Flow State Business

The Dump List: What I’ve Let Go Of in Business (And Why It’s Working)

• Ruby Lee

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This episode is your permission slip.


To simplify. To strip it all back. To build a business that actually works for you.


After seven years in business, I’ve created a model that runs without the pressure, the big team, the rules, or the overcomplication. And in this episode, I’m sharing the exact things I’ve dumped to make that possible.


This one is for the entrepreneurs ready to burn the rule book and build something lighter. If you’ve been holding onto things in your business because you think you should, this will give you a whole new way to look at what’s truly working and what you’re ready to let go of.


  • Grab my workbook Cut, Simplify, Scale - the exact process I used to eliminate over $5K/month and reclaim time, profit, and peace.
  • Connect with me on Instagram here.

 So more and more I am attracting a lot of amazing clients my way, uh, who have purchased a $7 PDF or have done a mini course or bought into the bundle. And your messaging me on Instagram saying, girl, like everything you're saying and doing in business right now is really resonating. Everything that you're doing feels like a big fat permission slip to strip away all of the layers that maybe you'd stacked on over the last few years because business got a little bit crazy.

I think just like after COVID, like it just got online business especially, just got really complicated and very messy. If anything, this is the time to just like come back to home base and really ask yourself like, why do I have all of these extra things? When really it's just, you know, pushing down your profit lines or making you feel mega overwhelmed.

Today I had a call, for example, with a client who is really successful. You know, she's been on tv. She has many books that she's written now. She's in the media, mainstream radio, doing speaking gigs all around the world, and she's just like Ruby like. The way that you do business is so light and it's so airy, and I just need more of that in my life.

And the way that you talk about business is just a big permission slip. So I thought this episode could just be one big permission slip and a reminder of actually like how to come back to home base and just asking yourself like, I'm just gonna talk about things that I'm, I'm just no longer doing. And the permission I gave myself to really scale and have a much more peaceful and easy and chill business than ever before.

Like when I say I can't even remember the last time my nervous system has felt more chill, I truly mean that. Like if I go back to the start of my business seven years ago, definitely not like. Always on edge about like where the money was coming from. Even by the way, pre-business in corporate, I was just like always that gal who was working like 14, 15 hour days.

I mean, I was a recruiter so there was no standard hours. I was, when I was eating dinner, I was interviewing people on Zoom from the UK at like, you know, all times of the night. So. I don't think I was really come in corporate either. Then halfway through my business, you know, things were going so well. I was scaling out these massive masterminds and mini minds, and then always just feeling like I had just the most tightness in my chest ever.

And so here we are now, seven years later, and I. I've just gotta keep giving myself permission to rip out the rule book and sometimes the rule book gets bigger and bigger, you know, depending on what stage in business you're at. So let's just rip a few pages out together now, and I'm gonna name some stuff that I've done, but you definitely don't have to.

It might just give you a prompt around some other parts of your business where you are just like this. This is exactly what I needed to hear. Okay, so we're gonna take a few minutes to say this out loud. Just to set the scene and to give yourself like the full authority to listen to the big announcement that's going on in your soul right now.

Okay, so we're gonna say this, I give myself permission to do business, however, the bleep, I want to, I give myself permission to rewrite the rule book. And I give myself permission to start over again without freaking out that I'm starting over again. Okay. On that note, I just wanna take a few minutes myself to say this out loud.

There are so many things. I haven't done in my business over the last six months, and I'm actually so proud that I haven't, like things that I swear a lot of the most renowned business coaches and mentors all around the world would say is essential, but I have a theory that they're saying it's essential because.

They haven't given themselves permission to strip back the layers because they can't. They've built this massive empire now that even if one tiny pin is removed, the whole thing, at least in their mind, is gonna come crashing down. What I love about the coaches that I work with is that we have so much flexibility.

Around our business models and we've built it smartly. We haven't built it in like, you know, spaghetti code as my coders used to say when I was in the tech startup world where it was so hard to unravel the codes. It's more just like you can unstack it like a really easy Lego build and we can rebuild it in a way that just feels like it makes sense.

Okay? So everything is not gonna come crashing down just because you're giving yourself permission to simplify. There's a couple of things that I think for me has really been so abundantly. Hell yes. I call it the dump list, by the way, like the things that I've dumped you, you might wanna put together your own dump list.

All right, so dump list one. I as a very meta example, maybe you've noticed I don't have any more music on this podcast. I don't have an intro music. I don't have outro music. I literally just press record and talk to you guys. There's no fade ins, no production team. People are still tuning in every single week.

The podcast is like, well and truly, over half a million downloads. It's magic. I love it. And you know, like, I get it. If you love the big production, if you just wanna do the YouTube thing, if you wanna hire an amazing producer, please do that. But for me, I just cannot be fucked. Like I just wanna record it at home.

I'm sitting here on a Monday afternoon, it's 1:04 PM I am. Literally just chilling out my fluffy slippers and it like, you know, I canned the whole like need the podcast to be on YouTube thing. It might come back, it kind of may, but secretly I'm glad that I don't need to be on video for this. And when I was a part of another like big agency.

Part of their advice is like, in order for the podcast to really scale, I need to have video. I think there's a truth in that, but it's just not my truth. So you've gotta ask yourself, is it your truth? Does it feel good? Does it matter In the bigger scheme of things? To me, the answer's no. So. I'm happy with that and I'm loving seeing that the podcast listeners are still going up and up and up, which is so nice.

Okay. Number two. I haven't done any form of a professional photo shoot for like two years or so that I've paid for. I should say. I have been offered some amazing contra deals, but I haven't paid for any and I, it's not that I don't value photography, I just. The whole thing, like, oh, getting the outfits and the studio lights and the makeup and the hair done, and then like a $1,200 invoice or so, $2,000 invoice for 12 photos, just like, I know I can't, I just can't, like, I, I love paying my assistant and we take like candid shots even.

So I haven't done that in ages, guys. I just repeat photos from like months ago. The last studio that we rented was a hundred bucks an hour. On the Gold Coast and we did two hours and I got like so many photos at my, I just said to Deb, just click away. Just take photos. Photos, like maybe 20% of them were extra blurry 'cause I was just moving.

And the camera that we have isn't that great. It's nice, don't get me wrong. Still like a thousand dollar camera, but it's not like studio level. And I just use those photos again and again, like over the last six months it, it hasn't made a difference to my profit levels. If anything, it's just. Mate, it's given me more profit because I'm not needing to like, update my photos all the time.

And it, it converts just fine. It converts more than just fine. Okay. All right. Number three on my dump list. I haven't ever had a professional website built, like, I mean, there is a website but don't look at it. Um, it's definitely not. Glossy. It's not being designed by an agency. It's not a masterpiece. I just have never felt like $20,000 needs to go into my website.

And I, I think for me, because I have that stronger belief and given myself that stronger permission slip, nowadays, most people just buy from my checkout page. They don't even go to the sales page. They'll hear me talk about it on socials or maybe on here. The link that I provide you is just like, here is the checkout, and then you just go and check out.

So I mean, I do have sales pages. I definitely do, but they're not at all professionally designed. I just use the templates that are provided from my system and I don't change a single thing. I also don't use long form sales pages anymore. I used to really go long with it because that was sort of the trend.

You remember like if you clicked off something off the Facebook. Ad, whatever ad was calling you in, and you could scroll at least 10 times before getting to. Buy now button. I, yeah, I just don't do that at all. It goes straight to checkout. There's no scrolling required. And I just think like for the real ones, for those of you that have been around and that trust, the brand, that know my journey, I am so transparent with everything that I think now when clients want something, it's kind of that energy of like, if you know, you know, if you feel it, you buy it and I don't need to write.

Like a 30,000 page op-ed for you to say yes to my thing. So, and that's what I stopped doing, um, on the 30,000 page op-ed thing. Kind of similar-ish, I've just completely stopped doing live streams and I haven't done a live stream for. Ages 12 months plus, I reckon. And that used to be one of the primary ways that I sold and I thought that people only bought off my live energy.

And um, I'm gonna put this in the same category. So by live streams I meant like I used to do Facebook lives and Instagram lives. I had a little stint doing LinkedIn lives and I'm also gonna bundle in their live masterclass webinars. Uh, live challenges, things like that totally scrapped off. Like my dump, it's, it's on my dump list.

I've dumped that. I do not do anymore live master classes or webinars and thank goodness, thank the permission slip gods, because that used to take up so much time in my energy and I used to fully, fully bat that belief that if I wasn't doing that, I wasn't making any sales. And since I've stopped doing that.

I've made even more sales, so that has been on my dump list, and I'm very happy that that has been on there and it will absolutely stay on there for now. I also dumped the idea that I needed a really big team. I've talked about this quite a bit, so I'm not gonna go into too much detail, but right now it's literally just the three of us, me, my husband, and my assistant, Deb.

Her hours fluctuate, you know, week by week. But generally speaking, um, yeah, that's it. So I don't have, you know, like a full-time ops OBM strategy manager. Mike looks after a lot of that now there's no layers of approval. Thank goodness, my God. Like I was speaking to a client of mine, I really helped clean up her structural side of her business.

And yeah, she's basically, she's come from this world where she didn't know how to even create a sales page in her business because she had an OBM who she hired to do all of that. And her OBM, uh, stepped away from the business and, um, she was in tears about it because she didn't even know how to write an email to her list.

Guys, I'm just really of the belief and you know, I have. Corporate to thank for this, I suppose. But if you don't know how to operate your own business and your own tools, don't outsource yet. Just learn it first. Just and, and please, like, I just mean like if you just spend one hour of your day for one week learning a system, you would be pretty close to getting good at it.

Maybe not mastering it, but just getting good. And then from there, you actually know what parts of it you wanna outsource. If you don't know that and you are outsourcing the whole thing from scratch, you are putting yourself in a bit of dangerous territory because A, your wool can be pulled over your eyes so easily, like contractors can just charge you whatever they want.

'cause they know you don't know. They know that. And if there's money to be made and there's money on the table, may as well take it like contractor vibes. Um, but also. It will just make the way that, like, let's say you get a really, really great person on board in your team to be able to speak the same language to a certain point rather than like umming and ing and pointing your way through things.

And you will feel so frustrated because you'll have no idea what you're being charged for. So that's a little side note, but. I would just say that now my small and mighty team with no approval levels, I can just go in there, send emails whenever I want, write up pages whenever I want, put together a checkout page whenever I want.

It's so nice and it feels so easy. Oh my God. And just like. Not having to manage like a project management tool, whatever it is, by Notion or Slack, not having to respond to 1000 different Slack messages with approvals or questions. It's just such clear focus for me now in the business. I'm so grateful for it.

Okay. I also, on the dump list, I have decided that I am not needing to. Tie myself down to any social media rules. You've probably seen this actually in play for me. I don't go live, I don't post a lot of like trending reels with trending music. Most of my posts that have gone really, really well are the posts that, what do you know?

I enjoy making. I enjoy making carousels from. Still photos. The photos that were taken two years ago are part of my carousels. Or even if I have no photos, I can't be bothered going to the archives to find them. I'll just screenshot them off my notes page and you would've seen those, like the notes style, um, posts that I've been making.

They, they always go really well. I really enjoy the reels that are teaching. I've recently, you know, a couple of months ago, got an iPad, so I'm just drawing out a lot of my knowledge now. You guys are loving that one. Style where it looks like I'm podcasting, but FYI, I'm speaking to nobody. I'm just speaking to the camera and looking a little left of center, so it looks like I'm speaking to somebody and it looks like it's being cut out of a podcast, but it's not.

I'm sitting in the corner of my lounge room and those ones do really, really well for coaching, mentoring inquiries, so I don't even need to hire a studio for that. I'm just setting it up on a tripod. It's a vibe, you know? And. I will say that I have sold more low ticket than I ever have in my entire business, seven years, because prior to this I was a high ticket, you know, coach and all that.

But it's the first time that I've realized my $7 PDFs can absolutely lead to $10,000 days plus. And you know, it's so. Liberating. Just, I have so much joy in my business because of this dump list. So I wanna talk about like why all of this works, and then I want you to create your own dump list. Okay? This works for me because my business is finally being built off my own easy, clarity, ease, and effortlessness.

Okay? It's not built off somebody else's complexities. When I hear of somebody else's complexities, and I get a lot of that now because I have a lot of clients who come to me asking me to teach them more flow, ease, effortlessness, and then usually the first few parts of our calls or you know, workshops is.

Like making it less complex. So there's a lot of undoing and untying, the knots. If you guys have ever got your like fine necklaces into a knot, you know how hard it is to get a knot out of a fine necklace. That's how it feels like, and I promise you, if you stick to it, if you undo that knot, it'll just feel so easy for you moving forward.

I also know now that I can take an idea and move on it so fast, and because of that, it makes it feel like. I don't know, like the best thing that I've ever created in my business. And that's also why, because it's so quick to go from idea internet out there to the world. There's also a reflection of that energy around the money coming back that easily.

So there's this sense of like, I can get this idea out quickly, and then money returns to me easily because my systems are so clean and they're so simple. And. Everything now because I've set up the main parts of it, like the easy funnels and the easy way to receive money, the easy way to upsell that. Now everything is just like a rinse and repeat, so.

It feels so easy, and I think that's why my daily sales model works really beautifully. This is why people come back again and again to buy. This is why I'm scaling without sacrificing more time, I have so much more peace. I have so much spaciousness in my life. So I want you to, a couple of things. I want you to write down your own permission slip.

And by doing this, we wanna write out everything that you wanna dump out of your business. And your job right now isn't to work out how to dump it. Like, oh, I've got 17 people on my team. How do I fire all of them without the business burning up and falling apart? Just write down what you ideally would like.

Less off in your business, less pressure, less tasks, less all of that. Like if, let's say you've heard something that I've said and you're like, yes, I wanna do that, write that down. And then on your list it needs to be handwritten or you know, if you need to do it digitally, do it. But I want you to sign it off like a permission slip.

I give myself permission to dump these things from my business, and I trust that the universe and my guides will show me the way through it. Okay. I hope this episode is your permission slip to dump all of that. I want you to know that you have so much power, like by writing this out, you've got so much power that's now activated because of it.

Because you are calling in your rhythm, you're calling in your consistency, you're calling in what you're truly believing to be true, and your business does not have to be super fancy. To be into the millions or to impact millions. It just needs to be built around what exactly feels good for you and what works for you.

And that's it. Okay? If it's a $7 thing that you're selling, just remember you are. That's it. That's the thing that's gonna open up all the doors because it feels so good for you. All right, so on that note, have a fabulous week with your dump list. And signing off on that and giving yourself full permission to be all of you.

Because in this energy, we receive more flow, we receive more ease, we receive more money, we receive more joy, and I shall leave it there. I'll see you in the next episode. And as always, please come over to Instagram. Let me know what's on your list, big kisses, and I'll catch you in the next one.