A few weeks ago, I had the best conversation with someone, which really opened my eyes to the assumptions that people make about what I do as the owner of my business.
I thought this made for a really fascinating podcast episode.
In today’s episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, I’m going to share with you 10 things that I do not do as a business owner, and I think that some of them might surprise you.
Let’s dive in!
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Here are 10 things that I don’t do as a business owner that you might be quite surprised about.
1. I do not post everywhere
I don’t post on:
- X
- Bluesky
- YouTube (other than these podcast episodes)
I’m not on every platform.
In fact, I have one primary social platform, and that is Facebook.
My Facebook page is the best place to hang out with me on social media. It’s the place where my best content, ideas and questions go. I spend most of my time online on Facebook because it’s my primary social media platform.
A lot of people assume that I am streaming things into multiple spaces because in the very early days of social media (and even up to this day) a lot of “experts” recommend pushing your content out onto multiple platforms. They say that “If you’re not everywhere, you’re nowhere.”
But that’s proven to be untrue, especially in recent years.
People have social media fatigue.
They don’t want to chase you around the internet and follow you from platform to platform.
If they do follow you on multiple platforms but you’re pushing out the same stuff everywhere, then very quickly, they’re going to get tired of seeing the same stuff over and over and assume they’ve seen your content before.
It’s something that I don’t do, and it’s something I don’t recommend. I don’t recommend being on all the different platforms.
In fact, I recently deleted my Threads account and my X account (no thank you, Elon Musk).
I don’t post on LinkedIn. I sometimes get tagged on LinkedIn (especially when I’ve sponsored a sports team), and I still keep my LinkedIn active because it’s a great referral source for my clients and I often refer people from my LinkedIn connections to my clients in my business. But I don’t post on LinkedIn.
People were surprised when I took this podcast from being a video and audio podcast down to audio-only. But my listenership of this podcast skyrocketed when I stopped having the video version available.
I think part of that is because people get a bit perfectionist about how they consume your content. If the video exists, people want to wait and watch the video because that’s the ideal way to listen to it. They can sit and take notes at their desk. This meant people were hoarding the podcast to listen later, rather than subscribing and listening as it came out.
Making it available in fewer places has been responsible for a huge spike in listenership.
That’s the first of the 10 things I don’t do.
2. I don’t work 40 hours a week and I don’t work 8-hour days
Most of my work days are four hours or less, and most weeks, I work four days rather than five.
Some weeks I only work three days a week.
My goal in 2025 is to increase my work hours. I reduced my work hours to five hours a week when I was recovering from a surgery in 2021, and as part of that recovery, I had a chronic health condition. I had chronic fatigue, I was really struggling with my energy, and so I had to work my way back up to 15-hour weeks, very slowly.
Then in 2023, I set the goal of working 20 hours a week. I didn’t quite make it – I averaged about 17 hours.
In 2024, I aimed to work over 20 hours a week. I got to 21!
Now in 2025, my goal is to build up to working around 25 hours a week.
I’m itchy to get back into my business a little more.
My energy is starting to stabilise and I’m able to bring more consistent energy into my business. But I don’t want to burn myself out. I don’t want to overdo it.
So far in 2025, I have been working around 15 to 20 hours each week on average, and about half of that is client-facing and half of that is behind the scenes.
I certainly don’t do 40-hour weeks or 8-hour work days. I don’t think I could do an 8-hour work day unless I’m running Virtual Conference which is two 8-hour days (which I then take a week off afterwards).
At the end of 2024, I ran a 3-day retreat where I did two 2-hour sessions per day, and even after that, I took five days off because I wanted to make sure that I didn’t burn myself out, and I wanted to give myself a nice rest afterwards and balance that out.
I did nothing else on those days because I didn’t want to go too big too consistently.
I’m not someone who likes to work late at night, I’m not someone who likes to work early in the morning.
I prefer to start my work day around 8-9am and finish up around lunchtime most days if I can.
Usually, I might have one or two client sessions a week that are in the afternoons. But other than that, I keep everything limited to the mornings.
It’s part of the reason why the Planning System calls this year are at 10am because I wanted to restrict my work days to be mostly mornings.
My best time to work and think and get stuff done is 9am until lunchtime. After lunchtime, I’m pretty done, so I try and keep everything in those hours.
3. I do not start my days the same way and at the same time each day
People often assume that I have this amazing early morning routine or start-of-day routine that I do the same way and at the same time every single day.
That is not the case.
For starters, the whole premise of having a morning routine that’s the same each day and getting up at the same time each day is built on the androgen hormone cycle, which is the assigned male at birth hormone cycle.
I was assigned female at birth, so my productivity cycle is a 28-day cycle, it’s not a 24-hour cycle.
Because of that, I wake up at different times of day depending on where I am in my cycle, and I start my work day at different times of day, depending on my cycle, depending on what client calls I have, and depending on how I’m feeling.
If I wake up and I don’t feel like I’ve had a really good night’s sleep, I don’t force myself to go through the same morning routine and sit at my desk at the same time every day, because I’ll just sit at my desk and fade out.
I’ll just stare off into space and do nothing.
Instead, I listen to my body. I pay attention to how I’m feeling and what my energy is like for the day. I do have a start-of-day routine in that when I sit down at my desk, I start my day by opening my planner, making sure I’m clear on my priorities for the day, setting my intentions, and getting an energetic connection into my business. But I could do that at 7am some days, I could do that at midday some days.
Some days I don’t do it at all because I don’t work at all.
That was interesting to me that people still thought that I start my days the same way at the same time every day.
I do know that morning routine is seen as something critical to being a good business owner. But it’s a very patriarchal, very masculine energy, which I don’t subscribe to.
4. I don’t always work with a mentor
I think that this is often bandied about as a non-negotiable. We’re constantly told that you should always work with a mentor, because you can always learn more, and you should always be pushed outside your comfort zone.
I just don’t subscribe to that stuff. To be honest with you, since I had my surgery and my chronic health issues, I just don’t have the headspace and the energy for it all the time.
I’d rather work with someone when I’m in the mood to stretch and challenge, and I can see that I need some freshness or a different approach than just working with someone all the time ‘just because’.
For 2022 and 2023, I didn’t work with a mentor. I had a wellness practitioner that I worked with, and a mindset practitioner that I worked with haphazardly, but I didn’t have an ongoing mentor.
In 2024, I worked with someone for three months, but that was it. And in 2025, I’m working more consistently with a mindset practitioner, but I’m not working with a strategy mentor, because to be honest with you, from a strategy perspective, I know what to do.
I’ve got my strategy. It’s just now a matter of really finessing it and seeing it through.
In 2024, I didn’t follow through on a launch plan for a single launch because my health was a bit haphazard, I was still finessing the things in my strategy, and I was in a bit of an experimentation phase with some of my strategy.
On top of that, my number one strategy of ongoing list growth ads on Facebook was blown to smithereens when I had a reel go viral on Facebook, which messed up my audience measuring and tracking, and so I had to start over at the end of 2024.
For six months, the strategy that worked for me so consistently and so well was not available to me.
I could have learned how to access my audience in different ways but I couldn’t be bothered.
I know what to do. And I know what strategies work for me. I know what launch structure works for me.
It’s a matter of just getting it done now.
I’m really seeing 2025 as a year to solidify my strategy and implement what I know. Working with a mindset practitioner will help me ensure that I’m not sabotaging the success of that or getting in the way of that because of mindset or energy stuff.
That’s another of the 10 things I don’t do in my business – I don’t always work with a mentor.
5. I don’t search for new marketing strategies
I don’t see learning new strategies as a good return on investment.
Isn’t that fascinating?
For example, if I join a membership, I don’t see learning a new strategy as return on investment. I measure my return on investment from the results I get from that strategy if I’m doing something new.
In a lot of cases, return on investment for me comes from refining an existing strategy so that it delivers better results… not from learning a new marketing strategy.
I’m not searching for:
- New marketing strategies
- New platforms
- What works today compared to yesterday
I know what works for me at the moment. It still works for me. It still has scalability. I still haven’t seen those through to their full potential, so that’s what I’m focused on.
I’m focused on implementing what I already know and what strategies I already have in place, but implementing them to their full capacity and to their full scalability.
Someone that I was speaking to recently asked me where I go to learn new strategies to grow my business… and to be honest, I don’t need anything new. I don’t go looking for new stuff.
In fact, I often find new strategies are thrust upon me by the algorithm, and they are often the source of a month’s distraction away from my core strategy that was a waste of time.
If I’m learning new stuff all the time and I’m not refining my existing strategy and solidifying the results from my existing strategy, that’s not necessarily a good thing.
I think for a lot of people, they learn a new strategy and they perceive that as a good return on investment. But how did it return on your investment? What were the results of doing that new strategy?
In most cases, there have been no results, they’ve just learned how to do something new.
That’s not return on investment.
You’ve learned something, but you haven’t seen a difference in your results.
I don’t look for new strategy. I’m not interested in new strategy. I try and avoid finding new strategies because they can often be painful and time-wasting distractions.
The next of the 10 things that I don’t do (which may or may not be a good thing) is…
6. I don’t cold pitch
I don’t cold pitch to go on podcasts, get speaking gigs or get clients. It may not be a surprise to you that I don’t slide into people’s DMs without their permission, I don’t friend request strangers on the internet, and I don’t do stranger follow-backs on LinkedIn.
I don’t do any of that to get clients.
But I also don’t cold pitch to go on podcasts.
I love being on other people’s podcasts. It can be a great little organic way to grow my audience. Often, it’s great referral traffic and it’s a really great way to get new audience members. But if I have an hour to send out cold pictures to be on other people’s podcasts, or I could spend that hour finessing some Facebook ads, I’d rather work on the ads. Because then they’re coming for the content I’m sharing, I’m more specific about my niche, and I just feel like it’s more my thing.
I also don’t like writing cold pitches and I would have no clue what to say.
Take this or leave it. I’m not saying that no one else should cold pitch. I’m just saying that I don’t do it. And that might surprise you. I don’t cold pitch to be on people’s podcasts or to get speaking gigs, I just wait until they fall in my lap.
That might be a silly mistake on my part, but I don’t do it now.
7. I don’t accept cold pitches
I get cold-pitched by people who want to be on my podcast or want to speak at conference all the time. All the dang time.
Some particularly famous people have offered to speak at conference for free. My response whenever someone says that they want to speak at conference is, “We would love to have you at conference! Go buy a ticket so you can get to know us and come along.”
A lot of people immediately respond that they don’t go to conferences unless they’re speaking at them. All that says to me is that they’re not fit to speak at my conference because it’s a community-led conference.
I do invite people to come and speak at conference who’ve never attended before, but I’m very particular about the kinds of people that I invite, and none of them have cold-pitched me to speak at conference.
It’s always been me inviting them, which is really interesting.
If you are reading this and thinking you’d love to be a speaker at the Heart-Centred Business Conference, buy a ticket. That’s really the best way to become a speaker.
Most of the speakers have attended conference previously. The ones that haven’t are very particular kinds of gaps that I want to fill or styles of speaker or topics that I want to cover, and I know about them through other places, or I’ve met them in other ways.
I’m just not into getting the cold pitch.
I get cold-pitched on behalf of a lot of podcast guests all the time, and it’s very clear that they have not listened to the podcast. They have used AI to generate a pitch about the podcast. None of what they say in their pitch is actually meaningful.
Often, the people who are pitching to speak on my podcast are the antithesis of what I teach. I’ve even had pitches from people who say that they help you use persuasive language to get people hungry to buy so that they don’t even think when they buy your offer.
Sure, that’s exactly what I want to platform on my podcast… NOT!
These days, I don’t even read most of the cold pitches that come in because my team reads them, they have three things to look for, and if those three things aren’t there, they don’t even make it to me.
Then the ones that do make it to me, I don’t accept. I don’t think I’ve received a cold pitch for my podcast that I’ve accepted, especially by email in four years.
I don’t accept cold pitches.
8. I don’t friend request or follow potential clients
I’ve seen this as a sales strategy that has been taught before, where if you see someone who looks like they could be a potential client, you go and follow them, pretend you’re interested in their service, because then you sneakily get their trust by pretending that you’re an interested customer. But then the information that they’re giving you can be used as a way to pitch yourself as a provider.
I just find all of that so foul and so gross. I’m such an upfront, straightforward person that I couldn’t pretend if my life depended on it anyway, so it’s definitely not something that I do.
I do follow my clients on social media here and there, but it’s more from a place of wanting to see what content they’re sharing so I can give feedback in our next session. Or I want to see what they’re sharing because I think other people in my audience might find that helpful.
It’s more like a client-care thing.
I’ve noticed quite a lot in people’s sales pages recently, where they say that if you purchase something from them, they will follow you with their Instagram account that has over 100,000 followers, thus providing you with that referral marketing traffic. (I don’t know how they turn it into referral marketing traffic.)
I platform and promote members of this community a lot. But I’m not doing it to try and sell to them. I’m doing it to look after them, and it’s not something that I would advertise as a promise in my packages or when people work with me. Some people teach parenting stuff. I’m not a parent. Why would I follow them?
I would only do that if I thought that I would see content of theirs that I needed to share with my own audience.
It’s really fascinating to me that people are teaching this as a strategy. It’s not something I’ve bought into, nor have I followed.
9. I don’t apply for awards
I have done a CEO spot in my newsletter about why I don’t apply for awards. A lot of you reading this will probably have read that.
But the main core reasons that I don’t apply for awards are:
1. 99.999% of business awards processes are completely rigged and biased and don’t reflect what’s going on in the market.
2. It often costs you money to apply for awards.
3. The people running awards often use the awards nomination and voting process as a list growth strategy. It’s actually growing the award-runners business more than it’s supporting the award-winners or the award finalists.
I just find it hierarchical. I’m not in that space. It’s not my vibe.
This brings me to the final of the 10 things I don’t do in my business…
10. I don’t focus on audience growth all the time
This is a really interesting one, because my audience does grow very consistently. But there are certainly quarters in my year where I’m not focused on audience growth. I’m focused on connection, nurturing and conversion primarily in my strategy.
I’m not always coming up with new ways to grow my audience, get in front of new people and grow my organic reach.
I have a consistent organic strategy on socials. I post daily on my Facebook page and I consistently run Facebook ads. Some of those are very set-and-forget. But there are also definitely times in my business when I’m not running the ads. Or where I’m not posting as consistently as I normally would on socials, and I don’t care, because I’m in a conversion focal point.
Often, I have great plans to ensure that I’m still growing my audience. But when push comes to shove, I have to focus down, because maybe my energy is not there, or I’ve had a lot of other stuff going on outside of my business.
I know that it’s not always priority number one to grow your audience.
If I’m constantly looking at chasing new audiences, and I’ve got limited time or capacity, that often means that I’m not nurturing and selling to my existing audience, and that’s where the majority of my sales come from – my existing audience, not new audience.
New audience growth is looking after next year’s sales. I don’t always have to find new ways to grow my audience, do new things to grow my audience, or even grow my audience with new people at all times.
I think that that’s definitely a big surprise to people because I do bang on about consistency of this growth and consistency of the long-term stuff in your business.
But you don’t have to be focused on that as your priority number one all the time.
In fact, a lot of people could stand to spend two to three months ignoring audience growth and focusing instead on audience nurturing and conversion into buying things. They’re not nurturing and converting the audience they have, so growing with new audience isn’t going to get them the results that they assume it will get them anyway.
Ultimately, my business strategy and what I do has to come from a place of deep alignment. Alignment with what’s a priority for me, alignment with what’s important for my market, and alignment with what my strategy needs to be at that point in time.
If you are missing that sense of alignment or that clarity around exactly where you want to be focusing in your business, my Aligned Online course might just be the thing that you need.
This is particularly helpful for those of you in the first one to two years, or if you’re not yet making $5,000-$8,000 per month in your business.
If you’re still in those early stages, often it’s because there’s some misalignment in your foundations or in those core decisions about exactly what your business model is and who you are focused on marketing to.
If you want to grab my Aligned Online course, you can get it for the best available price if you use the coupon code AWESOMEOFFER at: tashcorbin.com/aligned
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
