed down to us, we think being tired from always being “busy” is a sign we’re doing well, and moving forward in the right direction.

I used to believe this. I don’t believe it anymore. A successful business shouldn’t be hard, it should flow and feel easy.

One way to achieve this (perhaps the single most important way) is to simplify as much as you can. This means looking at all those layers of to-dos you’ve piled up over time and for each of them decide if you actually need to do it, and if you do how you can do it better.

In what follows I share 7 ways you can simplify your business for success. I’ve added success in there on purpose because I believe that simplification will bring you more flow and ease but will also keep you energized and happy. This in turn will keep you focused on the important stuff which will bring in more money. See where I’m getting at here?

#1 Focus on the essential

In every business there are a few key things that yield the most results. In order to make your business work it’s important to focus on these essential components. Basically it comes down to identifying what works well in your business, and doing more of that! What follows is that everything that isn’t essential should come second, or be eliminated altogether.

This idea is grounded in the concepts of Essentialism and the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle.

Essentialism is the disciplined pursuit of less, based on the core question: “Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution towards my goal?”. The Pareto principle states that, for many events, about 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Translated into business speak: 20% of the things we do in our business produce about 80% of our results. So the trick is to figure out what those 20% are and do as much if it as we can.

#2 Automate as much as possible

Business automation is one of the areas in my business I was most reluctant to look at. If you’re in business today, especially online business, chances are you use a multitude of apps on a daily basis.

The problem here again, at least for me, is the stockpiling of apps. Before you know it, one app has led you to another, and another, and so on. My reluctance to look at what I was using for my business, and the way I was using it came from the fact that I knew there would be a learning curve. I needed to first check all the apps I was using to make sure I actually needed them, then figure out how I could use them better.

Once I did the work I realized I was spending more than €5000 a year on apps, most of which I hardly used. My first step was to cancel everything I didn’t need. This left me with about €1000 a year worth of app subscriptions.

Here’s a list of the ones I use most, and the time saved by using them effectively (affiliate links):

Acuity Scheduling
For appointment scheduling. When someone signs up for a free coaching session they’re automatically redirected to my online calendar through Acuity. This saves me and the client time by avoiding the back and forth to find a moment that works for both of us.

Time saved letting acuity deal with my calendar: 2 hours a week

Zoom
I use zoom for video conferencing with my coaching clients. The one tweak I did that saves me massive amounts of time is a build-in integration with Acuity Scheduling mentioned above. Acuity lets you connect with Zoom so that every time a new appointment is created, it included a link to a zoom video conference room. Before this I used to create and send out zoom links to my clients before every session. I know, right!

Time saved letting zoom create its own links: 2 hours a week

Zapier
I’m not sure how to define Zapier. A workflow or task manager? A way to connect apps? In any case what I do know is that I think of Zapier when I imagine how great it would be if new tasks could magically appear in Asana (see point #3) when I create new Google Calendar events for instance, or how awesome it would be that WordPress post drafts would be created automatically from all the newsletters I send out. In fact, that – and so much more – is exactly what Zapier does for me.

Time saved letting Zapier prep content for me: 4 hours a week

Waveapps
I believe in the power of the “important admin stuff” you have to do for your business. I know many entrepreneurs see this as a necessary evil but I’m convinced the success of any business is in part due to the way administration tasks are done. There are a gazillion apps out there that can help you streamline your admin processes. For invoicing I love using Wave Accounting. It’s easy to use and offers great features like recurring billing via email and automatic payment notifications.

Time saved letting Wave Accounting worry about my invoices and payments: 2 hours a week

#3 Structure and create routines

Structure is another one of those things that can save you a bucket load of time. Working without a plan is never a good idea, I’m sure you’ll agree. Why then are so many entrepreneurs working without a defined and thought out structure or set of routines? It’s exactly the same thing!

I have routines for how I write, how I work with clients, how I plan out my goals. Routine is part of almost everything I do in my business.

When it comes to structure, I have a lot of that too. I plan things on specific days, do them in a specific way, and have a lot of templates and workflows (see below point #6 and #7) that I’ve created over the years. To help me stay on track I use a project management tool called Asana. All the essential tasks I have to do are organized in projects, with repeat times for recurring tasks. I give every task an “energy value” of low, medium, high or epic. When I plan my days I use a fixed set of each type of task. This way I don’t plan too many things in a day, while I still move towards my goals quickly, and with ease.

#4 Get organized and schedule ahead of time

To have a business that flows and feels easy it’s important to be proactive instead of reactive. Unfortunately a lot of entrepreneurs I know are part of the latter group rather of the former. Every day they fight with their business, and react to what comes at them. It’s not their fault. They’re entangled in this way of working because it’s the most common way there is. One way to escape it is to get organized and schedule work ahead of time.

I make sure I schedule in enough time every week to write blog posts and newsletters, and even to work on new products and launches well head of time.

For social media I love to use Smarterqueue. This intuitive social media scheduling tool is easy to use, and let’s you put a schedule for your social media together! Once you’ve done this once the only thing you need to do is add content regularly, and the app does the rest.

#5 Set boundaries and say “no” more often

When I first started out in business my boundaries where non-existent. “Yes” was the only thing I knew how to say. In fact, I even put a tagline on my business cards and website that reflected this belief. I’d seen it on the name tag of a hotel manager and found it so on point that I decided to use it for my business. It read: “The answer is YES. What is the question?” I still think it’s a great tagline. Unfortunately what works for hospitality management doesn’t automatically work for other businesses.

By adopting this attitude of “yes” I quickly found myself overworked, overwhelmed, and incredibly unhappy. Saying yes to anything that came my way resulted in a portfolio of not so fun clients, big projects that I wasn’t being paid nearly enough for, and late night and weekend phone calls from clients who wanted to share “one more important thing” with me.

It was unsustainable. Eventually I had to grow up, and shift gears. That’s when I learned the power of boundaries, and saying “no”.

Today I assess every request I get based on the list of things that contribute most to my business. If the request is in line with my long-term goals I might say yes – if I have the time to do it – if not it’s a “no”.

#6 Create templates

One day I was typing an email to a client when I realized I had typed that same email at least 10 times before. I’m sure you know the feeling 🙂 That’s when I decided to create a vault with templates for emails and other communication I deal with in my business.

It wasn’t a difficult process at all. I didn’t sit down with myself and force myself to come up with a list of emails I needed templates for (although this could have worked). I simply decided that whenever I wrote an email from then on I would save it as a template first. By being consistent at this for a few months I put together a rich and extensive library of templates that now save me time and effort daily.

#7 Map out workflows (SOPs) for the different parts of your business

When I realized how easy it was to create a library of email templates I decided to do the same with my business workflows. I mapped out the entire process of the different parts of my business from start to finish, with an overview of all the steps that it takes to complete something.

When I create a new product, put together a new coaching package, or start out with a new client I have a workflow that I can follow. The processes are streamlined in an almost done-for-me way. In Asana I have project templates that I can copy easily. Once created the new project already holds all the tasks I need to do for a particular project. How awesome!

 I set out to write a small post about simplifying your business for success and it turned out to be more than 2000 words long. I guess I’m not a true minimalist yet 🙂 If you’ve still here though, kudos to you! While you’re add it, why not drop a line in the comments below and tell me how you simplify your business. I’d really love to know.