I was sitting in a hotel conference room during my first year of grad school when someone handed me a pink catalog and asked if I had ever thought about being my own boss. It was a Mary Kay opportunity. I almost didn’t take the catalog.
I was working toward a master’s degree in architecture at the time. I had never once considered making money outside of a corporate structure.
That afternoon did something I did not expect. It showed me I could design how much I wanted to earn, and get creative and get good at earning it, instead of waiting for someone else to decide what I was worth.
It fundamentally changed the shape of what I thought was possible.
This is the story of how I learned, more than once, that when you redesign your business, you are not giving up on it. You are catching it up to who you have become.
The Version I Built Because Someone Else Designed It
That early taste of independence is part of why, a few years later, I gave myself permission to leave a comfortable architecture career in San Francisco and start over on the opposite coast. I took an entry-level job paying $8 per session in Charleston. It led to a business partnership in a brand new industry: health and fitness.
I did not know enough yet to build it my way. So for the first stretch, I built it the way my business partner told me to. I learned online marketing, branding, email automation, all the things that felt advanced and smart at the time. I was proud of how fast I was learning.
By the end of that chapter, I had two studio locations of my own. One was failing. I had a big team that did not have enough hours and was frustrated by it. The business was stretched thin because I could not physically be everywhere, and being everywhere was the only way I had been shown to run it.
It wasn’t viable because it was a design I inherited and copied before I knew how to question it.
The Redesigns That Came After
In my mid-thirties, I closed one studio, sold the other, and started over as a digital nomad from Guatemala. I built something from scratch this time, on my own terms. What I wanted then was total location freedom and enough time freedom to enjoy it. I built exactly that.
Parts of it got heavy eventually. Being the forward-facing brand all the time started to cost me something I could not name yet. So I redesigned again, into an operations agency, running several businesses from behind the scenes instead of in front of a camera. That was perfect during COVID when I had nothing else to do and nowhere to go and travel was at a standstill. I could be logged in all day.
A few years into that, my life changed again. I had stepkids now, a partner, a home with its own logistics and demands. My capacity was already spoken for before the business asked anything of it. So I redesigned once more, back into coaching at a high level, because it let me protect the time and energy I actually had left to give.
I judged myself for these shifts while I was making them. I do not anymore. They were the right calls.
If anything, I waited too long to make each one.
I Don’t Think I’m That Different From You
My life has moved through real changes over the last fifteen to twenty years. From testing entrepreneurship on the side, to leaving a decade and two degrees of corporate climbing behind, to building my first business by following someone else’s lead, to learning how to build one my way, to redesigning that one at least twice more as what I wanted, and what I had capacity for, kept shifting under me.
You already know this part of your own story, even if the specific chapters look different from mine.
Somewhere in there, the version of you who wanted to prove she could do it all, all at once, ran headfirst into the version of you who has other people and other demands that matter now too.
That is not a sign you got it wrong the first time. The design served you then. But it was never built to serve you forever without being touched again.
The Lie We Were Handed
I think most of us are still quietly trying to master everything at the same time: the relationships, the home, the domestic life, the logistics, the health and the body and the image, alongside the business, the leadership, the strategy, the marketing, the creativity, the finances. All of it, held at full capacity, all at once, forever.
I believe women are capable of all of it. That was never the question.
The lie is believing there is no room for redesign when one part of that equation starts asking for more of you.
The lie is believing that reallocating your time and energy is the same thing as failing at something. It is not. It is the most honest response available to a woman who is still, actually, paying attention to her own life.
What most of us don’t do, because we are heads down and determined to make it all balance, is give ourselves permission to pause. To take a breath. To ask what we actually want next, not whether we hit what we already said we wanted years ago.
This is not about not knowing enough or not knowing better. It is a permission problem.
Redesigning Your Business Is Not Starting Over
I want say this in specific for you, because I am a personal example of dramatic change and I do not think dramatic change is what most people need.
You do not have to close two studios and move to another coast to redesign your business. Most of the time, the core of what you built still serves what you actually want.
What needs to change is how you are running it, what it still depends on you for, and how much of you it has quietly made itself entitled to.
Small redesigns count. A boundary you finally hold. A role you finally hand off completely instead of half letting go of. A part of the week you take back on purpose instead of by accident. None of that requires burning anything down.
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I built the upcoming Compass Session for exactly this pause. It is the evolution of three years of work I was first asked to present, and it is still the single session people are talking about years later.
It is ninety minutes to actually stop, appreciate what you have built, and look honestly at what is calling you next that you have not yet made room for. The first live session is free. There are twenty seats, and there is no recording, because the moment you can watch it later is the moment it becomes the first thing that gets bumped when life gets loud. Holding the room accountable to itself is the point.
Reserve your seat for the Compass Session
Katrina Cobb is a Business Architect for women founders generating $300K to $1M+. She helps leaders redesign the architecture of their business, lifestyle, leadership, and identity so growth feels spacious, sustainable, and deeply aligned with the life they actually want. Explore her work at katrinacobb.com.