Design a Business Ecosystem Around Your Life, Not a Template

Meet Michelle, the digital doula

Hello, hello. Thank you for joining us for ND OutLoud. I have Michelle here with me today, and she is a PGI certified coach and a digital doula. She has a co-creator program that helps people take their passions, lived experiences, and home skill sets and develop an online offer that’s natural for them, with technology to automate and create all kinds of focus in their lives. I’m so happy to have you here with me today, Michelle.

Thank you very much for having me. It’s an honor and a privilege.

So we’re going to be talking about designing a business ecosystem, and why it actually helps you live naturally and restores your biodiversity. Tell me what that means.

Okay. So I am undiagnosed, but I am definitely ADHD, and I have a daughter who’s ADHD, and I have a son who is nonverbal, on the spectrum, and self-injurious. We’ve had to, as we do, craft our lives in ways that can accommodate all of those pieces. If you don’t mind, I’ll give you a little backstory. I’m a biologist by formal training. My mom was a nature artist before she passed. So there’s nature, and I love nature, and I love all things systems.

When I think of business systems and I think of natural systems, the part that I love about working as a digital doula, and about what I’ve crafted to manage my family’s needs, is that it’s not a monoculture. Right now in nature, we’ve got agriculture that monocrops everything, and it’s not very biodiverse. I think business is sort of like that too. Business has created these large companies, and what we need, to diversify business and bring it on home, is to really listen to who we are individually and craft individual offers that fit around our lives, so we can live our soul’s purpose.

And I learned that from my son, so it comes full circle. Everybody has a gift inside them. The school system, the medical system, all the systems didn’t seem to appreciate that he had a gift inside of him, because they couldn’t see it, they couldn’t hear it. But I knew it was in there. In the same way, I work with business people who are interested in doing online business, to craft and speak what their purpose is. I think everybody has a gift inside of them, and what I do is help people bring their gifts out and get them online, so they can earn money in a way that’s natural for them.

Burnout is rarely the client work, it is everything wrapped around it

I think this is so cool, and this is something we actually talk about a lot around here: doing things the way that works for your brain. We have to do things the way that works for ourselves, which is why she’s perfect to have on here. So when you are working with somebody who’s chronically overwhelmed, on the verge of burnout, say a coach or a VA, what’s one of the first things you walk through with them to help get them out of that overwhelmed burnout space?

Typically, there are two kinds of people I work with. One has never taken any of their interest or passion and done anything online. They never thought they would want to, and they’re a little worried about the tech. I help people with that. But for the people who have done it, and maybe are a coach, and maybe are burnt out, what they’re facing is this: you’re doing work that serves the world, you’re connected with a bunch of clients, but you’re topping out. You can’t keep up. You want to help the clients, but then you have to do the paperwork, and you go to do the paperwork, and then you lose the client’s cash. There’s the doing of the work, and then there’s all the business infrastructure around doing the work. Some people like that part, and some people don’t.

So what I do is listen to what you do, how you do it, who you do it for, and we go through an offer ecosystem assessment. We assess what it is that you do, how you do it, and what you need technologically to fill in the parts that you hate, so you can play at the things you love. And everybody’s business is unique. Some people like to do podcasts, some don’t. Some like online courses, some like communities. It depends on what you’re selling, who you want to reach, and how you like to do things.

After I’ve listened to you, I say, okay, you’ll need one of these, one of these, one of these, and I custom build the technology with you, to support and automate. Say you love talking with people and having a sales call, and you do a really good job of landing people into your program, and then you forget to send them a contract, and you don’t have any follow-up or nurturing. The technology will automate a lot of those pieces for you. So when you get a client, yay, you hit the button, and all of the things that need to happen, happen, and your business doesn’t fail because you’re holding everything and you’re burnt out. It helps alleviate paperwork, it helps attract clients, it helps you be more consistent in your social media posting. Wherever you’re struggling, you can design the technology to come in and support your business, and you can design it the way you like to see it.

Too many logins: harmonizing the software pile into one place

That’s amazing. And when you are neurodivergent, I’m going to tell you, this is the person you need on your side if you’re struggling with all of these things. Why do I know? I used to do what she does. I don’t anymore, and it is such an amazing thing to have so many things automated in your business, to not have to do them yourself. It takes so much pressure off of you. But what is one of the biggest complaints, or excuses, that you hear from business owners when they first come to you?

“I have too many different softwares I have to sign in for.” I have to have MailChimp, I have to have Kajabi, I have to have Eventbrite, all of the pieces of software. And then all my passwords. And they all cost money, and it’s adding up, and it makes it overwhelming and confusing. So I harmonize all of that into a single place, so you’ve got all of the contacts for your business in one space, with your website and your funnels and your courses, and they’re all interlinked. Then you can set it up so if someone signs up for your newsletter, they automatically get on the newsletter list, they automatically hear about your course, and once they’ve received the course, you send them the next piece. You’re nurturing your clients through your service, and you can provide them the transformation that’s your gift, and not work on all the stupid BS in the background. Being stuck in admin hell sucks.

What really lights me up is that once they’re out there giving their gifts and shining in the world for who they actually are, it makes everybody’s life better. If I can help people build that, they get to be who they best are, and it makes me happy.

So basically, you take all of the complicated things that we get stuck on the rabbit trail with as business owners, where we can’t decide on the perfect program. And I’m going to remind you, you’ve heard me say this before, there is no such thing as the perfect program, or the perfect whatever. There is no such thing. But you help them find what works best for them. Something they’re going to use, something they’re going to enjoy using, and you make sure it all works for them so they don’t have to do the work.

Yeah. There is no silver bullet. But the important thing to me, and why I talk about naturalness, is that it has to be built around you. You can build it yourself, and that takes a buttload of time and a whole bunch of frustration and adds to the admin piece. Or you can hire a $30,000 to $50,000 a year marketing agency to build all the things and do all the stuff, and then you still can’t actually manage it yourself. I saw there was this place in the middle. If I can build you the car and hand you the keys, you can drive. You’re smart. We get everything set up so it’s working, and if you need tweaks or maintenance or upgrades later, we can work on that. But you have everything that you need.

I went through this process over five years, learning: okay, if I want to do this, I have to have that. It took so long. I’m interested in saving people the time and the money it takes to go through that process. What took me five years, I now have down to about a three-month process, where at the end of it you have all of your tech built, your audience built, your socials coordinated, content laid out, and everything is working for you, while you’re working on what you want to work on.

Her why: it should not be easier to order a pizza than to get help

So how did I get into this? Digital doula is not something I ever thought I’d say. I’m a science geek by formal training, and I hate sales, or at least I thought I did, until I learned that until someone transacts with you with money, you can’t serve them. They have to honor you too. What brought this up for me is I was actually helping my son, coordinating his caregivers, because the agencies weren’t helping him. Then I realized other parents needed this too, so I started helping other families. At one point I ran a team of about eight people helping 15 families in my local area with respite and homeschool delivery, because we needed to do our homeschool naturally too. The school system just isn’t built for us.

And when I did that, it really worked. It worked for the parents, it worked for the kids, it worked for the workers. But as a business, it wasn’t working. And I am adamant that it should not be easier to order a pizza than it is to get help for us neurodivergent folks. I said, no, there has to be a way to make enough money to subsidize and keep this respite and homeschool delivery service. So I went on a mama bear hunt, and I tried all the things, MLMs and crypto and stocks, and I realized what’s natural for me is to help people find what’s natural for them. I landed in digital marketing, and this is what I created. When I do the digital marketing with you, it’s actually a social purpose enterprise that subsidizes respite and homeschool for neurodivergent families.

Thank you for bringing that up, because that was my next question: why do you do this? What she does is really amazing. And we love, when you’re neurodivergent, to help each other, and jump in and be the person providing that support.

What she would tell the overwhelmed mom she used to be

If you were going to tell any mom who was in the place you were ten years ago, five years ago, with your kids, frustrated and overwhelmed, needing to start your own business because you don’t have a choice, you can’t go have a day job, you can’t be gone all day, what would you go back and tell yourself?

I would say that it’s easier than you think to honor yourself and not get lost in the caregiver burnout. Earn income by doing something people come and talk with you about anyway, or that you really love to do, what you hyperfocus on, or a skill set you have. Maybe you had to quit your job after 10, 15, 20 years of doing a particular thing, and you really know how to do it, and you don’t want that skill set to have been wasted. You can take those passions, life lessons, something you’ve been through, maybe you survived cancer, maybe you figured out how to do something really well, and you just want to share that with people, but you don’t know how to turn it into a business. You don’t have to be afraid of the technology. You don’t have to be afraid of sales. You don’t have to be afraid of having an online presence and developing something that would help your family and bring in more income, while you take care of the important things, which you always do first. You don’t have to choose one or the other. You can have both. That’s what I’d say.

A lesson I think all of us needed. I also have an autistic son, and when he was young, it was all about giving and doing for everyone but myself, and I didn’t have what I needed. What you’re giving them is making the things they’ve got to do easier, so they can have what they need.

Yeah. And you’re worth the investment. It actually saves you in the long run, because you don’t have to not earn income, you don’t have to constantly pay out. You can start earning.

Mindset plus tech: 80 percent of business is between the ears

We kind of get stuck in our camps. I do the tech building, but when I do my program, I also work with mindset. That’s why I mentioned I’m a Proctor Gallagher Institute life coach. A lot of the time it’s how we’re thinking. The success of a business, 80 percent of it, is between the ears of the business owner. So it’s really important that you understand how you work, what your thought paradigms are, how you can shift into a positive mode, and then get the skills and the understanding, and then have the technical, concrete tools.

I don’t just say, “Oh, I’ll build you a website.” That’s great, anybody can do that. But is it customized to you? Is it advancing what you want, and how you want to show up in the world? Is it natural, in the sense that it fits your tendencies as a business owner, what you gravitate to in your day, and when you can do things? Is it logistically going to produce something of business value? Those are all the pieces we have to have together. If you’re doing something that is actually from you, and you’re birthing something of you into the world, that’s why I say digital doula, and creating a digital legacy you can pass down as a business, then it needs to be done carefully, thinking about all of these angles, because then it’s authentically yours.

And one thing I am also adamant about: we don’t need to fit in other people’s boxes. We can construct our own box. That’s what I love about the flexibility of the software I use, building the box you want to see built, the one that fits you. If you naturally lean this way, why would you want to build yourself a business that cuts you off? You need to build your business around your natural self.

Where to find Michelle and what she has coming up

I love that. Thank you so much for being here and for sharing with us. Tell me what you have coming up in your digital world.

Firstly, I would love to invite anybody who’s thinking “that sounds interesting, but I’m not sure” to come join my free Facebook group, Natural Entrepreneur. If you’ve never done anything before, I have an eight-week program that can take you from “I have no idea what I would want to do” to your first sale. And then I have my 12-week program, for people who have been doing it for a bit but are getting really overwhelmed, where there’s so much to do and they need it simpler, less costly, more effective, and completed. That’s where we really do the offer ecosystem work. People can sign up for an offer ecosystem assessment. I’ll sit down with them for an hour and give them my best recommendations for free, and if they want to proceed, they can come into my 12-week program and we will build out that thing.

That’s amazing. We will drop her links below. She is awesome. This is the second time I’ve gotten to talk to her, and she’s part of my ecosystem now. If you have any questions at any time, always reach out to us, and we can connect you as well. Especially if you are one of my ND folks who has a lot of anxiety about reaching out to somebody new: just DM me, if you’re comfortable with me, and I will connect you to Michelle. She can absolutely help you create a business that’s easier and less overwhelming.

Thank you, Danielle, for everything that you do, because it makes a difference when there’s a voice out there that understands us, and that is willing to support and connect the way that you do. I just want to honor you for that, and thank you for the opportunity. And I’m really excited that hopefully this will help, and we can even get some more caregiver burnout taken care of by doing business together.

Absolutely. Have an amazing day, everyone. If you have questions, again, ask below.