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Beyond Margins

By: Susan Boles
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  • Summary

  • Can you build a business based on… “calm?” On Beyond Margins, host Susan Boles looks beyond the usual metrics of success to help you build a business where calm is the new KPI. With over 15 years of experience as an entrepreneur, CFO, and COO, Susan shares the business strategies that lead to a business with comfortable margins—financial, emotional, energetic, and scheduling margins. Join her and her guests as they counter the prevailing “wisdom” about business growth, productivity, and success to provide a framework for making choices that align with your values and true goals. Episode by episode, you’ll get a look at the team management, operations, financials, product development, and marketing of a calmer business.
    © 2024 ScaleSpark, Inc. dba Beyond Margins
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Episodes
  • Navigating Breaks In Business and Life: Inside My Unplanned Hiatus

    Navigating Breaks In Business and Life: Inside My Unplanned Hiatus
    May 14 2024

    Sometimes, you just need a break. I know I did.

    What was meant to be a quick breather turned into a transformative journey of two and a half years. The show (and my company) emerged with a new name, a new look, and a new perspective on what truly sustains a business—and a life.

    I say that I took a break from my business. But the reality is that I broke. I realized that I was burnt out to the point where I was physically, psychologically, and emotionally impaired.

    In this episode, I share the whole story—the behind-the-scenes of what went wrong, what went right, and why I’m back. Today’s episode kicks off a series on, appropriately, taking a break.

    Whether you need a break because of burnout like me, you or someone you love got sick, you're getting ready to have a kid and need to plan for parental leave, or you just want to take a sabbatical to refresh, big breaks are hard to prepare for.

    How do you figure out how to pay yourself (and your team) during a break? What systems and procedures need to be in place to make sure things run smoothly? How do you handle managing and serving your clients while you're away? And, if the break is unexpected and unplanned, what then?

    After all, running a business is a marathon—not a sprint. If we’re going to be in it for the whole 26.2 miles, we better learn how to rest. And that starts with making calm your KPI.

    Listen to the full episode to hear:

    • The challenges of pausing work and the reality of burnout recovery
    • Why I made the counterintuitive decision to take a full-time job to rest
    • The importance of building a business with comfortable margins and a focus on sustainability rather than relentless growth
    • Why I’m using calm as a key performance indicator (KPI) in business and advocating for a model that values space, margin, and a personalized definition of success


    Learn more about me, Susan Boles:

    • Beyond Margins
    • Connect on LinkedIn


    Learn more about Sean McMullin:

    • YellowHouse.Media


    You can leave Susan a message with all your thoughts and feedback here.
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    48 mins
  • Introducing Beyond Margins

    Introducing Beyond Margins
    May 1 2024
    Break the Ceiling is now Beyond Margins. I’m excited to bring back the show and introduce you to people thinking about operations, finance, and business-building with calm as their top KPI. Do you know someone who could use a little more calm in their business? Someone who wants to think beyond margins? Share the show with them! And make sure you follow or subscribe in your favorite podcast app.***Honestly, I don’t really want to 10x my business. There. I said it. I want interesting work, enough revenue to be comfortable, and 10x the time spent riding my bike or paddling in my kayak. Maybe that’s how you feel, too. When you set out to build your business, I bet you wanted to build something you loved that made you money, supported your family, created great jobs for other folks, and gave you freedom and flexibility. You knew it wasn’t going to be easy… but this?!You've worked weekends, early mornings, and late nights around your kids' soccer practices, and you've been exhausted and overworked. You've worn all the hats and done all the jobs. Maybe you’ve been through burnout or burnt it all down (maybe more than once). Now you just want a business that works for you, that feels fun, comfortable, and calm.. Your goals are similar to mine: you want to take Fridays off, chaperone your kids' field trips, or hang out in the sunshine on a Tuesday afternoon, but still know that the work you’re doing matters. For all the talk of entrepreneurship leading to more freedom and flexibility, you and I know those things don’t just happen.But we all want to be financially secure, to build something meaningful and important, to make the right decisions, the smart decisions. And when things aren’t going all that well, or there are just a million decisions to make, or we don’t really know what to do next, you make the choices you see others making.I call these default decisions.These are choices we make in our business, based on what everyone else is doing, without really ever thinking about them or whether they're the right choice for you and your business. Default decisions sound like "best practices," or "what's working right now," or "my step-by-step method to X."The defaults are hard to escape. They're caused by something deeper - this culture that you probably started your business heavily influenced by, even if you wish you weren't - productivity and achievement culture.That's where it's about outlasting, out-hustling, growth = success, profit doesn't matter, reinvesting in the business, growth, growth, growth, 10x everything.And by following these default decisions, you can build a business that is technically "correct" by all external definition. But those default decisions end up anchoring you to a business that's only focused on your sales, your output, your efficiency, your productivity - because, well, that's the default.Default decisions are based on assumptions—that your idea of success is a permanent island getaway or a Lamborghini in the driveway, or maybe that “doing more” or “crushing it” is the key to overcoming any challenge.Those assumptions can lead you astray when they are absolutely not the things you want from your business. Remember, calm? Fun? Comfortable?Relying on default decisions might boost your bank account for a month or juice your social media following, but they won’t get you the calm, comfy business you crave.Here’s what I’ve learned over 15 years of building my own companies and acting as CFO for others:Your company is going to end up being whatever your top priority is. If your top priority—is growth - the default? Well, your company will end up focusing on growth — potentially at the expense of your profit margins, your team's well-being, and sometimes even your ethics. If you want to build something different, you have to solve for something different. Instead of solving for growth, what if you solved for calm? You can’t build a calmer business unless you design it that way. It has to be built into your business's DNA. It has to be your overriding priority, the thing that you’re solving for, the touchpoint you’re always coming back to. To build a calmer business, you need to make calm your new KPI. I’m your host, Susan Boles, and this is Beyond Margins – the show where we geek out about how to build a calmer business with comfortable margins. I’m a speaker, podcaster, and consultant with more than 15 years of experience as both a CFO and COO in a variety of industries. I’ve worked with major universities, small retail shops, and software companies, just to name a few, and now I focus on working with agencies, consultants, and creatives. Each episode, we’ll explore: Financial strategies that help you build towards something calmerNew ways to think about your operations to build more comfortable margins Team management and leadership strategies to help you support your team’s wellbeingCountering default ...
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    4 mins
  • Taking a Break

    Taking a Break
    Aug 3 2021

    I wanted to give you an update on what's going on with Break the Ceiling.

    Over the last two years, I've released almost a hundred episodes of Break the Ceiling. I've put out so many episodes that I'm really proud of, and I've talked to a ton of really amazing business owners.

    Thank you so much for listening and hanging out here with me, geeking out on the backend of running a business.

    I wanted to let you know that we're going on hiatus, so we won't be releasing any new episodes for a while. I want to take some time to think about how I want the show to evolve, and I'd like to reimagine it a bit. So I'm taking a break from recording and releasing episodes here so that I can take this space.

    And to be honest, it's been a heck of a year and a half for me and I need a little bit of a break.

    Stay tuned to this feed and hit subscribe if you're not already a subscriber so you don't miss it when we come back with a new updated and improved show.

    We have some really exciting things planned, both for the podcast and for the business.

    In the meantime, there's almost a hundred episodes in the feed so definitely catch up on the ones you’ve missed.

    I'd love to connect with you and hear what you'd like to see for the show going forward and I'm looking forward to being back in your podcast feed and your ears soon.

    Learn more about Susan:

    • Scalespark.co
    • Twitter @theSusanBoles
    • LinkedIn @thesusanboles
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    2 mins
Leadership Management Economics
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