Most business owners know how to work hard. That is usually how the business got off the ground in the first place. The trouble starts when more hours stop producing more results, and the only plan left is to push harder anyway. In this episode, Rebecca shares a sobering pair of numbers: only 22.5% of small business owners describe their mental health as thriving, and 84% say they have sacrificed health, sleep, or relationships for their business.

In this Double Kaufman episode of The Amanda Kaufman Show, co-host Rebecca Kaufman (Amanda's sister, who was part of her team) asks Amanda what working smarter actually looks like heading into 2027. Amanda, founder of Clairvenu, gets into the point where working harder stopped working for her, the marketing she treats as a red flag, the three weeks she spent offline while the business grew, the invisible system of team culture, and the practice of guarding against noise.

Entrepreneurship Is the Most Aggressive Path Into Personal Development

Amanda likes to say that entrepreneurship is probably the most aggressive way to get into personal development ever, because how you, the person, show up really does matter.

How It Matters: Amanda has spent half her career as a high-performing employee and half as an entrepreneur. In both, if she tapped out, let her emotions get the best of her, or let the naysayers get in the way, she could not function. Rebecca frames it as two sides of the same coin: you can design your business to not drain you, and you can design yourself to not be drainable. Amanda agrees it is both, and it is symbiotic.

How to Do It: Be mindful about the person behind the business, and remember that you are not the business. Finding more peace and more energy is an ongoing endeavor, and it is worth it. Business outcomes also sometimes ask you to do things that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable, new, or risky. Amanda thinks of a business as a system, and your job is to build a system that will survive.

Common Mistake: Turning a blind eye to the new way your space or sector has evolved because you feel overwhelmed, then telling yourself you do not have the capacity for something greater.

Working Harder Stops Working as Your Responsibility Grows

Amanda first noticed the limits of hard work in her corporate career. Early on, her core competency was saying yes. She was there first, there last, and at one point she clocked 120 hours in a week.

How It Matters: That season taught her she has a savage capacity for work. It stopped being the lever as she rose in seniority. When people started reporting to her, she became accountable to the culture of the group she was leading, and her responsibilities grew past what one human can do. The side effects of 120-hour weeks did not help either: no patience, not much joy, and a lot of white knuckling. In her research for this episode, Amanda came across a stat suggesting founders who work 50 hours a week or less run more profitable businesses than those who work more.

How to Do It: Look at the outcomes you are actually measuring. As an individual contributor, Amanda was accountable to individual tasks. As a leader, she needed to cultivate her energy, her leadership, and her communication, and upgrade skills like influence. Those are the levers that grow with the role. This is just as true in entrepreneurship as it is in a corporate job.

Common Mistake: Defaulting to "I will just work harder and empty out the to-do list" when the role now calls for motivating people and leading them.

Flow and Ease Will Not Fix a Business on Its Own

Amanda wants to name a pattern she sees in marketing, particularly marketing aimed at female entrepreneurs: the promise of flow and ease. For her, that is a giant red flag.

How It Matters: Women typically carry a huge mental load at home and do more of the domestic work in a household. Marketers know that, and they appeal to that exhaustion. A mastermind or retreat built around flow and ease may be absolutely lovely, and Amanda knows it is not going to be her next level unlock to do less strategically in her business.

How to Do It: If you choose the flow and ease path, do it mindfully. Go on the retreat because you are taking that space for yourself and you deserve it. Then be honest that it is not going to fix your business unless you fix your business. Rebecca adds that both can be true. Your business will have seasons where you are grinding and seasons where you are reaping last quarter's work, and the thing that links those seasons is a system.

Common Mistake: Treating rest as the entire answer, or treating the grind as the entire answer. Neither one replaces a system that supports both.

Systems and Team Let a Business Grow Without You

One of Amanda's biggest business breakthroughs happened while she was face down on a massage table in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

How It Matters: Back in lockdown, Amanda's grandmother invited her on a cruise. Amanda had about a year and a half to prepare, and her focus for that season was simple: the business continues without her for three weeks. No internet, no cell phone, by choice. With a team running the systems, the business grew. They enrolled more clients, onboarded more, and resolved client challenges, and Amanda was not even there.

How to Do It: Expect the preparation to take far longer than the time away. Three weeks off translated into a year of putting things in place: a trained team, documented processes, and the right technology. Rebecca, who was on that team, says it did not go perfectly, because no three weeks in any business goes perfectly. What helped was that everyone owned their part, it was acceptable to lean on the team instead of isolating, and there were structured communication channels and communication cadences that made it hard for a problem to stay hidden for long.

Common Mistake: Expecting the business to run without you before the systems, team, and communication rhythm are in place to carry it.

Culture Is the Invisible System

Rebecca names another invisible system behind that cruise: team culture. The team did not just want to avoid burning the business down. They made it their personal mission to prove Amanda could take three weeks off.

How It Matters: Amanda calls culture invisible and also so visible: once you see it, you cannot unsee it. She hears from many business owners who have to chase someone on their team or chase their assistant. If your team does not care about their individual contribution to the greater whole, there is an opportunity in leadership there.

How to Do It: Talk about the vision of what you are building, and do not leave it as a long distance idea. Amanda's team pulled it down to the ground and asked, so what does that mean in terms of the actions we are going to take? She also made a point of hiring people who believed in what they were doing.

Common Mistake: Thinking you can tell someone to care. Amanda puts it plainly: she cannot hire anybody, even her sister, and just tell them to care about blowing the numbers out of the water while she is gone.

Guard Against Noise and Commit to Signal

With AI changing how work looks heading into 2027, Amanda's way of working smarter is to be on guard against noise.

How It Matters: The signal is the action you take that causes a desired effect. The noise is everything else. In a services business, Amanda says the throughput through the entire system is conversations. Are you having the right conversations with the right people in the right manner, so the relationship progresses toward you playing a role in their lives with your service? When she looks at services businesses struggling in 2026, she sees owners who are overproductive on noise: creating things that do not need to be created and focusing on problems that are really preferences.

How to Do It: Get very clear about the itches you are tempted to scratch that would not move you toward your bigger goal even if you scratched them. Amanda's example is taking a full afternoon to re-engineer your Canva templates because they are not pretty enough. Put those things down. She does not mean delegate them, she means stop doing them. Then make a radical commitment to the signal and use AI and your tools to support focus on it.

Common Mistake: Adding guilt and shame to the pile. Amanda says feeling guilty about a scrolling habit, or asking "how come I'm not further along by now?" just to beat yourself up, is its own source of noise.

Use the 10x Thought Experiment to Find Your Next Move

Rebecca's last question is about the clear sign that someone has been spending too much time in the noise. Amanda's answer: look at your goal.

How It Matters: Most people can already sense it. Their intuition is telling them they are not having the right conversations, they are consuming too much content, or they are procrastinating on simple tasks. The goal gives you something concrete to measure against. If your goal is a certain level of income or profit and it is not happening, that is the moment to get curious.

How to Do It: Ask the same question, "how come I'm not further along by now?", in a curious tone instead of a punishing one. Write down every answer that comes up. Then run a thought experiment on each one: if you amplified this by 10x, would it move you closer to your goal or further away? If it moves you further away, put things in place to stop it. If it moves you closer, ask how you could make it 10 times more effective and what needs to be in place for that. Amanda says this is the exact journey they are on with The Amanda Kaufman Show.

Common Mistake: Measuring yourself by how busy you are instead of whether the goal is happening.

Conclusion

Working hard is a real capacity, and it has a ceiling. As your responsibility grows, the levers shift to energy, leadership, communication, and the systems and team that let the business run without you holding every piece. Be careful with marketing that sells rest as the whole answer, and equally careful with the belief that more grinding is the answer. Build the system that links the seasons. Treat culture as part of that system. Then guard against noise, commit to the signal, and use the 10x thought experiment to decide what to amplify and what to stop.

To hear the full conversation, listen to Episode 376 of The Amanda Kaufman Show on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know when working harder has stopped paying off?

Look at your goal. If you are putting in more hours and the income, profit, or outcome you want is not happening, more hours are probably not the lever. Amanda noticed it when she moved into leadership and her responsibilities grew past what one person could do.

What does working smarter mean for a service business?

Amanda says the throughput of a services business is conversations. Working smarter means protecting time for the right conversations with the right people, and cutting the noise: creating things that do not need to be created, and solving problems that are really preferences.

Is flow and ease a bad approach to business?

Rest is valuable, and Amanda supports taking that space mindfully. Her caution is with marketing that sells flow and ease as the fix for a business. A retreat can restore you, and it is not going to fix your business unless you fix your business. Rebecca's view is that systems are what link the hard seasons and the easy ones.

How can I take time off without my business falling apart?

Plan for the preparation to take much longer than the time away. Before Amanda's three weeks offline, her business spent about a year putting systems, technology, a trained team, and a communication rhythm in place. A culture where people own their part and lean on each other made the difference.

Where can I get help building a business that runs on a system?

Amanda's free live training, How Serious Service Businesses Build High-Converting Funnels & Acquisition Systems That Run 24/7, walks through how the pieces of a service business fit together so growth is built on a system you can measure. Register at https://clairvenu.com/training. If you want an outside perspective on your specific situation, apply for a free Revenue Clarity Conversation at https://clairvenu.com.