7 Lessons from a Year of Growth
Making space for presence, joy and support
The Sustainable Solopreneur is a weekly newsletter about seasonal, cyclical, supportive business strategy for solopreneurs and creative souls who want more out of life than the status quo, hosted by business coach and strategist Jenni Gritters. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while and you receive value from it, I’d encourage you to sign up for a paid subscription.
Psst: Next week, starting January 13th, I’m teaching a week-long intensive called BEYOND JOURNALISM. It’s a program for writers, journalists and marketers who want to diversify their offerings to find more stability and peace in a highly chaotic landscape. By the end of the 5 days, you’ll have clarity on a new business model, the way you want to market your offerings and what makes you the right person to deliver these services. Let’s stop clawing at closed windows and just walk through the open doors, shall we?
During December, I published two year-end reviews: One with practical numbers, and a second with emotional & intuitive takes. It was a big growth year for me and truthfully, I’m feeling like 2025 has more of a “stability” vibe — which is common, following seasons of growth. (We all need an exhale after a big inhale.)
So today, I want to share seven lessons from my big growth year before I head into my 2025 programming. Here’s what I learned:
1. Change your energy to change your business.
When I think about what I changed this year to triple my coaching revenue, one big thing stands out: My energy. I’ve always been someone who’s obsessed with strategy but in 2024, I finally decided it was time to work on my nervous system. Instead of being wired AF all the time, I wanted to feel safe and calm. And I noticed that the more I worked on my inside game (my mindset, my psychology, my old stories), the more the external outcomes changed as a result.
Over the past 6 months, I’ve developed a really consistent stream of folks booking free business audits with me, to ask about coaching work. And I know that’s because energy is a felt experience and 70% of the cues we get from others are non-verbal. The more authentic I am and the more I share my joy, the more my business grows.
So if you want to grow your business in a big way, remember this: It’s an inside-out game. If you don’t feel safe to be seen, marketing strategies won’t work. If you’re highly critical of yourself and full of shame, your branding will sound like an inauthentic performance. And if you’re full of financial scarcity, you’ll spend every cent you make or set rates with such panic that clients will walk away.
When you do the actual work rewrite those deep beliefs? It’s not easy but whoa, it’s magical.
2. The deeper the roots, the more you can grow.
I’ve talked about how I have a tendency toward toxic self-reliance — it’s a story I’ve told myself since a young age. “No one is coming for me.” “No one can do this as well as me.” “I just have to go it alone.”
In 2024, I called BS on that idea. I hired a coach and a therapist. I finally allowed my partner to truly support me emotionally and around the house. And it turns out, more support means a more grounded presence. And with deeper roots, you can grow more quickly and take bigger risks without feeling as scared. There are people to fall back on.
I also implemented really effective systems in my business and hired two amazing contractors. Again, those deep, grounded roots helped me stay in a calm headspace, which produced massive growth. You know I love a garden metaphor and it feels like creating a really healthy soil mix. Without that, any growth will be short lived. But sustainable growth is backed by nourishment and a steady hand.
3. When you have your own back, rejection hurts less.
2024 was the year I finally started to like myself — hell, I even had moments of loving myself, which always felt elusive in the past. And what I realized was that in the past, I was afraid of rejection because I worried negative feedback would break me. I was reliant on other people to tell me if I was safe.
Once I felt safe in my own body, in my own life, in my own home, in my own mind, suddenly rejection landed differently. In fact, it felt more like a sigh of relief because the person was simply recognizing that my work style wasn’t a good fit for them. I said to my coach, more than a few times: “I feel bulletproof.”
It turns out, other people don’t keep us safe. We keep ourselves safe with the support of trusted, loved ones.
4. Olympic-level growth requires Olympic-level resourcing.
I finally let go of my journalism clients this year, about three-quarters of the way through the year. And as I did that, the financial requirements on other parts of my business ramped up. That felt like a lot of pressure but it also introduced a new concept into my life: If I wanted to run a business like an Olympian (and I do! I am ambitious!), I needed to intentionally set up Olympic-level resourcing. I needed quite time in the woods. I needed biweekly massages. I needed daily exercise. I needed the best-of-the-best coach. I needed radical communication with my partner.
If I wasn’t getting Olympic-level support, I could not create Olympic-level results.
This looked like taking at least one night per month away from my family, at a hotel. It looked like flying across the country solo, twice, for an in-person business retreat. It looked like telling my husband when I couldn’t help with my kids’ bedtime because I needed silence. It even looked like permission to move my clients to a different day if I was feeling sick.
5. Even when you’re safe and successful, the old voices will keep shouting.
While this is true in every area of life, my 2024 journey taught me that my money patterns are messy. I often look at money as a proxy for safety — meaning, I think that if we have more money, I will feel more safe. But as I tripled my revenue this year, I realized that this was a false story. At the same time each month, no matter our revenue numbers, I would panic and worry that we didn’t have enough. The aha moment was that it was a pattern, not the truth.
I learned, finally, to recognize this as an old story that automatically populated based on certain triggers. And I learned that I needed to actually open up a spreadsheet and look at the facts to remind myself that I was just fine. I also had to work through what safety really is — and spoiler alert, it’s more about community and other people and health than it is about dollar bills.
6. Growth for growth’s sake is a dead end.
In 2024, I attempted to launch a few programs that were “smart” and would make money — but ultimately made me feel bored or like I had to pretend to be someone else. I closed them almost immediately after launch because I found that if the program didn’t work for me, very few people would sign up. (Again with the energy game.)
So take it from me: Marketing is about energy. If you’re excited, the people will come! But launching something new just for the sake of “growth” without alignment won’t work. It’s a recipe for low revenue and burnout.
When I launched programs that were values-aligned, like SUSTAIN or my upcoming BEYOND JOURNALISM training, tickets flew off the shelves and I felt satisfied, happy and like I was in the right place at the right time. I also learned that even when I deprioritized revenue (in SUSTAIN, everyone gets evergreen access after they finish their payment plans, which means many members are now in the program “for free”), if the program was aligned for me, it actually grew my business in other ways.
So: No more shoulds. No more obligation.
Instead: Alignment and joy.
7. Joy is about small moments, not big wins.
Finally, 2024 showed me that my life was already really good but I’d been missing it as I chased more growth, more notoriety, more revenue. Because I was constantly in survival mode, I couldn’t see what was happening in the present moment.
What I learned in 2024 is that the things that bring me true joy have very little to do with masculine, capitalist success. Rather, joy looks like paddling around mountain lakes on Thursday afternoons. It looks like picking my kids up from school early to go to the climbing gym. It looks like taking a nap, watching the leaves change, growing vegetables and making sourdough bread. It looks like reading a book by the fire.
Joy is about the little things — it always has been. And in 2025, that’s where I’m orienting: Toward being fully present in my life and expressing my gratitude for all the tiny wins that are easy to miss.
We only get to do this once. And I don’t know about you, but my ultimate goal is to build a business that makes more space for the magic of my life.
xo,
Jenni
Curious about my background? I’m a writer and business coach living in Central Oregon. My goal is to teach everyone who will listen that it’s possible to build a simple, stable, successful business that support your human needs first. Join my group coaching program, SUSTAIN, for more conversations like this (and a community of people who are all about the path less taken), and follow me on Instagram.