11 Lessons I’m Taking From 2025 Into 2026 (And the One That Changes Everything)

If you listened to last week’s episode, you’ll know 2025 wasn’t exactly a gentle stroll.

There were wins. Massive ones. Milestones that reminded me how far this business (and our life) has come.

And there were also the moments where life did what life does best. It lifed. Hard.

But today isn’t about a recap of chaos.

Today is about the lessons.

Because if you’re a woman building a business while also being a human with a family, responsibilities, hormones, grief, renovations, sick parents, school holidays, and a nervous system that would like a little less unpredictability, then you already know this.

You don’t get to build your business in a perfect, quiet season.

You build it inside real life.

And that means the women who win long-term aren’t the ones who have the most “perfect strategy”.

They’re the ones who extract the lessons, make the hard decisions early, and set the business up to carry them through the next season with more peace and more profit.

So here are the 11 lessons I’m taking from 2025 into 2026.

And yes. Lesson number four is the chef’s kiss.

The Theme of 2026: Stop Building a Business That Relies on Your Capacity

Before we dive in, I want to name the through-line.

Most women are trying to scale by doing more.

More content. More offers. More “showing up”. More DMs. More urgency. More pressure.

But the truth is this. If your business growth is dependent on your personal capacity, you’re not scaling. You’re sprinting.

A scalable business isn’t the one that asks you to become a machine.

It’s the one that holds steady when you’re not okay. When you’re tired. When your kids are sick. When the launch doesn’t go to plan. When your brain isn’t braining.

2025 forced me to look at where my business was still relying on me too much.

And that’s exactly why these lessons matter.

Lesson 1: Low-Ticket Offers Aren’t the Easy Button (They’re the Complexity Button)

I love low-ticket offers in theory.

The industry messaging is seductive.

“Create a $27 product, run ads, and your dream high-ticket clients will magically ascend into your world.”

And yes, low-ticket funnels can work.

They can be a brilliant “try before you buy” pathway, especially in a market where buyers want proof and proximity before committing to premium support.

But here’s what 2025 taught me.

Low-ticket doesn’t mean easy.

Low-ticket usually means:

• Ads are essential (unless you have a genuinely huge audience)
• You need volume to make the maths work
• You need consistent optimisation
• You often need a backend cascade (bumps, OTOs, upsells)
• You’re playing a completely different operational game

And if you want low-ticket ads to perform well, you’re not dipping your toe in with $10 a day.

You need meaningful spend to collect meaningful data.

That’s why low-ticket funnels can become a full-time job.

Constant iterations. Creative testing. Messaging shifts. Funnel tweaks. Tracking metrics like a hawk.

I saw this play out in real time.

Something worked beautifully until it didn’t.

And when I tried to “scale what worked”, it went backwards.

So here’s where I landed.

If the business model I want is easy breezy group leader energy, with one hero offer, premium-ish positioning, and a simple suite, low-ticket funnels aren’t my lane right now.

In 2026, I’m choosing what’s cleaner.

Webinars. Free lead magnets (optional). Straight into signature offers.

Not because low-ticket funnels don’t work.

But because I’m not building a business that demands daily micro-management of ads and funnels just to keep cashflow steady.

Lesson 2: If You Want “Simple, Seamless, Space”, You Can’t Be the Bottleneck

I came into 2025 with three words.

Simple. Seamless. Space.

And then mid-year, I took a month off.

That time away gave me the one thing you can’t get when you’re deep in the day-to-day.

Perspective.

And the uncomfortable truth landed.

I was more of a bottleneck than I wanted to admit.

It wasn’t that the business wasn’t working.

It was.

But it was relying on my brain, my presence, my decision-making, my memory, my “just do it myself” default.

And if you’re nodding right now, you already know the cost.

Everything feels heavy. Everything requires you. You can’t truly switch off. Growth starts to feel like pressure, not possibility.

A business cannot be simple, seamless, and spacious if the founder is the glue holding every moving part together.

So the second half of 2025 became a rebuild.

Not the sexy kind.

The kind where you break things, restructure, and intentionally create a business that can run without you being the emergency contact for every single task.

Lesson 3: You’re Probably Playing Small (Even If You Think You’re Not)

This one surprised me.

I had built up a story that going beyond a certain revenue level means the business “breaks”.

That you need a giant team.

That profit disappears.

That life gets harder.

But here’s the truth.

That might be true if you build your business like a chaotic machine.

It’s not necessarily true if you build it like a lean, strategic ecosystem.

So I asked myself a bigger question.

What would it look like to build the business for where I actually want to go?

Not where I’ve been comfortable sitting.

Because this is what happens when you aim low.

You build low. You invest low. You plan low. And you keep proving your own ceiling.

If you want a bigger game, you need bigger moves.

Higher-level thinking. CEO-level numbers tracking. Intentional planning. Willingness to pivot fast. And investing like the business you say you want.

Most women want the results of a six-figure or multi-six-figure business.

But they’re still operating like someone with one foot in and one foot out.

If you want the leap, you have to make it inevitable.

Lesson 4: In a Low-Capacity Season, You Don’t Pull Back. You Double Down on Support

This is the chef’s kiss.

And honestly, it’s the one I want you to tattoo on your forehead for 2026.

When capacity is low, the instinct is to pull back.

Pause mentorship. Reduce support. Cut ads. Shrink visibility. Go quiet. “I’ll do it on my own for a bit.”

But 2025 reminded me of this.

That instinct is often the exact thing that makes it worse.

Because if you’re low capacity and you remove support, what happens?

You become the support.

You become the strategist, the implementer, the content team, the operations manager, the ads manager, the emotional regulator, the decision maker.

That’s not relief.

That’s a faster road to burnout.

In tough seasons, support isn’t a luxury.

It’s the stabiliser.

It’s the thing that keeps you moving when you don’t have the internal bandwidth to “figure it out” alone.

This is the difference between women who stay stuck and women who keep growing.

Stuck women pull back and hope it fixes itself.

Growth women get supported and make smarter moves faster.

That’s why I rejoined the mastermind I’m part of.

Not because life was perfect.

Because it wasn’t.

Lesson 5: Systems Will Save You (Even When Nobody Can See the Work)

Some of the most important work you’ll ever do in business is invisible.

In the second half of 2025, I focused heavily on backend upgrades.

Automations. SOPs. Tech stack improvements. Better internal workflows. Systems that remove decision fatigue.

This is the unglamorous truth.

If your business is held together by memory and hustle, it will collapse the moment life asks more of you.

Systems create space.

Not just time space.

Mental space.

And that’s the kind of space that makes scaling possible.

Lesson 6: Business Has Seasons. Budget Like It

Not every season is a “scale” season.

And not every season should be treated like one.

Sometimes you’re in integration, which looks like profit, stability, and refining.

Sometimes you’re in scaling, which looks like investment, growth, and expansion.

Sometimes you’re in winter, which looks like fixing what’s broken and shoring up foundations.

Sometimes you’re in rebuild, which looks like changing structure so the next level is possible.

If you don’t understand your season, you’ll do things like:

• Expect bigger results without bigger investment
• Cut spending when you actually need more lead flow
• Refuse mentorship because “it’s not 10% of revenue”
• Keep paying yourself like it’s peak season when your strategy needs reinvestment

This is CEO thinking.

Your numbers aren’t just numbers.

They’re feedback.

And your budgets should flex based on your goals, not your fear.

Lesson 7: Conversion Events and Conversations Are Still the GOAT

If I could give you two money-making actions for 2026, it would be these.

Run more conversion events. Have more conversations.

Conversion events include webinars, challenges, masterclasses, and live trainings.

Conversations include warm leads, past clients, your current audience, and the people already watching you.

These are direct levers.

They are not “nice to haves”.

They are revenue-generating activities.

And most women avoid them because they’re waiting to feel “ready”, or because they’re hiding behind content.

If you did only those two things more consistently, you’d likely see a measurable lift in sales.

Lesson 8: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Hitting one level of success doesn’t mean the same strategy will carry you to the next.

In fact, it usually won’t.

At around the multi-six-figure mark, things start to break if they’re not built to scale.

So you have to rebuild.

Which means letting go of what’s familiar, changing how you run launches, changing how you operate your team, changing how you manage delivery, and changing how you manage you.

This is why women stall.

They keep trying to use the same operating system for a bigger game.

And it just caps out.

Lesson 9: Short-Term Pain Creates Long-Term Peace

There were hard decisions this year.

Decisions that would have been easier to avoid.

But easy decisions create hard lives.

Hard decisions create easier lives.

Examples (you’ll recognise your own version of these):

• Upgrading tech when it feels annoying
• Letting go of a team member when it feels uncomfortable
• Running ads when you’d rather stay safe with organic
• Fixing your offer when you’d rather blame the market
• Building systems when you’d rather “just push through”

The question is this.

Where are you choosing comfort today that’s costing you freedom tomorrow?

Lesson 10: Life Will Always Life. Build a Business That Can Hold That

The goal isn’t to wait for life to settle down.

It won’t.

The goal is to build a business that functions inside reality.

A business that can run when you’re tired, when your kid is home sick, when your parent needs you, when you hit perimenopause brain fog, when your launch flops, and when your personal life throws curveballs.

A business that requires you to be at 100% all the time is not a scalable business.

It’s a fragile one.

Lesson 11: Sometimes the Lesson Is Getting Better Internet

This one’s light, but it matters.

I took time off and still needed to handle essential business admin (hello, payroll deadlines).

And trying to do it with bad internet was painful.

So yes.

In 2026, I’m choosing the boring support that makes everything easier.

High-speed internet on holidays.

Because peace isn’t always a mindset.

Sometimes peace is just a strong connection and no buffering.

The Big Takeaway: Supported Is a Strategy, Not a Luxury

If you take nothing else from this episode, take this.

When your capacity drops, don’t remove the very things that keep you stable.

That’s how businesses spiral.

Instead, ask:

• What support would make this season lighter?
• Where am I trying to “do it all” because I think I should?
• What would it look like to run my business like someone who expects to win?

Because the women who build Sweet Six businesses don’t do it by being martyrs.

They do it by building lean, profitable businesses that are designed for their actual life.

If This Hit You: Here’s Your Next Step

If you’re sitting in that $5K to $15K month range (or roughly $50K to $150K a year) and you know you’re ready to scale toward $250K to $500K without burning out or stacking more offers, and you want a personalised plan, deep support, and a calm-but-serious container that helps you execute like a CEO, reach out and request an invitation to the Peace and Profit Mastermind.

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