This is the first in a short series of posts about building a “life-friendly” business.

One that's not all about massive growth, scaling and empire-building.

But instead is about earning a good living without working too hard, and focusing on the things that make life worthwhile.

A business that can stay small, but reward you richly.

I'm not saying this is the best way to run your life or business. And certainly not that I've got it all figured out. I'm just sharing ideas and thoughts on what's working for me and what I'm learning on my journey.

My hope is that you find it useful and it connects with what you're hoping to achieve yourself.

I'm going to start by summarising four big pillars that I think you need to build a life-friendly business. In future posts I'm going to expand on each one and talk about some of the principles and practices that make running this type of business easier.

And I really must stress this is a bit of a “learn as you go along” stream of consciousness rather than a polished guide. But I hope it helps.

The first key pillar is that you need to be following a high-leverage business model.

It sounds obvious when you think about it, but if you want a business where you don't have to work long hours to make a decent living then your business needs to be set up so that you can earn what you need in a few days a week. 

There are three tried and trusted ways of doing this:

1. Charge rockstar level fees – so you only have to do billable work for a few days a week to hit your targets. Value based pricing or payment by results are essentially variations of this – you're disconnecting your fees from your hours to allow you to earn more while delivering great ROI for your clients.
2. Get others to do the delivery work for you. This is the classic professional service firm “pyramid” where the partners sell and supervise the juniors, while getting the majority of the rewards for the work delivered.
3. Create and sell “products” (like online courses) that aren't dependent on your time to deliver them and so can earn more without stretching you timewise. This is my personal preference and as I'll explain in an upcoming post, fits best with the “life friendly” approach. For me at least.

The second pillar is that you need to be selling a “high want” product.

It doesn't matter if you know your client really needs what you're offering. If they can't see it, if it's not a big, urgent “close to the jugular” problem for them then it will take lots of time and energy to persuade them to buy.

And if you want to earn a great living without burning yourself out, you don't want to be spending half your time persuading people they really need something they don't think they need.

Your third pillar is to nurture a fan-level following.

What I mean by that is you need enough people who already trust you, like you and want to buy from you that when you offer something they want, half the battle is won.

It's the complement to having a high-want product. A fan-level following means you have people who would prefer to buy that product from you. 

You don't need millions of them. But you need enough of them so that you're not forever scrabbling around trying to find an audience and trying to convince them to buy from you.

The fourth pillar sounds a bit boring, but it's vital. It's to be productively prolific.

That fantastic leveraged business model, super attractive offer and wonderful people who want to buy from you all gets sabotaged if it takes you months to get a product out of the door or days to create a little marketing video.

High leverage needs you to be able to do the right things (for you) fast and effectively. Otherwise that lovely free time you've earned gets burned up while you agonise over an email or a blog post.

I'm sure there's more than these 4 of course. And I'm sure that you've got your own experiences and insights too.

But I've found that focusing on a small number of variables helps to get a grip on things and make big improvements. So my next posts will expand on each of these pillars and give some tips on how to make them work.

I hope they'll help.