25. The Side Business Timeline No One Talks About

Have you ever looked at your business and thought… what is the point?

Like you’ve been showing up, trying, creating, learning, and still not seeing enough movement to prove it’s working?

In this episode of The Bold Biz Podcast, Jenny talks honestly about the part of building a side business that almost nobody shares online, the valley. The slow season. The invisible progress. The weeks and months where it feels like everyone else is moving faster than you.

This is not a “just keep going!” motivational speech.
 It’s a grounded, honest conversation about what the timeline of building something meaningful actually looks like, especially for women building in the margins of busy lives.

💡 In this episode, we talk about:

• Why side business growth is almost never linear
• The “plateau of latent potential” and why progress feels invisible at first
• What the valley actually feels like emotionally
• Why women over 40 often experience the slow season more intensely
• The different seasons of building a business, planting, growing, and harvesting
• Why celebrating small wins matters more than you think
• How to know whether to keep going or pivot

If you’ve been feeling discouraged, impatient, or quietly questioning whether you’re cut out for this, this episode will help you see your journey in a completely different light.

Because slow does not mean stopped.
And the valley is not forever.

⭐ LINKS & RESOURCES:

• Download Free Guide, The Idea Filter
https://www.theboldbiz.com/idea

• Download Free Guide, Done Starting Over
https://www.theboldbiz.com/doneoptin

• Visit The Bold Biz Website
https://home.theboldbiz.com/

• Join the FREE Bold Biz Collective (Skool Community)
https://www.skool.com/the-bold-biz-collective-5477/about

Transcript

Episode Intro

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Can I tell you about a Tuesday evening I had a few months ago? I had just sat down to work on my business after a full day at my 9 to 5. I opened my laptop, looked at my follower count, and my email list and my revenue, and I thought, what is the point? I've been doing this for so long. Nothing is moving. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. I closed the laptop, made some coffee, and I sat there feeling like a complete failure. What I didn't know in that very moment, what nobody had told me, was that I was about to turn a corner. That the valley I was sitting in had an exit. And that what I was experiencing wasn't evidence that I was failing. It was just what the timeline actually looks like. Welcome

Main Intro

SPEAKER_00 0:49

back to the Bullbiz Podcast. I'm Jenny Lavalius, and this podcast is for women over 40 who are ready to build something of their own without the hustle, the burnout, or the pressure to be perfect. If you've ever thought it's too late for me, or that everyone else seems to have it all figured out, you're gonna feel right at home here. Let's dive

Welcome

SPEAKER_00 1:10

in. Hey and welcome back to the Bulbis Podcast. I'm really glad you're here today because this episode is one I wish somebody had recorded for me about two years ago and just quietly slipped into my earbuds on one of those evenings where I was seriously questioning everything. Because here's what I've noticed, and I hear this constantly from women in the Bulbis community. We start our side businesses with this energy, this real genuine excitement about what we're building and where it could go. But then a few months in, sometimes even a few weeks in, we hit a wall. Progress feels slow, results feel invisible. We look at the other people who are building and we think, why is it so easy for them and so hard for me? And then we start to wonder if we even have what it takes in the first place. And I want to talk about that today. Not in a toxic posity, just keep going, you got this kind of way. But in a real honest, here's what the timeline actually looks like kind of way. Because I think one of the most damaging things in the online business world is the gap between what growth looks like on social media and what it actually feels like to live it. And I want to close that gap a little bit today.

The Myth of the Straight Line

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Let me start with something that I think is at the root of a lot of the discouragement I see in women building side businesses. And it's this idea that progress should be linear, that if we do the work consistently, the results should climb in a smooth, predictable upward line. More effort equals more results, right? More time equals more growth. And if that line ever flattens or dips, something must be wrong. But that is not how it works. It genuinely is not. And the fact that we expect it to work this way is causing so much unnecessary suffering and stress. James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, talks about something he calls the plateau of latent potential. The idea is that when you start building a new habit or a new skill, or in our case, a new business, you don't see results immediately. You put in the work and nothing seems to happen. And then nothing seems to happen, and then nothing seems to happen. And then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, things start to move. Not because the work you did suddenly kicked in, but because it was always working underneath the surface, building the foundation that the eventual results would stand on. You just couldn't see it yet. He uses the image of an ice cube sitting in a frozen room. You turn up the heat. It's still frozen at 25 degrees, still frozen at 26, still frozen at 27 and 28 and 29, and then at 32 degrees it melts. Was all that warming up doing nothing? Absolutely not. It was everything. But the visual evidence only shows up at the moment of the breakthrough, not during all the work that made the breakthrough possible. That's exactly what building a side business feels like. And I wish someone had drawn that picture for me at the very beginning. Because I can't count the number of times I thought I was failing when I was actually just still warming

What the Valley Actually Feels Like

SPEAKER_00 4:41

up. So I want to spend a minute here just naming what the valley feels like. Because I think when we're in it, we often assume we're the only ones who feel this way. And we're not. We are really, really not. The valley is when you've been posting consistently for two months and your follower count has barely moved. It's when you send an email to your list and three people open it. And one of them is probably you checking if it got sent. It's when you launch something and nobody buys. It's when you spend an entire Sunday building something and then on Monday morning it feels completely pointless. It's when you watch someone else in your space grow fast and you feel this hot, uncomfortable mix of admiration and despair that you don't really want to admit to anyone. It's also quieter than that sometimes. It's just a low hum of doubt that follows you around. A voice that says, Who do you think you are? A tiredness that isn't really about sleep. A creeping feeling that maybe you're not one of the people who gets to do this. I have felt all of those things many times. And the women I most admire in this space, the ones who've built something real and meaningful, every single one of them has felt those things too. It's not a sign that you're in the wrong place. It's a sign that you're building something that matters enough to scare you. Those two things tend to go together.

Why Women Over 40 Feel It Harder

SPEAKER_00 6:17

I want to talk specifically about why I think women our age tend to feel the valley particularly hard. Because I don't think it gets talked about enough. Because we're not used to being beginners. I've said that before on this podcast, but it's worth coming back to, because it's relevant here in a slightly different way. By the time we're in our forties and fifties, we have decades of competence behind us. We know how to do things. We're good at our jobs. We've navigated enough of life to have earned a certain level of quiet confidence in our own abilities. And then we start a side business and we're back at zero. Zero followers, zero email lists, zero proof that anyone is interested in what we have to say. And that contrast between who we are in the rest of our lives and who we are in this new thing we're building can feel genuinely humiliating. Not in a dramatic way, just in a quiet, grinding way that makes it very tempting to stop. There's also the time pressure. Women our age are often not building in ideal conditions. We're building alongside full-time jobs, families, aging parents, busy households, and an energy level that, let's be honest, isn't always what it was at 28. So when we put in the limited, precious hours we have and we don't see results fast enough, the cost of continuing feels higher. We're not just spending time. We're spending time we could have spent on something else, something easier, something more certain. That makes the slow periods feel even heavier. And then there's comparison. Social media does a particularly cruel thing here, which is that it shows you everyone else's highlight reel at the exact moment you are sitting in your own valley. You see the launch results, the follower milestones, the passive income screenshots. You don't see the 18 months of invisible work that came before it. You don't see the failed experiments, the abandoned pivots, and the days they also wanted to close the laptop and make tea and wonder what the point was. But those days happened for every single

The Seasons of a Side Business

SPEAKER_00 8:39

one of them. I find it really helpful to think about a side business the way you'd think about seasons. Because seasons make sense to us. We don't stand in February and think this winter's going on way too long, maybe spring just isn't going to come this year. But we trust the process because we've seen it enough times to know how it works. A side business has seasons too. And understanding which one you're in changes everything about how you feel about the pace of your progress. There's the planting season. This is the very beginning, when you're setting up your foundations, figuring out your offer, building your first piece of content, creating your lead magnet, telling a few people what you're doing. Nothing feels like it's working because you haven't planted enough yet. You're still choosing the seeds. This is not failure, this is just February. Then there's the growing season. When you're in it, posting consistently, showing up, building your list slowly, maybe making your first small sale. Progress feels slow because growth that's happened underground is invisible. The roots are going down, the stem is reaching up, you just can't see any of it yet. But it's all happening. This is not failure either. This is just March and April. So trust it. And then there's the harvest season. This is when things start to compound for real. When the consistency you built up in the invisible months starts to pay off in visible ways. New followers who've found you through old content, email subscribers who've been quietly reading for months and suddenly buy from you. A post that lands and spreads. A DM from someone who says that you changed how they thought about something. The harvest doesn't come without the planting and the growing. But it does come. Brene Brown talks about how we measure ourselves against other people's highlight wheels, their harvest seasons, and then wonder why we feel inadequate in our own growing season. That comparison is not just unfair, it's comparing the wrong things. You're not behind, you're just in a different season.

The Small Wins We Keep Walking Past

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Okay, I want to talk about something that I think is genuinely important and genuinely underestimated. And that's the art of celebrating small wins. Not in a forced gold star, well done kind of way, but in a real intentional, I'm going to notice this and let it count kind of way. Because here's what happens when we start building something. Our brains are wired to focus on what's not done yet, what's not working yet, and what's still missing. It's a survival mechanism that was very useful when we were trying not to get eaten by things. It's not very useful when we're trying to build the business and stay motivated through the slow parts. So we have to consciously override it by training ourselves to also notice what is working, what did happen, and what we did show up for. Your first email subscriber who isn't your mom or your best friend, that's a win. Your first piece of content that gets saved or shared by someone you don't know. That's a win. Finishing your lead magnet after weeks of putting it off. Enormous win. Publishing your first podcast episode when every cell in your body was saying, wait until it's better. Massive win. Getting a DM from someone saying, I really needed to read this today. That is not a small win. That is the whole point. Amy Porterfield, who has built one of the most successful online education businesses in the world, talks about keeping what she calls a win file. A literal document where she writes down every positive thing that happens, no matter how small. A kind comment, a subscriber milestone, a moment where she showed up even though she didn't feel like it. And she goes back to it on the hard days. Not to feel smug, but to remind herself that progress is actually happening, even when it doesn't feel that way. I've started doing something similar, and it has genuinely changed how I experience the slow periods. Because when you start collecting the small wins, you realize they weren't that small at all. They were the whole journey happening one tiny moment at

When to Push Through and When to Pivot

SPEAKER_00 13:25

a time. I want to address something that I think comes up a lot when you're in the valley. And that's the question of whether slow progress means you should keep going or whether it's a sign that something needs to change. Because I think this is where a lot of women get stuck, in the uncomfortable middle ground between persistence and flexibility. Here's how I think about it. There's a difference between quitting because something is hard and quitting because something genuinely isn't working. The first one is worth pushing through. The second one is worth investigating. If you've been building for less than six months and you haven't seen the results you hoped for, that is almost certainly not enough data to make a meaningful judgment. Six months in online business terms is still very early. You're still warming up the room. You haven't hit 32 degrees yet. But if you've been doing the same thing for 12 months or more, and nothing has moved even slightly, it might be worth asking not whether to quit, but whether something in the approach needs adjusting. The niche, the messaging, the platform, or the offer. Not a complete overhaul necessarily. Often you just need a small shift in an angle that makes everything else click into place. The key question I find really useful to ask yourself in the valley is this. Am I not seeing results because I haven't given it enough time? Or am I not seeing results because I'm not talking to the right people in the right way about the right thing? The first answer calls for patience. The second calls for a small experiment. Both are valid, neither one means you're failing. Seth Godin has this concept called the dip. The idea that every worthy endeavor has a period in the middle where it gets hard and progress slows down. And most people quit during the dip because they interpret it as a signal that they chose wrong. But the dip is actually a feature, not a bug. It's what filters out the people who aren't serious. The fact that it's hard is what makes getting through it worth

What I Know Now That I Wish I'd Known Earlier

SPEAKER_00 15:46

something. I want to leave you with a few things that I genuinely wish someone had told me when I was in the thick of my own valley. Not because it would have made the valley disappear, but because it would have made it a lot easier to stay in it long enough to get through it. The first thing is that slow is not the same as stopped. Every single thing you do for your business, every piece of content you make or create, every email you send, every conversation you have, and every skill you develop, it's all accumulating, even when you can't see it. Especially when you can't see it. You're not wasting time. You're building the foundations of your business. The second thing is that your timeline is yours, not hers, not theirs. It's yours. The woman who grew from zero to ten thousand followers in six months might have been building in a different niche with a different budget, with a team behind her, or with a previous audience that she's never mentioned. You don't know her full story, and comparing your chapter three to someone else's chapter 15 is one of the fastest ways to talk yourself out of a future that's completely possible for you. The third thing is that the valley is not permanent. It genuinely isn't. Every woman I know who has built something real has been in the valley. Most of them have been in it more than once, and every single one of them came out the other side. Not because they had some special quality that you don't have, but because they stayed. They kept showing up on the days when it felt pointless. They celebrated the small things. They asked for help when they needed it. And eventually the season changed. And the fourth thing, the one I want you to really sit with, is that the fact that you're still here, still listening, still trying, still showing up for your idea, even on the tire days and the slow weeks and the moments of real doubt. That is not nothing. That is actually everything. That is the whole thing right there.

Your Next Step

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Before I let you go today, I want to give you something concrete to take away from this episode. Because I don't want it to just feel inspiring in the moment and then disappear by tomorrow morning. So here's what I want you to do this week. Start a WIN file. It doesn't have to be fancy. A note on your phone is completely fine. And I want you to go back as far as you can and write down every win, big or small, that you've had in your business so far. Your first piece of content, your first subscriber, the first sale you had, that DM that made you smile. The day you did the scary thing. The moment you said out loud, for the first time, I'm building a business. And then I want you to add to it every single week. One win minimum. Just one. Because what you pay attention to grows. And if you start paying attention to the evidence that it's working, even slowly, even imperfectly, even just a little bit, you will find more of it. And it'll be easier to stay in the game long enough to see what this really becomes. If you're at the stage where you're still figuring out your idea, or you keep stopping and restarting and you're not sure why, I have two free guides that might be exactly what you need right now. The idea filter, which helps you cut through the noise and land on the right idea for your life and your skills, and done starting over, which is for the women who started and stopped before and want to finally understand the psychology of why that keeps happening and how to break the cycle for good. Both are linked in the show notes below the episode. And if this episode resonated with you, please share it with a woman in your life who's in the valley right now. She might not even have told you she's there. But if she's building something, chances are she needs to hear this today. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. You're doing better than you think you are. I promise. Thanks so much for listening to the Bold Biz Podcast today. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow the show, share it with a friend, or leave a quick review. It helps more women find this podcast. Stay bold, ladies, and see

Main Outro

SPEAKER_00 20:24

you next week.