There was a season when I was winning.
National awards. Two studio locations. A coaching contract on the side because others in my industry wanted to replicate what I had built. By every metric the business world handed me, I was succeeding.
I was also staring out windows a lot. Sipping coffee and going completely blank. Not thinking. Not planning. Just… gone. It took me embarrassingly long to understand what that was.
My body was trying to tell me the score didn’t add up.
I Learned to Build Businesses From Men Who Built Empires
When I started my first real run at entrepreneurship, I did what most ambitious women did in that era. I went to the guys who had the receipts. Gary Vee. Tim Ferriss. Grant Cardone. Later, Alex Hormozi, who I actually worked with when I had the fitness business. These weren’t abstract internet gurus to me. They were in my world.
And what they taught me, collectively, was this: more is the metric. Bigger, faster, omnipresent, dominant. Set the goal, hit the goal, raise the goal. Revenue is the scoreboard. Growth is the only direction.
I absorbed it completely. I set goals I didn’t actually want just to compete. I chased numbers to feed an ego that had confused achievement with fulfillment. And it worked, which is the insidious part. When the wrong framework works, you don’t question the framework. You just keep going.
I kept going until my relationship ended. Until I had no energy left for the creative life I had quietly loved since I was young. Until the only thing I could feel at the end of a “successful” week was a dull, embarrassing emptiness.
The business was winning. I was disappearing.
What I Did Next Was Not a Plan
I sold the businesses. I left the US. I started moving through Latin America, a little bit of Italy, trying to locate what actually lit me up underneath all the performance.
I regrew new businesses, online this time, more freedom-oriented. And for a while, it felt like I had figured it out.
Then COVID arrived, and there was nothing to do but work. So I did. All day, every day, for a long time. And when I came up for air, I realized I had swung the pendulum hard in the other direction. No friends. No dating. No creative pursuits. Just the business, again, dressed differently this time.
I had changed the container. I had not changed the belief.
The belief was still the one I learned from the men: the business is the point. Everything else is what happens when the business lets you.
The Decision That Changed Everything
I decided to move to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Not for a business reason. For a life reason.
I wanted to take a painting class. I wanted to stay in one place long enough to actually make friends. I wanted to give a creative part of myself, a part I had been starving for years, a permanent seat at the table.
I filled pages of journals that year. Not with business goals. With life design questions I had never been told to ask. What kind of days do I want? What kind of people? What does a week feel like when it’s working? What do I want to be surrounded by? What do I want to feel at the end of a life?
And then I got specific. Which, it turns out, is all business strategy ever was. Just applied to the whole life.
Once I designed what success actually looked like to me, it was just as achievable as any revenue goal I had ever set. I just had to decide it mattered. And then I had to build around it instead of hoping it would survive the leftover hours.
What My Life Looks Like Now
I walk cobblestone streets in the morning to a private art studio I rent in a historic town. I flip on the lights, admire the paintings on the walls, brew tea, and start with creative work before any execution or coaching begins. My partner brings lunch sometimes and we sit and talk for an hour about life and travel and what we’re building next. Evenings are slow. Meals are home-cooked. Conversation is unhurried.
Mondays feel almost like weekends. The Sunday panic that used to be a permanent feature of my life, that low-grade dread creeping in by late afternoon, is gone. When I travel, which is multiple times a year, France and Spain this summer, Guatemala in a few weeks, some of those trips are completely off. No meetings, no work, nothing. My team handles it. Other trips, I choose to take a call here and there because I want to, not because I have to.
I have a partner I love. Three stepchildren. A circle of friends. An international fine art career I built because I finally gave it space. A business that continues to grow and a life that finally feels like mine.
I am not telling you this to perform a dream. I am telling you because I spent years not believing it was possible, and I want to name the thing that changed it.
This Is Not a Story About Being a Coach or a Nomad
Here is where I have to address the objection directly, because I hear it all the time.
“That works for you because of what you do.”
I coach lawyers. I coach paralegal teams, relocation specialists, product makers who build things with their hands, creative agencies who do in-person shoots and brand photography alongside their digital work. These are not online-only businesses. These are not lifestyle brands. These are real, complex, in-person and hybrid operations.
And we still redesign them around the life the owner actually wants.
One client took her daughter to India for three weeks. Another took her entire family to Greece. A client takes every Friday off during summers for mother-daughter days. None of them became digital nomads. None of them abandoned their businesses or their industries. They used business architecture principles to redesign the structure of how their businesses ran, so the business could support their lives instead of consuming them.
The framework is not “quit everything and move to Mexico.” The framework is: design the life first. Then build the business around it.
The Belief Worth Questioning
The culture that raised most of us as entrepreneurs, and yes, it was largely a male-generated culture, told us there is one measure of success. Revenue. Growth. Scale. And that everything else is what you earn after.
More women are pushing back on this now and I am glad. Because what I know from the inside of my own story and from the inside of my clients’ is that the either/or was always false.
You do not have to choose between financial success and a life that feels full. I have not compromised my business results. I have not scaled down my ambition. I have redirected it to include more of what a life is actually for.
There are trade offs in any design. I am not pretending otherwise. But you get to decide which trade offs you are willing to make. That is the point. You get to decide. Not the hustle culture. Not the bro-framework you absorbed at thirty when you were hungry and impressionable and just trying to figure it out.
The faster you can release the belief that money requires sacrifice of everything else, the faster you can actually move.
What I Know About Myself Now
I have a natural propensity for tunnel vision. I can chase a goal with a kind of singular focus that is genuinely useful when it is pointed at the right things. When it is pointed only at the business, it will consume everything around it without hesitation.
Knowing this, I do not leave the other priorities to chance. I design them in first. The creative work. The slow mornings. The travel. The relationships. These are not rewards for hitting targets. They are the structure the targets live inside.
Some seasons are more intensive on the business side. I plan those intentionally. I know they are seasons, not a permanent state.
That is the whole thing, really. Intention. Not balance as a destination. Not some perfect equilibrium you achieve once and keep forever. Just the ongoing practice of deciding what your life is actually for, and then building a business that reflects that decision rather than contradicts it.
I spent years building businesses around an idea of success I borrowed from someone else.
The work I am most proud of is the life I designed from scratch.
If this is resonating and you want to explore what this could look like for your specific business and life, I offer a discovery call where we do a business diagnostic together and start talking through the bigger picture. You can book that call here.
Katrina Cobb is a Business Architect for high-achieving women founders scaling beyond $300K. She helps leaders redesign the architecture of their business — systems, structure, team, and profitability — so growth feels spacious, sustainable, and deeply aligned.
Explore her work at katrinacobb.com.