The Nitty Gritty:
- How conscious scheduling allows Tracey to time gaps to be “out” of her business and travel
- Why careful cash flow management is imperative when you sell fewer products or services
- How experimentation was key to helping her business evolve
This week on the Profit. Power. Pursuit podcast I talk to Uncaged Life founder Rebecca Tracey, and the insights she has for building a business that allows her to pursue her personal adventures in rock climbing and traveling the world are incredible. Rebecca helps solopreneurs, life and health coaches, virtual assistants and more who are just starting out build an online business they can run from anywhere in the world.
Conscious Scheduling
I take a lot of time off. To the point people ask, ‘Do you work at all?’
– Rebecca Tracey
Even though Rebecca first started her business while living in a van while on an 8-month rock climbing trip (something she doesn’t recommend by the way), she soon realized that for her to live the life she wanted it would be important to not have client time during the climbing season. She has created a business model that allows her to run one main program that launches twice a year that are strategically scheduled for right before or after climbing season. When she’s traveling, she doesn’t have anything in her business that consistently needs her time, although she admits it did take some time to experiment and figure out what would work.
Careful Cash Flow Management
My lifestyle is adventurous and awesome, but also pretty cheap.
– Rebecca Tracey
Rebecca used to run her program six times per year, but has gone down to two times. It’s her second year trying out her streamlined business model and she’s still getting used to it. It’s definitely a bit scary and a little stressful being reliant on only two launches a year to make the money she needs. To ease that stress, she has a financial buffer in savings to cover her personal and business expenses if one of her launches doesn’t hit the numbers, but so far, things are working out well. Her operating expenses are also quite low.
Evolution of a Business
As her business model evolved Rebecca wasn’t afraid to experiment. The program that she runs is really fine-tuned and gets results, and it’s the thing she loves doing most in her business. She decided that her program was going to be the thing she would sell, and she stopped messing around with trying to create new things all the time. She decided to just give it a go at her program being her main thing. It was working and feeling pretty good, so she decided, why not just go for it.
When she realized that running the program six times a year wasn’t very “uncaged” of her or good for her sanity, she experimented with reducing the frequency. As a result, even though at first she didn’t want to increase her group size and it was a little scary to do so, she had to if she was going down in frequency. So, she doubled the group size and when everything seemed to run smoothly, she doubled the group size again. She did have to make changes to the program to accommodate more people and she’s still adjusting her marketing efforts to be sure she gets the number of participants she needs for each launch. She knows that she will continue to evolve her business model in the future, as the program she runs will eventually expire.
Be sure to tune into the full episode where you can learn more specifics about Rebecca’s adventurous life and her formula for success at juggling her business and her personal passions.
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