My Quarter Went Sideways. My Quarterly Plan Disagreed.
I want to tell you about the last month or so of my life.
It has been, to put it charitably, a lot.
The kind of month where you solve one problem and two more immediately materialize to take its place like some sort of deeply unfunny hydra. And then, right in the middle of all of it, I got sidelined with an injury.
Now, in case you were wondering, the farm did not care about my old lady hip. The animals also did not care either, they just wanted breakfast.
The work didn’t pause to check in on my wellbeing. It kept showing up, as work tends to do, and I managed it about as gracefully as you’d expect from someone held together with ice packs, swear words, and an unreasonable amount of pain medication.
It’s hard not to get discouraged when it feels like life just keeps stacking things on top of you, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling it.
So when I finally came back up for air, I did what I always do: I checked my metrics.
Partly because my nerdy spreadsheet genuinely brings me joy, and partly because the beauty of having a quarterly plan is this:
When life starts life-ing all over your carefully laid intentions, you have somewhere to go to figure out whether you are actually in trouble or whether it just feels that way.
Turns out I’m not behind.
Not actually.
I had simply assumed the role of Chaos Commander-in-Chief based on vibes and adrenaline.
The quarter didn’t go the way I planned it, but that is a very different problem than “the business is failing” — and most business owners spend an alarming amount of time treating those two things like they’re interchangeable.
They are not.
Imperfect execution beats “I’ll get to that” every single time.
A messy, interrupted, injury-derailed quarter where you kept moving anyway is worth infinitely more than a perfect plan that’s still waiting for the right moment to begin.
I know this because I’ve lived both versions.
And the origin story for that lesson is, naturally, a farm and a fairly spectacular burnout.
The Messy Beginning
At the beginning, my business looked like this: business plans, financing applications, grant writing, coaching on the side, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, a move to a working farm.
On paper, things were happening.
In reality, I was scattered across four different kinds of work, none of them fully realized, burning through energy I didn’t have. The walking embodiment of “Jill of all trades, master of absolutely none.”
Then we moved to the farm and the chaos got louder.
Running a household. Raising animals. Managing a business. Trying to remain a reasonably functional human being. Everything collided at once, and eventually I hit a wall I couldn’t muscle my way through anymore.
It was constant burnout, and it supremely sucked.
I thought I was holding everything together with willpower and wishful thinking while slowly realizing neither of those things counted as infrastructure.
The turning point wasn’t dramatic, which honestly feels rude in retrospect. There was no lightning bolt. No cinematic breakthrough moment.
Just a slow, reluctant admission that the way I was working wasn’t working — and that working harder wasn’t going to fix it.
Not because I lacked dedication or talent (although some days I remain open to debate on that front), but because there was no real operational support underneath any of it.
I was running my business the same way a lot of my clients run theirs: on grit, goodwill, caffeine, and increasingly concerning levels of stress.
What Changed And, More Importantly, Why It Actually Stuck
Eventually, I got serious about systems. Shout out to Beverlee Rasmussen, creator of the Systems Business Coach methodology, for showing me the power of systems and lighting a fire in me I continue to tend enthusiastically.
Not just for my clients, but for myself and for the farm too.
The same thinking applied everywhere:
figure out what’s actually broken, fix that first, and stop trying to overhaul your entire life every time something stops working.
“Evolution, not revolution” isn’t just a catchy line I say to sound like a wise old owl.
It’s the thing that saved both my business and my sanity from the growing pile of half-finished, beautifully complicated plans I’d been accumulating for years.
What Makes My Coaching Approach Different
I work from home on a farm, which means “working from home” looks a little different here.
I’m writing this with baby chicks in my office who have dramatically overstayed their lease because the turkeys are arriving soon and need the space. I have barn cats named Ziggy Stardust and Pumpkin. I have absolutely shown up to client calls with literal shit on me and I refuse to pretend otherwise.
What that means in practice is this:
I bring zero judgement to the mess.
I’ve seen enough businesses from the inside — and lived inside my own long enough — to know that disorganization is rarely a character flaw. It’s usually a systems problem.
And systems problems are solvable.
I work with a lot of neurodivergent business owners, which has sharpened the way I approach this work considerably. Cookie-cutter frameworks don’t work for everyone, and one-size-fits-all advice is usually one-size-fits-nobody.
My job is not to hand you a colour-coded template and call it coaching.
My job is to help you figure out what will actually work for your brain, your business, and your real life.
Because if it only works under perfect conditions, it’s not really working.
And because I’ve personally lived through both “perfect and paralysed” and “injured, behind on the farm, and somehow still operational,” I am deeply committed to quick and dirty over theoretically perfect.
If it’s not implementable on a Tuesday when everything’s on fire, it’s not a real system.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A clinical therapist I worked with cut her admin time nearly in half — not by adding complicated software, but by actually examining where the time was going and building systems that fit the way she naturally worked.
A recovering perfectionist realized her procrastination wasn’t laziness. It was a predictable pattern. Once we could see it clearly, we built systems to interrupt the spiral before it took over.
And one of my favourite wins: transforming a client’s Google Drive from an embarrassing digital junk drawer into something she navigates with the blind confidence of someone T9 texting without looking at the keypad.
If that sentence activated something deep in your nervous system, you are probably my people.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Most business owners who come to me are not failing.
They are succeeding in spite of their systems, not because of them.
They’ve gotten very far on talent, determination, and sheer force of will and eventually hit the point where those things are no longer enough to carry the weight of the business alone.
Which brings me back to my obstacle-riddled, injury-derailed, not-actually-behind quarter.
The plan didn’t go perfectly. The plan never goes perfectly.
What the plan did do was give me a place to stand when everything got chaotic. A way to check back in, assess what actually happened instead of what I assumed happened, and keep moving without losing the thread entirely.
The detours were manageable because I still knew where I was trying to go.
That’s not a small thing.
That’s the whole thing.
If your Q2 has felt anything like mine, like you’ve spent the last few months navigating one new obstacle after another and you’re no longer sure whether you’re okay or just surviving — come find out.
At the end of June, I’m hosting a free 90-minute Quarterly Planning Session where we map out Q3 together in real time alongside other business owners whose quarters also had strong opinions about going off script.
No planning theory.
Actually doing the work.
You’ll leave with:
a completed Q3 plan
a clear focus for the next 90 days
and a planning tool you can keep using long after this quarter ends
Can’t make the live session?
Grab the free Quarterly Planning Tool and work through it on your own. It’s the same tool I use, and it’s the same tool that reminded me last week that I’m not actually behind.
And if you want to dig into what’s specifically creating drag inside your business, that’s exactly what a Systems Assessment is for.
Your business should support your life.
Especially when life is being a lot.