What I Do When I Hit a Breaking Point in Business

I popped up out of the wave, skidding across the shell-filled sand on my tush. Gasping for air, I wiped the salty water away from my eyes and realized my favorite sunglasses had become one with the ocean.

I didn’t end up in the ocean that day by accident, or because it’s my favorite place on earth and I just so happen to live on an island surrounded by it.

I went because if I didn’t, I was going to snap.

You know when life stress is at that simmering point where it’s about to become a boil?

You handle the water in the basement. You pay the vet bill because the dog just ate a dinosaur toy (true story). You get your husband an ice pack to help his broken elbow.

But for every problem you solve, three more pop up.

Nothing’s going right. Everything’s stacked against me.

I’m also technically supposed to be “off” this summer, outside of writing today’s newsletter and taking care of customers. But I’m not doing so great at that either.

Something had to give.

What I Always Do When I Hit a Breaking Point

Here’s my go-to process:

• Go to the beach
• Admit to myself I need something to change
• Ask my support system for help
• Create a game plan for change

Thanks to step two, my Director of Ops, Lindsey, my miracle worker, came up with a great idea for step three.

Her idea: send my top four newsletters of the year, one each week in August, like a VH1 song countdown, newsletter edition.

I took it a step further. What if I shared the strategy behind each email and my takeaway on why it did so well?

So that’s what I’m doing.

Introducing the Top Newsletters Countdown

Next month, I’m counting down my top emails of 2026 over on Sam’s Sidebar.

At the end of each one, I’ll share exactly what I aimed to do, the strategy. Why I wrote it the way I did, the thought process. And why I think it performed so well, the analysis.

If you want to know what it takes to build an email list of nearly 70,000 subscribers and keep them genuinely engaged, this series is for you.

My top four emails are really different from each other, and I had a completely different strategy behind each one. It’s basically a mini email course, disguised as a countdown.

Are you in? See you next week with the first email in the series!