You're at 6 Figures But Working More Than Your Employees — Here's Why

[00:00:00] So you had six figures and felt nothing. No celebration, no relief. Just this quiet panic that it's about to fall apart. If that's you, we need to talk. What's wild. I've been running my marketing agency for over 11 years now, and I've worked with over 220 coaches, consultants, service providers, just different business owners, and I've helped people scale from zero to six figures and six figures to seven, and there's this pattern I keep seeing this thing nobody talks about publicly.

You hit six figures, you're supposed to feel like you made it right, like that's the milestone everybody's chasing. That's the proof you are successful. But here's what actually happens. You hit it, you look around and you feel nothing or worse. You feel guilty, anxious, like you're waiting for it to collapse.

And I felt this myself. I've seen it in my clients. Today I want to talk about why six figure success feels empty and what that emptiness is [00:01:00] actually telling you. So let's start with the lie. We've all been sold. Six figures is supposed to be the number, the external validation that you've made it as an entrepreneur.

It's what separates the struggling from the successful. So you work off to get there. You sacrifice your relationships, your sleep, your peace of mind. You tell yourself, once I hit six figures, everything will be different. Once I hit six figures, I'll be happy. And then you hit it and you're still you. The same doubts, the same insecurities, the same feeling that you're feeling right now, the same feeling that you're somehow faking it because the real problem isn't the revenue.

It's that we've been taught to measure success externally while ignoring what's happening internally. Six figures doesn't fix your internal world, it just exposes what was already there. If you had imposter syndrome at 50,000, you'll have it at a hundred thousand. The number changes. The feeling [00:02:00] doesn't.

So why does it feel empty? Let me break this down into three reasons that I see constantly in myself, in my clients, and pretty much every successful in entrepreneur I've worked with. So the first reason is you built somebody else's definition of success. Most of us didn't sit down and ask, what do I actually want my life to look like?

We looked around at what other entrepreneurs were doing and we copied it. Like, let's face it, we chased the revenue number because that's what everybody else was chasing. But here's the thing, their goals. Aren't your goals, their vision of success isn't yours, and when you achieve something you never actually wanted, of course it feels hollow.

So lemme tell you a quick story. When I started my career, I was working at KPMG, I started from the ground up and made my way to manager. Three years later, I realized that, well, I actually didn't want to become a partner in the business. I was good at what I was doing. The pay rises were good, the salary was decent, but.

The partnership felt like [00:03:00] something that people thought were telling me that I should do, and. As a manager, I was like, well, I don't wanna look at paperwork all day. I don't wanna find mistakes in people's work. I don't wanna find risks and report on those risks only for my clients to not do anything about them.

And so the reports just felt like an ongoing monotonous kind of finding problems, but not actually getting involved in the solutions. Reason number two, you're still operating like you're broke, and this is huge. You hit six figures. But your nervous system hasn't really caught up. You're still in survival mode, still saying yes to clients.

You don't wanna work with still working 60 hours or 80 hour weeks, still afraid to spend money or even take time off. You hit the milestone, but you didn't give yourself permission to actually enjoy it. You immediately moved the gold post to seven figures because that's kind of the next logical step.

You hit the milestone, but you didn't give yourself permission to actually enjoy it. Reason number three. [00:04:00] Success without alignment is just an expensive distraction, right? You built a business that makes money, but does it actually reflect who you actually are? Does it give you energy or does it drain you?

Are you doing work that matters to you or work that just pays well? And that's exactly what I was doing at KPMG, right? They were paying me well, but I didn't actually matter. Success without alignment is just expensive distraction. Most six figure entrepreneurs are living in the integration gap, the space between external achievement and internal fulfillment.

Here's what most people get wrong. They think that the emptiness means that they failed, that something's broken, that they should be feeling a certain way that they're ungrateful or maybe even weak. But the emptiness isn't actually a problem. It's a signal. It's your internal system telling you that you've outgrown this version of success, and maybe it's time for something deeper.

Think about it like this. When you were [00:05:00] starting out, six figures was the real goal, was the right goal. You needed financial stability. You needed proof that your business could work. You needed to survive. But once you've survived, once you've actually survived, once you've proven you can build something.

The game changes, or at least it should. Now, it's not about making it, it's about what you make it mean. This is what I call the second mountain. So the first mountain is external success, the revenue, the clients, the visibility, the proof. And the second mountain is the internal fulfillment. It's alignment, purpose, contribution, peace.

And most entrepreneurs get stuck because they keep climbing that first mountain even after they've reached the summit. They go from six figures to seven figures to maybe even eight figures, and they're still empty because more of the wrong thing is still wrong. For me, when I hit six figures, I realized that, well, I'm kind of living fine.

I'm, [00:06:00] you know, paying my bills, I'm my lifestyle. I decided is not gonna really change. And I realized that actually making more money, yes, I mean, I could fulfill my, I could fulfill my life with all of these exact extravagant things. But I realized that actually there's gotta be something more because making the money or having the skills to make money, or finding the clients and working with my clients to make money, yes.

That helped me serve myself for the first, I don't know, seven or eight years of doing this business. But then I figured, well. There's gotta be something more. So I realized that more money wasn't the answer when I actually hit six figures in my business. And the reason I got there was because I was like, well, six figures feels good.

I'm owning well, I'm living well. But even with having savings in the bank account, or even, you know, reaching recently a million dollars in lifetime revenue, I was like, uh, I don't know. This still doesn't feel. [00:07:00] Good. It still feels hollow. It still feels empty. And then I realized that the emptiness that I was feeling wasn't that I was broken.

And it's not for you either. It's not failure, it's just an evolution. It's the next step. The emptiness isn't a problem, it's a signal. It's your internal system telling you you've outgrown this version of success. It's time for something deeper. It's not failure, it's evolution. So what do you do with this information?

Well, first you stop pretending that you're fine. You stop telling yourself that you're ungrateful or that you should just be happy with what you have. You've gotta acknowledge the truth, which is that success without fulfillment is just exhausting. Second, you've gotta ask yourself a different question, not how do I make more money, but what do I actually want my life to feel like?

Not how do I scale faster, but what would alignment look like in my business? Third, we start building for the second mountain. You design your business around your life. Not the other way around. You build systems that give you [00:08:00] leverage. You work with people who energize you. You create offers that reflect your values, not just market demand.

And this is a shift from hustle to alignment, from external validation to internal clarity, from successful and miserable, to successful and fulfilled. This isn't woo woo mindset fluff. This is strategic. An aligned business is a sustained business. A fulfilled founder builds better, sells better leads, better.

When your business is aligned, growth doesn't feel like grinding. It feels like momentum. If you're watching this and something's clicking, if you're recognizing yourself in this pattern, I want you to know you're not alone and you're not broken. You're just ready for the next level. Inside Growth Pros, we help you build the systems strategy and mindset to scale without burning out, to grow in alignment, not just in revenue.

If that sounds like what you need, there's a link in the description and. You can apply for a strategy call. We'll look at where you are. We'll look at where you want to go and whether growth pros is [00:09:00] the right foot, but whether you join or not, I want you to take this away. Six figure success. Feeling empty doesn't mean you've failed.

It means you're ready for something deeper. So stop chasing more and start building better. I'll see you in the next one.

‍