087: The Business Owner's Wheel of Life

Business owners need their own 'wheel of life' because your business makes up so much of your life. The traditional wheel misses what actually matters when you're running a business - like cashflow, time freedom, and whether you even enjoy what you've built.

So I created one specifically for business owners. We'll start the exercise together in this episode, and you can download the full PDF to complete it yourself.

By listening [and taking notes], you’ll learn:

• Why the traditional wheel of life doesn't work for business owners
• The specific areas you need to assess in YOUR business
• How this exercise reveals what's really working (and what's not)
• Why you should do this BEFORE setting your 2026 goals

If you want your business to bring you profit, peace and fulfilment, not just look good on paper, this episode is for you.

Enjoy!

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Transcript

Wheel of life

Business owner wheel of life

Client experience

Marketing

Personal fulfilment

Exit, retirement and contribution

Download the Business Owner Wheel

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Have you noticed so much business and marketing content out there is so abstract and airy fairy? Like what they're saying sounds good, but what do you actually need to do? That's where the Good Marketing Good Business Podcast comes in. This is where I share practical strategies to help you grow your service-based business. And in case we haven't met yet, I'm Shannon Stone, award-winning business and marketing consultant. And for the last decade or so, I've been diving in deep with small business owners, helping them to make more sales and get more done in less time. And today's episode is no different. Enjoy. Hey guys, welcome to the podcast. I am very, very excited to jump into today's episode where we are talking about the business owner wheel of life. Now you've probably heard of the wheel of life in general, and even if you haven't, it's essentially a tool to allow you to rank, I think it's eight different areas of your life, including health, business and career, relationships, fun. So it kind of takes you through all these different segments and gives you a little bit of an awareness as to how you're feeling about all these different areas. And then you can start to make some changes or set some goals in different areas. Now I've always been a business owner. When I've done this type of exercise, when I started my business in 2015, that's when I really started any type of personal development. And I would always prioritize business and career, which was always business, but they always label it business and career. But as we were approaching the end of this year, I really dove into it a whole lot more and I thought, you know, for a business owner completing something like the wheel of life, it's a little bit different. And it would also be really helpful to have a wheel of life equivalent for the business owner in a business sense, kind of bringing in some of those lifey and personal aspects to it. But also, as you know, as you're probably much like me, which is why you listen to podcasts like this, business is such a big component of your life. It's not your whole entire life, and it shouldn't be, but it is an important one because one, you spend so much time in your business, and two, it impacts the quality of your life as well. How your business performs on a financial level definitely impacts your life. And also on a fulfillment level, if you're always coming home or finishing the day and we're always being interrupted on the weekends, these things in your business are really going to impact your life. So that is what got me thinking around well, if it doesn't exist, maybe I should create it. So I've created this business on a wheel, and you can download it as a PDF and take yourself through the full exercise. But we'll go through some of them today. But the PDF is at shannonstone.com.au forward slash wheel. And there are 13 different areas that I've identified that I think are very important and relevant for business owners, kind of blending a lot of the business stuff, but bringing in some of the very important holistic elements, I guess you could say, to it as well. So what I want us to do in this episode is I want us to go through about four of these different, four of the 13 different elements and just start to get the ball rolling. And I think it's definitely worth doing the full 13, but we don't want to be here forever. So let's start us off with some of these areas. So you rank it out of five, five being the very best, one needing the most work. And at the end, you'll have, I guess, a snapshot as far as how your business owner experience is going from a financial kind of point of view to the internal operations, to your fulfillment side of things. So you can really see, okay, here's some areas that I should really look at making some changes in. So I think it's great to do this exercise before you do your goal setting and your planning because it gives you a really good snapshot into everything. And there may also be some areas you haven't even thought about or give no priority to, or haven't had the chance to actually sit down, slow down, and take some time to go through this. So let's start with the first area that I've got down here for us, which is client experience. So are you working with the right clients? Are you retaining your clients? Are you getting referrals? So out of five, when it comes to your client experience, what does that look like for you? How would you rank it? One being needing it needs the most work. Five is it's amazing. We're locked in solid over there. The next area I want us to go through is your marketing. So is your marketing organized and consistent? Is your marketing reflective of the work you do with your clients? So I know you do amazing work with your clients, but does your marketing speak to that same level? Does it really showcase what you do to that same level? Does your marketing most importantly work and convert people? If it's not, obviously your marketing needs some work. So that's the marketing segment. The next two segments that I want us to go through are a little bit more personal, so but very important and relevant for the business owner. Personal fulfillment as the next segment. So are you happy? Is the question. And I think this is very underrated and very underarked, as is fulfillment in general, but definitely for a business owner, because sometimes, you know, people have been running their businesses forever and don't let it evolve and start to feel trapped and become unhappy. So this is a really good opportunity for you to check in. And it's okay if you're not. This is why we do this, so we can make some changes. Also, with personal fulfillment, does your business contribute to your life? Is it adding to your life? Is it taking away from your life? Is it if you take weekends off, is it on your mind? Is business still kind of running and flowing through your mind? Is it keeping you up at night? Or you feel like you know you've got it sorted? Like weekends are yours, it's amazing. I'm just using weekends as an example, but the question is around whether your business contributes to your life in a positive way. The last point within personal fulfillment is does your business allow you to be expressive? So I think this is really important because we do spend so much of our time in business. Business is not our whole thing, it's not a whole wheel of life, it's not the only thing that we do. But does it give us an opportunity for us to be expressive in ways that are us, that are just things that we like to do? If you're gonna spend 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 hours a week, however many hours you're working in your business, I'm hoping that you're doing some things that you actually like to do. Now, this is where it kind of lends to a bit of a bigger picture. Your business is not gonna give you everything. It's not gonna give you your full purpose, it's not gonna give you your full level of expression. But does it give you enough of that to sustain you? Because this is why we ask this question and these type of questions, because if it's a very low score or if you dismiss it altogether, at some point it's going to become very unsustainable. You're not going to be able to do it for as long as you would like. And I think when we are able to rank these things very strongly, it really compounds with everything else, all the other elements of the all the different segments that we do. Your happiness and fulfillment and how your business contributes to your life is always going to affect your profit and loss. It's always going to affect your ability to convert clients and your ability to lead your business. Whether you realize it or not, it absolutely will impact it in those kind of ways. So that's personal fulfillment. The fourth and final area I wanted to take us through is a very underspoken about area, which is why it's very important for us to discuss it here. And it is exit, retirement, and contribution. So small business owners most often don't think about, well, definitely not exit and retirement, I think. Contribution they may, but what does it look like for you? Have you thought about what exiting your business, the final days of your business, might actually look like? Are you going to sell it? Are you going to have a succession plan? Are you going to simply close the doors? It's important to know these because it helps you in your operation of business. If you just plan to close your doors, that is okay because I'm not saying it's the best and right thing. I think it's a very case-by-case scenario. But most people do that. But if that is what you're going to do, I think we need to look at some other factors within the business so that when you hit maybe retirement day, your business wasn't just this glamorized job that leaves you nothing to retire with. We want to have these very real and honest conversations. So what does your exit look like? What does your retirement planning look like? Have you got things like superannuation in place? If you missed a few years in that when, you know, maybe business was more difficult or when you were just getting going, is it time to actually set this back up again? And then finally, contribution. For me, that's a very important part of business. Or just like I it's a personal value of mine. So I definitely bring it to business. But in what ways would you like to contribute? And you probably already contribute in a lot of ways without realizing you contribute to your clients, you contribute to your team, so employing people and the beautiful ripple effect that that has, as well as supporting your stakeholders and other providers that you work with. But is are there other ways you want to contribute and match that to your desires around that? So these are four of the 13 areas. We can absolutely go through all 13, but I think it'll take us some time. And I think it's very helpful to do an exercise like this on paper or or in a digital document if that's better for you. But hopefully we've started to get the ball rolling or allow you to see. It's important, I think, to do the wheel of life. But as a business owner, I think it's important to do one like this as well, because it brings awareness to a very holistic wide scope of our business from the finances to the marketing to our fulfillment to longer-term planning. It doesn't mean any of these things have to be sorted tomorrow, but at least we're starting to think about these and starting to bring some awareness and attention to it. Because what you do from an exercise like this is you start to see where some of the gaps are and you can start to create your goals and your plans based on some very informative factual information. You're not just plucking a revenue number out of the sky, which you're welcome to do that too, but you're seeing here's some different areas that my business can grow as from from within, but also in bigger ways as well, how it can contribute to my life financially in a fulfillment sense, as well as set me up, me and my family up in future, whatever that looks like for you. So if you would like to continue this exercise, visit shannonstone.com.au forward slash wheel w h e-l. There'll also be a link to that in the show notes. And if you do get lost, send me a message on LinkedIn and I will send it to you there as well. But hopefully you found this helpful. If you have any questions at all, definitely let me know. But I hope you have an amazing week and I'll chat to you really soon. Hey, thanks for listening. If you found this episode useful, I'd love for you to send it to a friend. The best podcasts I have found have all been recommended to me. If you can spread the word by sharing this episode, I can spend more time helping you by creating episodes just like this one. Send it, text it, tell somebody about it, whatever you need to do. The more you spread the word, the more I can focus on creating needle moving episodes to help you and your friends.