Stop Burning It Down: The 3 Phases of Building a Sustainable Spiritual Business
If you've been in the spiritual business world for a few years, you likely know this feeling: The sudden, overwhelming urge to burn your entire business to the ground, change your niche, and start completely over.
When the algorithms change, when a launch doesn’t hit the numbers you wanted, or when you just feel that deep, heavy frustration... the instinct is to pivot.
But as a spiritual entrepreneur, constantly reinventing the wheel isn’t saving your business—it’s exhausting your spirit. If you are tired of the hustle and craving a business that feels like a deep, grounding exhale, it’s time to look at the three phases of spiritual entrepreneurship, and why you might be stuck in the messy middle.
A business friend of mine shared her heart with me like me she's been in business for 8 years now and yet she still making minimum wage numbers despite the fact that when her and myself and many others got certified for coaching back in the 2016-2018 era where we were told that you could make 6 figures in 6 months so long as you kept a positive mindset.
As I listened to her admit the shame and embarrassment that only those of us who have been in business longer than 5 years (the average amount of time it takes a business to hit profitability in the US) can fully understand.
There’s a unique pain that comes from doing everything right - healing yourself from the inside out, going to therapy, doing EMDR, NFT, EFT and all the other acronyms ; spending years sloughing off the hustle culture and bro marketing and 9-5 bad habits that society taught us, only to still come up short in business.
We’re blazing a new path.
A new way of operating as business owners in the new age.
We listen to our intuition.
We trust Divine Source first.
We rest.
We automate and delegate.
We live our lives and get plenty of sleep.
AND
We are profitable, sustainable, systemetized and legitimate.
It’s time to release the shame of not feeling legit.
You have the legal structures in place, you have a logo, a brand, a marketing system that feels nourishing to you and your ideal clients and you know what the heck you’re doing.
You are an expert!
Wait - do you have all of those things in place? Or have you been trusting that your angels will do those things for you?
Sometimes we need to take ownership in aligned action too.
Legitimacy Checklist:
Do you have a solid brand you’ve stuck with for more than 2 years? Fonts, colors, graphics, voice?
Do you have a solid, consistent signature offer?
Are you clear on who your best fit client is?
Do you know where she hangs out online?
Are you getting in front of her consistently with your marketing strategy?
Do you have a solid, consistent marketing strategy?
Success is a 3-Pronged Approach
What makes a business successful? It’s not a simple magic number of days with a website. It’s not necessarily related to how many reels you’ve made or how many emails you’ve sent. Success is slightly more nuanced than that. In fact, my guides have confirmed that success is a 3-pronged approach. You need soul-alignment, proper systems in place and blind luck.
Yup, you heard that last one right - blind luck. Virtually every single uber successful entrepreneur out there will tell you, the success was a combination of hard work AND blind luck. Let’s explore that angle first.
Blind Luck
If you look at Bill Gates through the lens of Malcolm Gladwell in his best selling book, Outliers: The Story of Success, you’ll see that even Bill Gates, as brilliant as he is, can attribute a portion of his success to being in the right place at the right time (a.k.a divine timing or blind luck).
The 10,000 Hour Rule - You may have heard of this. It is the rule that to be an expert at something you must put in 10,000 hours of practice to get there. This essentially applies to every industry or activity. However, even getting the opportunity to practice something for 10,000 depends on luck, external circumstances and fate.
Demographic Luck - Gladwell talks extensively about how the month and year you were born affects success rates, explaining that if Gates would have been born later he would have been too young to prosper from the internet boom and if he would’ve been born earlier he would’ve been too old. Gates was born at exactly the right time for what he was born to do.
Gladwell describes lots of other successful figures and case studies with the hidden opportunities and divine meetings that assisted the hard work and soul alignment into full on success.
You and Bill Gates are very similar.
I believe “you were born for such a time as this” (a quote from Esther 4:14 in the NIV Bible.)
You too were born at exactly the right moment. How do I know?
Well, you wouldn't still be here if you didn't feel deep in your belly that you were called to do this work.
It’s your purpose.
Your undeniable path.
The exact experience you were meant to have.
So if we accept that the “blind-luck” piece is totally and completely out of your control, then how do we energetically navigate this?
Around this specific painpoint I saw a channeled vision.
A beautiful path unfolded, full of wildflowers. The path went on as far as I could see in the distance, though I had no idea where it was going. As I began to walk the path would wind and turn a bit, but the path stayed in front of me at all times, unrolling as a beautiful carpet for my feet.
This, my dear, is the message for you.
Stay on the path. One foot in front of the other. You were taught to value only the destination, but that’s not the goal with this kind of work that you are here to do. The success is in walking the path. You are here. You keep showing up. You enjoy the path, right? Don’t you love being on this path? When you release the idea of where you are going and instead feel the sunlight on your skin, the wind in your hair and smell the fragrant jasmine as you notice the flowers blooming alongside the path, these things bring you into the joy of the journey. Through these elements you find your presence and in presence there is peace.
Accept that the path is the path. You can’t control it. You don’t know where it will lead you, but your spiritual practice is to keep walking it and enjoying each and every step as much as possible. Let God do the rest.
Now, about the other 2 prongs.. If we can’t control the path, which is one-third of the equation, what can we control? The other two-thirds. Hey, good math skills!
2. Purpose, Alignment and Healing
This one I’m going to guess you know well, already. You don't get to this many years in business by being out of alignment.
The 3 Phases of the Spiritual Entrepreneur born in the 2016-2020 era
Phase 1: The "Muggle" World
We were raised that hard work and using “the right” systems and marketing tactics would make us successful. Enter: Hustle Culture, Bro Marketing, The Frazzled, Burnt Out and Over-Exhausted Entrepreneur.
Phase 2: The Awakening (and the Burn Down)
Then there was this juicy period of time that bookended the Covid Era, where I saw an entire sect of spiritual women denounce the hustle culture. We realized those things weren’t working. We blamed the patriarchy and burnt our systems and structures (similar to bra burning) in the spirit of standing up for the divine feminine.
We reject all strategy, calling it "toxic."
We rely only on our vibes, our intuition, and the alignment of the stars.
We burn down our old systems.
Everyone I know was trusting spirit and source and forgoing marketing techniques and arbitrary rules for success that had been drilled in our brain since birth. We were tipping the scales very far in the other direction; the direction of the feminine: receptivity, openness, creativity, energetic alignment only.
This phase is beautiful and necessary for your unlearning. But it comes with a shadow: Every time things get hard, your trauma response is to burn the business down and pivot again. > The Hard Truth: You cannot build a sustainable sanctuary if you keep tearing up the foundation every time you get frustrated. Trusting the universe doesn't mean abandoning your business structure.
And to be clear, the scales needed to be tipped that far to the other side in order to bring them back into full alignment, which leads me to phase 3, which I truly believe we are in now.
Phase 3: The Integration (The Matriarch Era)
This is where we realize we need spiritual depths AND supportive structures that hold the divine feminine. We need SOUL and STRATEGY. Purpose and consistent aligned action.
This is where true abundance lives. Phase 3 is the sacred marriage of soul and strategy. It is recognizing that you are an absolute expert in your spiritual gifts, but you must also be a grounded steward of your business.
In Phase 3, you stop acting like a frantic employee and step into the energy of the Matriarch. You build light, easy, and sustainable systems that hold the weight of your business so your energy doesn't have to.
If I had to guess, you are ending your Phase 2 era and are starting to sniff around Phase 3, albeit from a much more skeptic and jaded stance than you did when you were in Phase 1. Rightfully so. Many of us have been lied to by industry professionals. We were sold on the idea that hard work alone would get you a lamborghini in less than a year. Then we found out the hard way it wasn’t true. What worked for one person doesn't mean they are a guru with the end-all-be-all answer to success; yet that’s what the internet was full of a few years back.
Today we are smarter.
We are more intuitive, more experienced. And we know that a guru isn’t our answer.
You’re done looking for the next tool, course or coach to save you.
3. Hard Work, Business Smarts + Sustainable Strategy
The third prong to success is the actual human part of learning the game and doing the work, showing up consistently day after day until “luck” meets you.
When you are in Phase 2, frustration feels like a sign from the Universe that you are in the wrong niche. (As a Generator, I can tell you that frustration is just your energy telling you you've temporarily lost your flow—not that your entire life purpose is wrong!)
When you constantly pivot, change your offers, or ghost your community because you're "realigning," you are accidentally closing the doors to your own shop. Let me give you an example.
Why You Need to "Keep the Doors Open"
In my small town we have had a series of small nail salons and barber shops open and close within a year. They all do the same thing. They open their doors, we celebrate, the town flocks to support them, but it doesn't feel like enough support quick enough to the owner and so 2 months in they take another job or start pursuing other paths. Inevitably, they aren’t at their shop to take walk-ins, their availability for appointments goes way down and so by month 6-8 they are walking away stating it was too hard.
Meanwhile, the businesses in the same industry in the same town that are booked solid tell me they welcome more salons as they have to turn people away constantly. I have asked them what it takes to be successful and they all say the same thing: “Keep your doors open during work hours and commit to being there no matter what. Do that for 2 years and you’ll have a solid clientele built up.”
I have found the same advice true for my yoga business. Too many yoga teachers start a class and then 2 weeks later cancel for personal reasons and then 2 months later they don't feel like they have a big enough class so they change times or days of the week. They repeat this cycle until they give up entirely. What they aren’t realizing is that every time they switch to a new time slot, they lose the committed students they were already building up in the current time slot. It takes people several months to change their habits, adapt to new schedules and recommit to a new time slot. Layer in a random cancellation and the students won’t feel safe to build their life schedules around a flaky class.
Think about it, every time you switch niches (guilty as sin over here 👋) or cancel a webinar due to low registration or rework your signature product - you start over with building trust and commitment from your audience. One of my yoga mentors told me this: “Even if no one shows up for your class, you still stay and practice yourself. Your students will never be more dedicated than you are. If you are dedicated and devoted to your class, they will be too.” That’s been some of the best advice I’ve received in the yoga business and continues to prove itself true to this day.
✍️Do you tend to change niches, brands or signature offers when business slows down?
✍️Do you cancel retreats, webinars, courses, etc. if the attendance is low?
I’ve done both wayyyy too much in my 8 years and I can tell you with certainty, it has hurt my business and swayed my audience’s trust.
Think of your business like a brick-and-mortar boutique:
If a customer walks down the street to visit your beautiful healing shop, but the hours are completely unpredictable, the sign keeps changing, and half the time the store is boarded up while you "rebrand"... eventually, they stop walking down that street.
Your clients need to know you are open for business. They need the safety of your consistency just as much as you do.
People want to know how to easily categorize you in their head.
They want to know your MAIN thing so when they’re at brunch with the girls and someone mentions that very specific issue they're having, they can jump in quickly to tell them about how AWESOME you are at solving that specific problem! They’ll forward an email to them and boom you have a trusted referral you didn't even know about, all because you stayed true to the main thing.
My one caveat here is your first 2-3 years of business. If you are a coach you absolutely must have a “spaghetti on the wall” phase during this time. Try different niches, work with lots of clients. Get your feet wet. This is the only way to find out what you truly love coaching/teaching around and who you most love working with.
I’m also not saying you should never pivot if you feel called in your soul to pivot. I’m just saying don’t be as quick to pivot as I’ve been the last 5 years, where I burn it all down and rebuild something new on a random Tuesday because of a Generator whim I happen to be on. Sit with it first. Take your time. Slow transitions if any at all. Trust that you are enough and that more often than not the problem isn’t your offer or your brand colors or your niche, it’s that you haven't had your doors open during office hours consistently long enough. Stay in your business. Keep the door open and wipe counters, stock products and sweep the floors in eager participation that the clients will come, because inevitably my dear, if you are doing all of these things, they will.
A note on Business Smarts
I always tell my clients they start their business journey as experts in their field, ready to expand into business. The thing is, they are very likely beginners at business and need to learn a whole lot of things in order to successfully turn a passion project into a sustainable business. Things like setting up your business entity, understanding basic business bookkeeping and tax regulations and getting extremely smart with your marketing strategy is what skills must be learned in order to succeed.
That is exactly why I created The Sparkling Business Academy. TSBA is your Phase 3. It is the space where we stop burning it all down, and instead, build the grounded, light, and easy systems that allow you to finally exhale, trust your business, and keep your doors open with confidence.
How to Find Your "Exhale"
Your ultimate goal isn't a chaotic quantum leap; it is Sustainable Consistency. You want to trust your business again. You want to wake up, sip your coffee, and know your systems are running quietly in the background.
To get there, you must:
Stop confusing friction with failure.
Commit to your current path long enough to let the roots take hold.
Embrace grounded business strategy as a deep act of self-care.
Strategy isn't unspiritual. It is the chalice that holds the holy water of your gifts.
Step into Phase 3 with Slow Marketing Studio©
You didn't start a spiritual business to become a burned-out, full-time marketing manager for your own life's work. You started it for freedom, flow, and deep impact.
But to get there—to truly embody that peaceful Matriarch energy where your business supports you instead of draining you—you need a foundation that doesn't crumble every time the wind changes or the algorithms shift. You need the grounded, practical systems that make abundance sustainable.
That is exactly why I created Slow Marketing Studio©.
SMS© is your Phase 3 sanctuary. It is the space where we step off the exhausting "launch-and-burn" rollercoaster and build the light, easy, and highly profitable structures that run quietly in the background. Inside, we honor your natural rhythms, completely ditch the toxic hustle culture, and put the true business foundations in place so you can finally take that deep, well-deserved exhale.
If you are ready to stop ripping up the seeds to see if they are growing, and instead give your business the exact strategy it needs to bloom, I would love to welcome you inside.