The Design Business Show 186: Creating Space for Aligned Business Shifts with Ari Hale

Ari Hale is a mom, business + marketing coach, and a systems + automation genius. She helps freelancers stop trying to be everything to everybody so that they can focus and think like a CEO.

In her programs, she helps give the mindset, systems, and templates you need to grow your business. She helps clients increase their revenue, and make more of an impact while working less hours.

Ari is not another business coach who’s never had a business. She’s been in your shoes and every single thing she teaches is something she has used successfully in her businesses and her coaching clients businesses.

Here’s what we covered on the episode:

How Ari Has Transitioned Her Business

How I have known Ari from the industry for 8 years now – we met while working together on a project for a mutual client and through the years have worked together, and I’ve hired her to do some coaching for me
Ari is a business and mindset coach; right now, she works with business owners who are driven, ambitious, and high performers but are at a point where they’ve realized this isn’t what they want and are questioning how to walk away or transition away from something they’ve worked so hard to build but currently isn’t in alignment with them
How we were both launch managers and are good at the systems, organizational, and project management skills, but the context in which we used them were on completely different sides of the launches
How Ari started as a virtual assistant in 2014 and shifted into exclusively launch and project management
Building a business launching back to back wasn’t sustainable for Ari; she needed downtime to rest, so, around 2018, she decided to transition away, and then in 2020, she officially stopped all client work in that manner and launched a project management course, membership, coaching and her group program which she ran for almost 2 years
Now Ari is transitioning again in her business and says she is getting closer and closer to alignment for the present moment and where she’s at now
It’s hard to create a brand for something and then decide you want to transition out of it– a lot of the people we helped with launches spent all of their time, investments, and assets on teams and stuff for their launches, not necessarily for their brand
How Ari and I believe you should test your service before doing everything that goes into launching it and building your brand
A mistake Ari has made and has seen past clients make is rushing to build an entire business and brand around an offer that validates and does well without giving it time and space to breathe or before seeing if you enjoy everything that goes into it like the operations, delivery and clients you’re bringing in
There’s always this rush to make more instead of taking a pause and checking in with yourself – there’s no conversation or strategy around making sure what you’re doing is really in alignment with you
One thing Ari realized this year is that she has been doing things that are out of alignment with why she decided she wanted to have a business

Our Real Experiences + What We Learned

I talk about how I realized I didn’t want to do launch management anymore, and Ari adds that we would help these businesses get up and running, sacrifice a lot of time and energy, and then when it came time to scale and grow, the processes, compensation, and consideration from human to human weren’t equitable or fair
When these businesses want to grow and scale, they want to hire someone younger who will do it for cheaper, but these people don’t have the experience and don’t know what to look out for in the industry
We talk about how to keep contractors who helped you build your business and how to not burn contractor bridges by treating people poorly
I share the story of how I worked for someone and couldn’t get away from my computer, not even to move, which we were doing at the time because we were launching
Ari shares the story of a client who hired someone to come in and clean up operations – she was asked to speak to this person and was very transparent in her feedback with things she thought were going well and areas where she thought there could be an improvement
When Ari shared her feedback, the client was furious that she was so honest about their business – they were verbally abusive and fired her that day but realized they needed her and asked her to come back
Ari thinks when people reach a certain level in their business, it’s like they lose touch with reality; they get a weird complex around speaking to their team, and they forget we’re all human – she never wants to create experiences like that in her business or for her team
When you treat people poorly, all that energy leaks through everything – the company that treated Ari poorly had lower audience engagement, emails opened, and their launches stopped working
I share a similar story where I was yelled at because the web developer wanted to be paid
How the campaign I just worked on was fun, but there were a lot of issues on the back end – like it was extremely hard to send out an email broadcast and how I wanted to help them with that
There are two other stories I share – one about having to let a client go after 2 weeks and one about letting a client go after not getting compensated per our agreement
What Ari has learned as a leader is that her business runs much differently than what she’s experienced and how she’s been super intentional about not letting her business stress her out – if it’s causing her displeasure or stress, she’s not doing it because she’s seen what kind of monsters people can turn into because of stress
Ari talks about how she runs her business with her team – she doesn’t launch anything and expect them to help unless she’s had a meeting and planning call with them; Ari doesn’t have their numbers unless they’ve texted her first and because things are so simplified they don’t even have a weekly team call anymore
Mistakes are encouraged on Ari’s team because she doesn’t want them to be afraid to make mistakes – this way, they can see where things can be improved
The freedom Ari gives her employees makes them happy because it allows them to get in their flow, create their process and just be deadline-based
I talk about my process for the podcast, the journal I want to create, and even the virtual summit I’ve been thinking about for creators to learn about all the ways they can make money online

Ari’s Current Business Pivot + Creating Alignment in Your Business

How Ari launched Allergic To Hourly™ in 2020, which was the most financially successful thing she’s done but says she wasn’t prepared to grow and scale it; she didn’t have a good mindset or financial strategy, which created a lot of pressure for her and diminished her creative flow
When Ari first started building her audience, she posted and created what she wanted, but when the program became successful, she started posting for conversions instead of using her creative flow, which made her miserable
For the last 4 – 6 months, Ari has been doing a lot of internal work to tap back into what she wants and what she will make it mean about herself if she transitions again
How there is no course or streamlined strategy for pivots in your business because it’s very specific to the individual – Ari shares that she’s gaining clarity and feels like she wants to create, engage and invite new people in again
Ari speaks about the grieving process she had to go through to let go of the things she had recently built and invested in because she was not happy with it
It’s not about the clients Ari was working with, and she shares that she’s been very transparent with them about her journey because a lot of people don’t want to talk about it, and many of them are going through the same thing
If you are a go with the flow type of person and never take time to decide what you want and create a vision for yourself, you’re going to flow into things you don’t want
How the operations of Ari’s business were never in alignment because she never stopped to give herself space to think about what she wanted and how she wanted things to look and feel
By ignoring herself and the feelings she was having, Ari created situations where she had to make a change, and it mostly manifested in her mental health and her ability to create
To make this shift in her business, Ari switched Allergic To Hourly™ to self-study, because she was unclear on what she wanted the program to look like, so Ari paused enrollment and marketing while figuring out how her business could support how she wanted to feel
How it can be scary to push pause, but Ari says she needed to create as much space physically with her time and mentally so she could figure out what she wants
You are going to be a completely different person than who you were when you first started, from 5 years ago, from last year, which is why it’s okay to shift and change to create alignment for yourself in all seasons of life
Both of Ari’s programs are self-study right now, and something she’s been experimenting with is mindset coaching because she realized clients were coming to her for what they thought were strategy issues, but when they dug deeper, they were really mindset issues
Ari shares that it’s been fun to dig deep and help give clients the tools they need to self-coach themselves, so they don’t feel like they are stuck between their calls
In the past, Ari went off advice from other people about what her business should look like
Ari has discovered that many clients start their business out of necessity or because they fell into it, so when she works with them, they first figure out how they feel, and she guides them into trusting themselves, the things they are feeling, and navigating the times it doesn’t feel great
How Ari was able to get her mind to a place where she felt like she wasn’t spiraling and how she then got her body on board by moving and using supplements/food to make sure her body felt right and good
This year, Ari worked with Chrissy Papetti, who helped her learn about nervous system regulation through human design and gene keys, which Ari has found extremely helpful in keeping herself grounded
Right now, Ari is into tapping (EFT), automatic writing and shares that she recently started working with Susan Ferraro again for mindset work
Different things I’ve learned about myself through the years like how to eat and allow myself to rest – something I want to learn more about is navigating mindset work vs. anxiety and depression
Ari talks about leveraging how your brain naturally processes information instead of forcing yourself to be or think like other people, which is something she struggled with in the past
A lot of what Ari has experienced in the last year with her business has been an opportunity to better understand, accept and love herself, which is the energy she wants to build her business around
How Ari has been able to navigate and move forward in her business while having a little boy at home
Ari shares that it’s okay to have low moments as long as you can pull yourself out and says that she’s learned that feeling the highs and the lows is part of her process
Part of Ari’s purpose of being here isn’t just to help clients grow a business so they can amplify what they want out of life; it’s to hold space for people who are experiencing the things that she’s experienced and navigated
So many people are rushing to an end goal without thinking about what they want, what it means when they get there or what happens after they do get there
People get on this hamster wheel of achievement, and it feels empty because they don’t know what they’re doing it for at a certain point
If you don’t want to deal with yourself and get to know all sides of yourself, Ari does not recommend getting into business because it will bring all those things up
How I’m giving myself as much space and grace as possible because I need it and how it’s okay to give yourself permission to not have it all figured out and to just let it be a mess for a bit
Trust yourself and know that you will land where you are intended to land and know that with every experience, there is something to learn
Connect with Ari through her website, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok