The No Team Dream: A One-Woman Show Working 5-Hour Days With 80% Profit Margins

Lifestyle Business School

In the past two years, I have gone from three full time team members..
To me, one part time contractor.
The result of scaling DOWN my team?
My business went from 40% profit margins on a good month.. To 80%, always.
I halved my revenue.. But took home WAY more profit.
And I felt lighter, happier and more fulfilled than I had in years, with my days spent working on the things that truly light me up.
Two years on, things looked so very different..
It feels like a dream.
The no-team dream.
Systems Over Team
So, what changed?
And specifically, what ENABLED me to re-build my business A One-Woman Show Working 5-Hour Days With 80% Profit Margins?
Here’s the cliff notes:
From a business model perspective, I moved to a model that felt far more aligned.
It required fewer moving parts, fewer offers and fewer resources.
And I started prioritising systems over team.
It looks like this:
✔️ A Simple Model: One of the most overlooked “secrets” to an elegant business is simplicity. More offers, more work. I worked on refining my business model and offer suite to be simple.
✔️ Increased Leverage: I built offers that leverage my time by packaging my Intellectual Property into scalable offers that were divorced from my time (and didn’t require big team to run).
✔️ And Systems BEFORE Team: Rather than hiring FIRST, I worked to systemise as much of my business as possible, so that my time is now leveraged by processes, automations and tools instead of another set of hands.
Together, those three things, once achieved, are a little thing called Operational Elegance – and it has changed my (business) life.
Operations doesn’t sound sexy.
But truly, it is the thing that has set me free.
I want other people to experience it, and it’s why I have dedicated my entire business mission since 2022 to help others achieve the same.
If you resonate with this mission? Lifestyle Business School is for you.

Want more?
📫 Subscribe to the Newsletter:
For Expertise-Based Founders ready to engineer a lifestyle business that passes the Monday Morning test with flying colours. Get one actionable step each day, and then weekly thereafter. Subscribe here.
🎧 Subscribe to the Podcast:
With 1m downloads, make sure you hit the follow/subscribe button right now.
📝 Download our FREE 26 Page Expertise-Based Business Diagnostic:
Get clarity on what to work on first or next. Click here to get it for free.
🎓Join Lifestyle Business School:
Get the complete Operating System for starting or growing an expertise-based online business to the Lifestyle Business Sweet Spot. Click here to join today.
📲 Instagram:
Follow Stevie on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/steviedillon_