Let’s get honest: building your business around someone else’s rules is a fast track to burnout. Been there, done that, got the temper tantrums to prove it. This episode dives into how your temperament shapes the way you naturally work — and why your business model has to match it. I share my own hard-earned lesson, what changed when I realigned, and how you can start reshaping your business in a way that actually supports your energy, your joy, and your bottom line.

Takeaways:

• Aligning your business model with your personal temperament is crucial for sustainable success.
• Shifting from a model of trading hours for dollars can enhance your business satisfaction.
• Understanding your temperament can significantly reduce stress and improve energy management.
• Creating a business model that supports your natural working style fosters joy and productivity.
• Utilizing temperament assessment tools can provide profound insights into your working preferences.
• Small incremental changes in your business model can lead to significant improvements over time.

Find resources, links, tools, and more here: https://bemorebusiness.com/episodes/re-sourcing-your-business

This is the Be More Business podcast where wisdom and innovation merge to create a business that supports the life you want to live.

Here's your host, entrepreneurial, wise woman and cyber sorceress Kimberly Beer.

I want to ask you a question.

Is your business model working with you or against you?

Now you may have heard this question posed differently in the past.

Maybe you heard it as are you working with your business or against your business?

And today I want to have a heartfelt talk with you about why I think that you should change your business model to fit your temperament and the way that you prefer to work versus you trying to change yourself and the way you show up to fit a business model that someone may have told you or that your industry said was the right way or, or that possibly we all just assume you should be in your business.

So let me start this little adventure with a story and this is a personal story for me.

About 15, 17 years ago, it's been quite a while.

I primarily did marketing work for clients.

Now I had started out doing a lot of project based works like people would hire me to do a website or a brochure or to set up a marketing program for them.

And then as marketing became more digital digital it put a lot more stress on small business owners and I started having people come back more and more and more.

And so what I did was developed a retainer system where they could purchase X number of hours from me every single month and I would work for them for those hours.

And this did two things.

One, it kept them consistent in their marketing which was really important.

And two, it helped me pay those monthly bills that were really hard to do when I did project based work where it could be feast or famine.

So it worked out really well for a while and then it didn't.

And part of the reason that it didn't work out well had everything to do with me and some things to do with the business model.

Now I'm never going to be a big advocate today for telling you to trade dollars for hours.

I don't think it's good.

I think that it sets the wrong expectation in your customers.

If you have a service based business, I highly recommend moving away from that business model.

Unless it is just a really good industry mod and you're doing well with it.

There are times that it will work, but for a lot of people getting out of trading dollars for hours is the first step to really being free from in your business and how it shows how you show up in it.

Let's set all of that Aside for a moment and let's talk about temperament.

So in the.

In looking at that business model, I was struggling.

So I was not keeping my customers happy.

I was feeling drained of energy.

I was frankly grumpy a lot of the time.

I was really.

I had a short fuse during this part of my business.

And a lot of it had to do with the fact that I felt overwhelmed with the things that I had to do to provide reporting back to my customers, to fulfill their expectations about how I should spend my time, all of those things.

And it was not working for me.

Long about this same time is when I met one of my mentors, Melissa Pierce and I.

She's a client of mine and when she started coaching me because I was struggling in my own business and she offered to help very savvy entrepreneur in and of herself and was there to help coach me.

One of the very first things she had me do was write a vision which really changed how I showed up in my business.

It shifted the energy level immediately.

The second thing she did was she had me take the temperament test.

And I think those things probably both happened right around the same time.

But she had me take the Kersey Bates sorter.

Now I'm trained in that.

I've been through her Gestalt program.

This was pre all of that.

So I took the temperament sorter and at first I argued with the results because they showed me to be an enfp.

And I'm like, no, I am way more organized than that.

I am.

I was convinced I was a J. I also was very good at systematized things.

I mean, after all, I was running a business that was highly systematized.

Step by step, things had to be checked off right?

So I'm like, no, that can't be right.

Yeah, it is right.

And it was the reason that I was struggling so hard in my business.

So this big awareness really started to shift some things for me and I started to look at how my business was set up to this standard that was not easy for me.

So there's a couple of ways to explain temperament.

And I think one of the best metaphors that people use is using your right and left hand, so your dominant hand.

Most people in the world or in our culture, anyway, I'm going to go with the US let's say that most people in the US are right handed.

And almost everything in our world is set up for right handed people.

The desks at schools, the scissors, the left handed scissors are really hard to find.

Pretty much everything you do is Set up for a right handed person.

And it is a struggle for a left handed person to live in that world.

Now, can they?

Absolutely.

Can they thrive?

100%.

And so can you if you're working against your temperament.

But it is harder and it drains your energy.

And why do things harder when you don't have to?

Because business models allow us to change the way that we do business, change the systems that we're using, change the way things happen in our business, the flow of it, to better fit our temperament.

So Kersey Bates is only one way of looking at this.

And Kirsty Bates is a shortened version of the Myers Briggs.

If you took one of those back in college, you probably have your Myers Briggs test, or maybe you've taken one as part of a job.

There's a lot of times that we take sorters as part of a job.

I can tell you if you took it as part of your student experience or you took it in context to a job or some other type of a coaching program, I highly recommend you take one, whatever, sorter, again, if it was meaningful, because I want you to do it outside of that context.

So don't show up as the employee looking to get a job or as the student who is coming at it with the student mind.

I want you to come at any sorter that you take from here forward.

As this is the person I'm showing up as, who I really want to be, what my absolute preference would be, and if there's close questions on that test, pick in a perfect world what your preference would be.

So Kirsty Bates, I do want to cover that real quick because I think it's important in my story and my example that I am giving.

Kirsty Bates looks to four different ways that we interact with the world around us or that we process the world around us.

The first one is how we receive and go through that information, how we kind of digest it, and that's introvert and extrovert.

This also has to do with how we charge our social batteries, whether we charge those alone or whether we charge those in a group of people.

So that's introvert and extrovert.

And most people are familiar with whether they're an introvert or an extrovert.

The other three of the departments, so to speak, in Kirsty Bates may be a little bit less familiar with you for you.

But the second one is how you frame and move through the things in your world.

So either sensing or intuitive.

So sensing people like things, very detail oriented, very step by Step intuitive people like to jump all around and like to look at more big picture and are concerned with futuristic further out things rather than the details in the moment.

Then how you make decisions is kind of the next compartment in the sorters results and that's whether you make decisions with your head or with your heart.

And also finally how the final compartment is how you prefer to deal with and organize the world around you.

Do you like to follow rules and have things have everybody be very much within what is agreed upon or do you prefer to have freedom and to want to maybe color outside of those lines and kind of follow the feel of a certain thing?

Is that more important to you?

So there's a lot more to it than that.

There's books written on this, there's entire courses of studies, there's websites, there's coaches who work with it.

There's a tremendous amount of information that I'm not going to cover in a 30 minute podcast.

But the bottom line to it is if we look at those four areas of how the Cursey Bates basically types us for a certain temperament and believe me, there are shades of gray in there, if you are one temperament, that does not mean you're.

If you test out to be an extrovert, does not mean you're an extrovert all the time.

You still have an introvert piece.

So remember in that left handed, right handed conversation, right hand dominant people still have a left hand and they still use it and people who are left handed still have to live in a right handed world and stretch and use what would be the right handed way of doing things.

So anyway, back to just as our world is set up for right handed people, that right handed preference, our world likes to look at us and say we would like for you to be a certain way so we would like you to for you to be an extrovert.

And in business that looks like showing up easily to networking events and creating good sales conversations and all of those kind of things.

That's what we would consider successful.

We also consider it great if you can do things step by step because that's how our education system is set up for us to learn is step, step by by step.

That's how employers really would like us to behave in the work environment is to be able to take a task that they have outlined in a standard operating procedure manual and have us start at step one and end at wherever the last step is.

That is a preference.

We also prefer people who are heartfelt, who show up with feeling and appreciation and empathy that is oftentimes valued and seen as more positive than somebody who's very logical and very, very practical and pragmatic about how they approach things.

And don't always bring in that heartfelt piece because they have a preference to think about it before they feel into it.

And then finally, our world is set up for people who need to follow the rules and who will follow those rules.

We have agreements about what time we are going to start work, what time an appointment or a meeting starts, where we're going to be at a certain in our world, how we are going to live together, how we are going to behave in a certain way, and how we are going to organize things so that we can interact with them as a collective.

So ideally, in our world view, we would like an ESFJ to show up in our world.

They're extroverted, they like details, follow step by step instructions well, learn easily by step by step.

They are very heartfelt and empathetic and, and they tend to want to follow the rules and find order a very nice and comfortable way to be safe.

The reality is that only 12% of the population, give or take, fall into being strict ESFJs.

For the rest of us, the remaining percentage, we have a world that looks at us differently.

So a lot of times when people are writing books about business and they're setting up business models, they tend to favor what I would consider that ideal personality.

And I don't mean that as in it is an ideal temperament or personality.

I mean, that is, when we think about it, that's the person we tend to think would be the most successful, as possibly an entrepreneur or an employee, et cetera.

The truth is we're all successful no matter what temperament you have.

But the systems tend to get set up for kind of what we think people should act, not necessarily what they do act like or what they do prefer.

And thus what happens is many times business models don't fit the way that the business owner or operator really prefers to work.

And where this comes out in the wash, so to speak, is through exhaustion, through grumpiness, through having that short fuse, through burnout, through not being excited about the future.

I mean, there's a hundred ways that this falls out in your business and the fallout can hit way more than you.

Stress is a big part of it.

And one thing that we want to do in our business and in the world at large is reduce the amount of stress.

Stress is deadly.

Stress is time consuming, stress is expensive.

So.

So for those of us who want to make more Money to be more at peace.

Stress is a high end thing that we want to look at reducing.

So we want to start building systems that work for our preferences because it's a way that we can begin to be more comfortable, to be more joyful, to be more at ease, and to not be as tired or stressed at the end, end of the day.

So back to my personal story.

So now me armed with this information and this podcast is going to make this sound like it happened immediately.

It did not.

It took years.

But as that information started to sink in with me, what I started to do is I started to shift how my business model worked.

And one of the first things I did was when I took on new clients, I got rid of the trading dollars for hours and the time based system because that huge drain on me, it had a lot of rule following, it had a lot of restriction, it had a lot of very detail oriented stuff in it.

All things that were not my preference.

And my temperament is such that it was really, really asking me to pull hard on some preferences that I wasn't even close to having.

So in the handedness example, I was very, very right handed and I was trying to do, do everything with my left hand or vice versa, if you want to think of it that way.

So what I did was I shifted to a model where I moved from having a contract that outlined hours for dollars to having a letter of agreement that basically outlined what I was responsible for, what my client was responsible for, and the value that I would provide for that client and what I expected to be paid in return and how that relationship would work.

And I will tell you, it was life changing.

So the biggest takeaway that I had and probably the thing that impacted me the most was about six months after I did this, I went into a new year and that was my best ever financial year up to that point.

Because what happened was I had more energy, I had a more positive attitude.

I, I really showed up differently for my business.

And what it did was it trickled down and showed up big time in the bottom line of what I made that year.

So if you're financially motivated, I'm going to tell you, looking hard at your temperament and looking at how you can shift your business model to work more in your preferences will end up moving your bottom line just out of energetic return.

But more than that, I, my clients were happier with me by far.

Now, did I lose some clients in the process?

Absolutely.

There were people that wanted to work within that paradigm that I had created before.

They were comfortable with it.

That's what felt safe for them.

That was their preference.

And it was no longer going to work for them to work with me in this new capacity.

But the clients that did move over ended up being far happier.

And I ended those relationships with the clients, clients that didn't work on a positive note, saying, hey, I'm happy for you.

I will help you find someone who can do what I was doing in the same way that I was doing it and do it with your preference and in your safe and comfortable zone rather than mine.

So it ended up working out really well.

Now I have shifted my business model even more.

I've incorporated a lot of other things because this was probably the first page that I peeled back on the understanding that in order to have the life I wanted to live, I needed to have a business model that fit that.

And as I continued to delve into what my strengths were, the places where I was really, really good at something, I shifted my business model even further.

To be more of a consultant, less of the production type work, and to do the things that really, really excited me, which are like really recording this podcast and teaching classes and doing courses and now playing with AI and tech and all of that kind of stuff.

So over the years I have evolved even further.

And I anticipate, as I continue to grow and evolve and learn even more about myself and how I want to show up and work, that my business will continue to evolve right alongside of me.

My goal is to spend as much time as I possibly, possibly can in those zones of genius.

And I think I'm borrowing somebody's words there, although I don't know what it is, but spending those times in my zones of genius, where I'm spending the mass majority of my time, 80% or more of it, doing things that are in fit my preferences and where I can really shine and be energized rather than drained.

So how do you create this in your own business?

It's probably the next question that you have.

Well, you got to start somewhere.

And the somewhere you need to start is by starting to create, create some awarenesses around how you prefer to show up.

So here's the reality of being a human in this world right now.

We are told from the time that we arrive on this planet all of the way through how we are expected to show up.

And so sometimes we're really lost about how we would really like to show up, what it would be natural for us versus what we've modified in ourselves to create, to meet an expectation that somebody else has given us.

So that's what these temperament sorters are designed to do.

They're designed to help you get back to that baseline, to get back to your original design, to look at kind of how you prefer to show up in the world.

And that's number one, is grab one and take it.

There are a ton of them.

There's the Myers Briggs, there's the Kersey Bates.

Those two are very similar.

Myers Briggs.

Briggs is a longer version of Kirsty Bates, or actually, probably more realistically, Kirchy Bates is a shorter version of the Myers Briggs.

It's probably how I should have said that.

There's the Clifton Strength Finder, which I find, by the way, dovetails beautifully with Kirsty Bates.

Then there's the Enneagram, the disc.

And there's a host of these out there.

And to be honest with you, I don't think any of them are wrong or bad.

So I think that any one of them that you can gain insight into about yourself and how you show up in the world and how things are easier for you versus how things may be more difficult for you, there is value in that, deep value in it.

And so I encourage you, this is the month to do it.

The make it happen Monday.

In my world, this month is the challenge to get out there and take one of these sorters and start looking at how you show up.

And I use the word sorter versus test because it's not attached.

This is not a pass fail situation.

This is you sorting out where your preferences are versus where they're not.

So the next step, of course, is to utilize the results that you get.

And this is so critically important.

And I see a lot of people take this and go, oh, wow, that's really interesting.

And they treat it with the kind of flippancy that they might treat a astrological answer, a astrological reading versus that is if they don't believe in astrology.

So I don't want you to do that.

Don't be flippant about this.

Take a look at that, at your results.

And then what I want you to do is to think about it in context to your business.

There's a whole ton of personal life relationship stuff that can come along with this too.

But I'm here to talk about you being more business.

So look at it in context to your business.

So the business.

The best way to do that is to look at what is draining you in your business.

Take a moment to contemplate what are things that you absolutely dislike in your business.

Doing like, what do you dread showing up for?

For me, it is accounting.

Like, I don't like accounting at all.

It's very step by step, it's very restrictive.

There's a lot of rules to.

It does not fit my happy place at all.

I still have to do it.

And that's another important thing to understand about temperament, is that you have the opposite side, you have the opposite hand, and you can flex it, okay, but start looking at the places that you feel drained or that you struggle with or that you resist doing or that you find incredibly difficult in your business.

Entrepreneurship is not easy, but oftentimes I think we make it harder than we have to because we keep trying to do it the way somebody else thinks that we should should versus looking at, oh, who am I?

What do I prefer?

And how can I build a business that supports that which will in turn support the life I want to live?

So start looking at the places in your business that you're struggling and then take a look and comparison of that with whatever the result was from the particular sorter that you took.

What is it in the sorter that could possibly be causing resistance or an obstacle to whatever the struggle is in your business?

Now, this may not always work out to be temperament.

I want to be full disclosure here and tell you that sometimes the things that are hard in our business are hard for other reasons than just our personal preferences and how we want to work.

It may have to do with a trauma response.

It may have to do with a limiting belief.

It may have to do with the all a host of things that I work with routinely in, in my gestalt work or in my hypnotherapy work.

But a lot of times if you look at this, you may find it flows back to your temperament and shifting, just shifting how that particular system works to be one that is more compatible with your temperament can make a big, big difference in how you feel at the end of the day, whether you're drained and exhausted or whether you're energized and can move on to the next thing.

So start comparing those things and then start making small shifts.

You don't have to do this thing huge.

You don't have to sit down and completely remodel your business to be totally different overnight.

You can make a small shift here or a small shift shift there and see how that works.

Experiment with it, Take in everything as curiosity how you would approach it.

If you're just curious about what might happen differently if you change this one small thing and over time those one small thing changes add up to be something really, really big.

In closing, I just want to say that I hope that what you have learned in this podcast today will bring more joy and ease and create far less stress in your business than what you may be working within now.

And I do think this is definitely worth your time to take a look at to see if possibly shifting your business model can really shift your whole experience, including your bottom line.

Thanks for hanging out with me today and I'll see you in the next podcast.

Thank you for listening to the Be More Business podcast, where wisdom and innovation merge to create a business that supports the life you want to live.

For more resources, courses and inspiration, visit Be More Business.com.