You Started a Business for Freedom—So Why Are You More Overwhelmed Than Ever?

This week on This Mother Means Business, Laura is having an honest conversation about the version of “freedom” so many entrepreneurs thought they were building — and why so many women still feel overwhelmed, overworked, and stretched thin inside their businesses.

Laura unpacks the hidden patterns and business models that quietly steal entrepreneurs’ time, energy, and capacity, especially for women building businesses alongside motherhood and real life responsibilities.

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering why entrepreneurship still feels exhausting despite building something successful, this episode will challenge the way you think about freedom, growth, and sustainability in business.

In this episode you will hear:

01:12 – The moment many women decide they want something different

02:30 – “How’s freedom going?” and the reality many entrepreneurs are experiencing

03:18 – Why so many women feel exhausted despite building successful businesses

05:20 – Why hustle culture assumes unlimited capacity

06:03 – The difference between a hustle model and a design model

06:48 – Freedom thief #1: Revenue that depends entirely on your time

08:54 – Freedom thief #2: A business that cannot function without you

10:05 – Why being the “system” in your business creates burnout

11:16 – Freedom thief #3: Tying your worth to being needed

12:42 – “The measure of a well-built business is how well it serves you.”

13:40 – Identifying what is currently blocking your version of freedom

15:05 – Building a business that supports your real life and capacity

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Transcript

Laura Sinclair (00:02.029)
Welcome back to another episode of This Mother Means Business. A lot of you are not going to like today's episode and I'm going be honest with you because I'm going to be talking about something that we need to talk about that is important but is going to be a little bit uncomfortable. Okay. And I promise you it's going to be important because I wouldn't preface an episode with you probably not going to like this if it wasn't important. And I want to talk to you about freedom. I want to talk to you about the space that you have in your business and

There's a lot of these memes that we see, reels that we see that are like, wow, I'm so glad I quit my nine to five so that I could work 100 hours a week in my business as an entrepreneur. And while I'm the last person that's going to glorify hustle, I am a person that's going to tell you that that's not OK. You don't need to be doing that. You do have to work hard. You probably have to work harder than you want to work, especially in the beginning. But you definitely don't have to.

work hundreds of hours every week to make your dream a reality. And I know we've done episodes about this. I recently did one on the 20 hour work week and what that can look like, how you can achieve space and time in that sort of window. But I want you to go on a little journey with me for a moment. I want you go back to the moment that you decided you were going to become an entrepreneur. And maybe it was a conversation. It might have been like a middle of the night moment of absolute clarity. Or maybe it was a really hard moment. Maybe it was a job that wasn't working or a boss that didn't see you or a season of life that made you realize that

You need to build something different. know that's motherhood for a lot of you. But whatever that moment was, I want you to go back there. OK? And I'm willing to bet when you go back there, when you think about that decision, freedom was in there somewhere. Freedom for me is one of my core values, freedom of my mind, most of all, because I like to make the things that I want to make what I want to make them. But certainly financial freedom, freedom of location, freedom of time, all of those things are really important. But I'm willing to bet that freedom was probably one of the words that you used.

That image of freedom, right, whatever yours look like, because it can all look a little different for everybody. That's the whole point. So I'm going to ask you now that we're here together chatting, how's freedom going? How's that going? Because most of the women I talk to, these are women who are very capable, very committed, you've built something real, right? You're making money. The honest answer to that question is it's not the way that I imagined. Right? Maybe I'm working more than I did before. I have less. I certainly don't have more.

Laura Sinclair (02:30.156)
the freedom I was building towards feels like it's one more thing away, right? When I just do this one thing that I'm going to have it, I'll have the space to do this when I have that. Okay. And today I want to talk a little bit about why, why I'm seeing this. And I'm hoping that I can give you something that's more useful than just another pep talk about just staying the course and sticking with it. Because there is an actual explanation to why this happens. And there is an actual way through. Okay, I know that for so many of you.

your day starts, your workday starts before your feet even hit the ground, right? You're checking your phone, your kids are at the door, you sit down to work, you have to make decisions, you're flying all over the place, there's a million things going on, right? Maybe the morning that you were planning on using for super creative work, for the things that actually move the business forward, it's gone before it's even started, right? Now you've got a sick kid, there's all these things happening. And like, the day can get away from us really, really fast. And then next thing you know, you have no space for yourself, you didn't work, you haven't worked out in a month, you're not eating properly.

I mean, I talk to clients about this all the time. I meet women all the time who are saying this, right? And my life certainly in seasons have felt this way too, but.

you're tired, okay? And you might be wondering whether this idea of freedom that you imagine is actually just a trap, if it's actually available to you, or if it's even possible. And I want to tell you that it is available to you, but not through the model that most of us were given, and certainly not through anything that most people are teaching. And so my hope is to be able to give you some insight into this idea of freedom and why it seems to evade you in this moment.

And certainly there have been seasons of my business and I've talked about this really openly about how sometimes I don't experience it either. I try to not let those seasons be my core state, but I think in general, like when we think about freedom being the whole point, like why don't we have it? I think so much of it is we lack the actual tools to make this possible for us. And so when we think about freedom, like

Laura Sinclair (04:35.126)
It's not something that you just arrive at, certainly in business. Okay, it's not like a destination at the end of the road. I'll just get there and I hit, I finally hit six figures or finally hired my first person or you hit some sort of external marker that signals that somehow you've made it and then you achieve freedom. think freedom is a structure. And if it's not something that you build and structure intentionally, then you don't have freedom. The end. Okay. most women when they're starting their businesses, especially women who are coming from corporate

or who are building around raising babies, are doing any of this alongside a life that has real constraints, are trying to go into this sort of very hustly model that is work harder, post more, show up everywhere, be always available, grow at all costs, that really assumes unlimited capacity, and it assumes that your work is measured by your output and availability. It is, in almost every way, a model that was built by people that are not you and me.

and so many of us try to make this work, right? Because that's the model that we're given. And the alternative is really more of a design model. And that's what I'm hoping to teach you on the episode, because I think that when we think about this idea of freedom, and this is all going to look different for everyone. I don't think that you can build a business in two hours a day. a lot of people are teaching these very, simplistic versions or ideals of

of their business. mean, there's lots of people right now that are teaching low ticket offers, for example, because this is the one that's coming up into my brain, where it's like, you know, I made $7 million a year selling a $37 offer, but they didn't start their business that way, right? People aren't always being honest about what it looks like. And I'm absolutely here to be honest with you. So I want to talk to you about some of the freedom thieves, the things that show up that actually steal our freedom.

We're going to give names to them. These are the ones that I'm seeing most common. And I think you'll probably recognize yourself in at least a couple of them. OK. So the first one is this idea that revenue requires your hours. Right. So every pound or every dollar that you earn is

Laura Sinclair (06:48.312)
So the first one that I want to share with you is this idea of revenue that requires your time. It's the most common one. It's the one that catches people off guard the most in the business.

It's the most common one. And it's the one that catches people off guard because really in the beginning, like it makes sense, right? It's like, you're going to work hourly. Of course, our revenue is going to be tied to our time. But when every single income stream requires your active hours, when there's nothing in your business model that generates revenue without you being present and working, that is not going to create freedom for you. Okay. The ceiling then becomes the number of hours you can work. And for a lot of us, the ceiling is a lot lower than most business models assume. Okay.

So where this becomes a really big thief of your freedom, I was gonna say freef, because apparently freedom thief is now one word, the question becomes, can you work harder? Okay? And we shouldn't be asking that question. The question we need to be asking is whether what you've built, does any part of your model require you to not be there? Okay? Because until you have something that will function without you being the one to deliver,

Scaling just means more hours and more hours is probably the opposite of what you started this for, right? So how do we create then systems in your business to allow you to scale? There's nothing wrong with being a solo printer. If that's where you want to stay, that's fine. But we may need to come up with other revenue streams because you will be capped, right? You're not going to be able to charge $10,000 an hour as a copywriter. You're not going to be able to make the money that you need to make if you're only working five hours a week.

So we really need to think about, okay, what's your capacity? And then what's the model that's going to allow you to make unlimited income at scale without worrying about where you're gonna be for those two hours or who's gonna pay you for those hours, okay? So that's a really big one. Then the next freedom thief really kind of ties into the first one, but this is the idea of a business that can't function without you, right? You become the decision point, the approval gate, the person that everything flows through, which we've talked about before, okay?

Laura Sinclair (08:54.85)
But I want to bring it back here because it has this really interesting texture to it when we start talking about it the context of freedom. When you are the system in your business, you're the one who knows where everything is, who makes every call, who has to be consulted before anything moves. Can't take a day off, can't be sick. I like to say like you can't get hit by a bus. I know this because I broke my leg in 2024 and this was a big thing for me.

This is a structural problem in your business. This is an architecture issue in your business that is fixable, but it does require redesigning your business so that it can function without you. and it doesn't have to be without you forever, just without your constant presence. And so I think when we think about these things, this is where some ego stuff comes up. And I talked about this a lot on the show, but it's sort of like, what are the decisions that you can document so that they don't require you to make every single time? What processes can you systematize so they don't only live in your head?

What can be handled by someone else so that you can be somewhere else? You can actually have freedom without it being an emergency. We have to empower people or systems. certainly now in this moment, like with all this cloud stuff and AI and being able to do things for you, like what can we, what tools can we implement to make some, do some things for you? Like if you are doing top to bottom admin through client service in your business, that's a problem.

Hey, you can be a solopreneur. You can be the person that is, doing client delivery, but like, you can't also be doing your books and can't also be doing your admin and also in your inbox. Like there's just so many things that we need to think about is like, how can you make the function without you? And then the third one is really this idea, this trap of being needed, right? Which these all kind of build upon each other. But if you've built a business where being needed feels like success, it means your worth is tied to your availability and stepping back feels like it's failing. Like this is a big one.

And this one can be really uncomfortable. There is a part of being the person that everything flows through that feels kind of good, right? Being needed is validating, but being the one person who needs to do everything, like you don't really want that, right? Being the one that people can't do without feels like evidence that you matter and I understand it, but being needed cannot be the metric for success, right? Handing things off.

Laura Sinclair (11:16.16)
I know can feel like losing control, especially if it's something that you have done before you've handed it off and it didn't go well. It can feel like, okay, well, I can't just do that. I have the evidence now that that's not going to work, but it's really important for you to have systems that actually make you replaceable. I am a person that doesn't desire to be everything to everyone. I don't want to do every role in my business. And so I want you to think about sort of a different definition. I want to offer this to you.

The measure of a well-built business is not how much it needs you, it's how well it serves you. You are not more valuable because you're stretched than I promise. You are most valuable when you're rested, when you're strategic, when you're present in both your business and your life. So how do we get out of it? If you've seen yourself in one, two, three of these, I'm sure you have. And if you haven't, then that must mean that you are the most free person and I love that for you. But what do we build instead?

So what does the alternative actually look like? And I think this really starts with what does your business need to look like for it to work for your actual life, okay? And I think sometimes when we have these conversations, it can feel like, that's so far away. And so sometimes we just need to start with a very small step, one step, and then another step after that. But this is the work that we're doing inside of the Inner Circle. This is the work that I'm doing with my mastermind clients, really thinking about how do we redesign our business through a model that's supportive of who you are and what you actually

want. And this means designing offers that don't require unlimited hours. It means building systems that can run without your constant supervision. It means creating revenue streams that have real leverage that can grow without your input. None of this happens overnight, but it also just doesn't show up one day. Hey, this has to be designed. This is the work. This is what I do with my clients every single day. Okay. The women that are seeing real results and real freedom in their business. And when I say freedom, like it's not perfect. It doesn't mean it's problem free.

but it's the kind where they actually get to breathe. We built it, we built it together, they built it. They have made explicit choices about their model, their offer, their systems, how they operate that decided what they were and were not going to build. Freedom is 100 % about design. It is allowed to be adjusted for your actual life. And so I wanna end with the image that we started with. The freedom that you were working towards, the specific version of it.

Laura Sinclair (13:40.37)
not the abstract concept, but the actual image. What you had in your mind when you're like, okay, I am going to become an entrepreneur. I am choosing entrepreneurship. Hold onto that image. And now ask yourself honestly, what is the one thing in the way you're currently running your business that is... Now ask yourself honestly, what is the one thing in the way...

Mike, struggling with this one. Now ask yourself honestly, what is one thing in the way?

Laura Sinclair (14:14.602)
my gosh. Now ask yourself honestly, what is in the way of the... I can't speak. Ask yourself honestly, what is in the way of you getting there? Okay. What exists in your business right now and the way that you're running it that is directly working against that image? Okay, it can just be one thing. That's your starting point. That's where we begin.

That is how you start designing your life accordingly. Okay. So the version of you that you imagined back in the day, is possible, right? It's not despite the life you're living, it's within it. Hey, the business that gives you back your time, that doesn't need you sacrifice it to run that earns well and feel sustainable. Like all of that exists. It's not a fantasy. I've watched women build it. We build it inside of all of our programs, one-on-one coaching, mission mastermind, inner circle. It doesn't happen by accident. You have to build it. Okay. And I know that you can build.

I know that you can. So that version of freedom, it's available to you. If it's not going so well right now, it's okay. You can send me a DM at it'slaura.sinclair. This is the work that we do. This is the work that I do is specifically around helping women who are making it happen. You're making the money, but you hit that point of burnout and it's just like, okay, something's got to give. And when something's got to give, you know where to find me. Okay. I hope this was helpful. See you in the next one.