Let this be the year you build yourself out of your business
Whether you want to work towards selling your business, carve out space for a new creative project, or simply take more time off, my goal is to help you step out of the day-to-day without sacrificing the quality of your company’s work, service or reputation.
Create an Agency that Practically Runs Itself
Strategic Advising
Individual Mentorship and Consulting
Get individual, personal support to overhaul your hiring, management and operations, so you can confidently step back while the business keeps growing.
Help when you need it
Quick Sessions to Tackle an Urgent Need
Sometimes you need help with one pressing issue. Maybe you’re hiring and worried about repeating past mistakes, or feel your team is going to miss something important.
Personal Action plan
Get your Business Independence Score
I built the Business Independence Scorecard to give you a personal checklist of the exact steps it takes to build yourself out a service-based business.
your strategic partner
I’m Brigitte Lyons, The Ops Whisperer.
When I founded my last agency, my goal was to transition from a traditional model into a business that would be more compatible with my goal of full-time travel.
I knew I was going to be unreachable much of the time, with a shifting and unpredictable schedule, so I had to remove myself from day-to-day operations.
If I couldn’t be reached for hours (or days), the business needed to keep running.
After a decade of self-employment, I was forced to figure out how to build myself out of the day-to-day.
In the process, I built a company I ran working 20 hours a week, while traveling to national parks and off-grid locations.
You may have zero interest in long-term travel or visions of selling your business any time soon. You don’t need to stop working with clients if that’s what you love.
But here’s the important part:
Designing your business so it can thrive without you makes it stronger, more resilient, and creates room for growth and innovation.
If you want a business that runs smoothly without you constantly swooping in to solve problems, you will need to do two things: 1) Develop foolproof systems, and 2) Train your team to make the right decisions without your direct input.
Doing this work in my own agency unlocked the fastest period of growth I’d experienced in more than a decade of self-employment and entrepreneurship. Even though I was less available, the business thrived by every objective measure.
The agency grew faster than any business I’d launched before
I was able to give myself a raise
My team members developed new offers for the company on their own (including a program that became our most profitable service)
Three years later, I was able to sell the business.
Your Goals are Within Reach!
“I came to Brigitte thinking I had an operations problem. I knew our project management systems were tight and well tested, but it still felt like we were overengineering things. We’re a small firm, and we work with a select number of clients at a time — so I kept asking myself, “Why does it feel like we’re moving mountains?”
One conversation with Brigitte identified the problem. It wasn’t operations. It wasn’t our systems. It was ME, the leader of the company!
I wasn’t empowering my team members the way I should have been. To be clear, we have a great team — everyone gets along, we’re aligned on values, and everyone really goes above and beyond to deliver the highest quality content for our clients. But my presence in every little task and conversation was hamstringing my people, preventing them from learning how to make their own decisions and being leaders themselves.
After a few sessions with Brigitte, my team and I had a plan to work through this challenge. The result was I was able to take a month-long sabbatical this summer, and my team had absolute confidence they could make decisions without me.
When I came back, it was like I hadn’t been gone at all. Our clients were happy and my team was happy — and my team asked me if they could keep going with the higher-level work they had been doing. For the first time in the 10 years I have been running this firm, I feel like I’m not on my own making every little decision. I empowered my people, and they empowered me in return!”