Episode 0Aug 17, 2026· 19:32
✌️ How to Make Pivoting Fun — Welcome to Our Back to Biz Refresh Series!
▸ Show notes from the creator
Hello hello and happy mid-August, friends!
Today we're kicking off a new Biz Refresh series — five episodes in five days to get you ready for fall in a fun, aligned way!
Press play to hear why I'm embracing a pivot, and tune in this week to learn:
How to refresh your brand (for free!)
Ideas for updating your home office & work vibe
My guide to more affordable systems & software for your tiny biz
A new approach to ambition that let's you dream big without burning out
You'll hear from amazing guests like Alex McGinness, Taylor Apolonio, and Amina AlTai. It's basically a mini-of-the-moment-creative-business-masterclass all for free on the pod feed this week! So please subscribe and share it with a friend xo
RESOURCES + LINKS
👋 Download the FREE Leaving Social Media Toolkit
🌐 Get on the Interweb waitlist for creative business courses + community
💓 Join the Clubhouse for exclusive bonus episodes + emails
COMMUNITY SPONSOR
✏️ Looking for a fall planner that's about permission not perfection? Check out Nine to Kind. Get 50% off their digital planners with code OFFTHEGRID50 & 25% off analog products with code OFFTHEGRID25. Learn more & claim your discount at: https://www.ninetokind.com/pages/offthegrid
About this episode
Hello hello and happy mid-August, friends!
Today we're kicking off a new Biz Refresh series — five episodes in five days to get you ready for fall in a fun, aligned way!
Press play to hear why I'm embracing a pivot, and tune in this week to learn:
How to refresh your brand (for free!)
Ideas for updating your home office & work vibe
My guide to more affordable systems & software for your tiny biz
A new…
Listener reactions
💡0
🤝0
🔥0
😄0
0 reactionsShare your reaction
Pick how this episode landed — then leave a public review or a private note to the host.
You
Your name will appear with your review0/300 Visible to everyone
Sign in to leave feedback
Full transcript
00:00
Amelia HrubyHello. Hello. And welcome or welcome back to Off The Grid, a podcast about sharing your work and making money online without relying on social media, big tech, or the sleazy sales tactics that have come to pervade so much of online business. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. And on this show, I share stories, strategies, and experiments for making art and running a business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty.
00:00
I'm coming to you today after a pretty solid six week break of not really being online that much. I told myself and you, dear listeners, that in July, I was doing a month of no calls and no content, and I really stuck to that. I spent a lot of time laying on the couch reading, floating in my tiny backyard pool, listening to music, and traveling to see friends and connect with the people who helped me remember who I am, who they are, what makes everything so meaningful. And it was a really beautiful month. I'm very grateful for that time away.
00:00
I also spent some of that time brainstorming ideas for the show, for the interweb, for the clubhouse. I took a few days in July to move the clubhouse from Substack to Ghost, which I shared about in the last episode with Lex Roman. I also took some time to work on an off the grid rebrand, which is in progress. I'm very excited to say. If you join the clubhouse, you'll see some sneak peeks of what the new look is going to look like, and I'm hoping to really bring it to life across all of the shows and offerings in the off the grid universe this fall.
00:00
And I think that's my favorite thing about kind of stepping back from the more public aspects of work is both tending to myself because I'm a human being who needs support that isn't just in the form of, you know, podcast listens and dollars in the bank account, but also to have that, like, generative creative time that I think can only come when I'm working in a less goal oriented way. All of that to say, I, Amelia, am back. I am rested. I am ready. And I am so, so happy to be bringing you a new season and series of the podcast.
00:00
I'm calling this one our Back to Biz Refresh Series. And it's going to be five episodes in five days here on the podcast feed, all totally free for everyone tuned in. And in this series, we are gonna talk about how to get back to business When it's still summer outside, but at least where I live, the children have gone back to school, the pool is closed, and these stores are full of school supplies, markers, folders, trapper keepers, everything else you need to go to school. What do we do? Us, small business owners, creators, online marketers, what are we doing during this period?
00:00
So I think what we're doing is continuing to enjoy summer as it lingers and also find ways to get back to work that feel fun, that refresh and invigorate us because there's a lot to come in the fall. Right? I find that in my work at least, spring and fall are my busiest seasons in terms of launches, sales, people are emailing me, they want stuff. And so I find myself now here landing with you in mid August feeling like I need to get ready for what I know is to come in September, October, November. But I'm not really ready to like lock in and go hard yet.
00:00
So this back to biz series is about how to get back to it in a fun and refreshing way. I'm also thinking of it as a how to make pivoting fun series. Because as I've reconnected with Interweb members, as I've touched back in with the folks who are in my close biz friends, small group program, as I've just been talking to people in the clubhouse and to my friends and peers, I'm realizing that a lot of us are making very big changes and sometimes very hard decisions as we look to our business or our creative work this fall. I don't think I have to tell you that 2026 has been a really hard year politically, economically, socially. The US is still at war, a war that I vehemently oppose and so many of us do in Iran.
00:00
The economy is still struggling even though, you know, AI is like bolstering so much of the stock market to greater heights than ever. We're also seeing incredibly high prices at the grocery store. We're seeing incredibly high prices at the gas station. And that means that a lot of us have less to spend, and we need to make more than ever. And we're really feeling that crunch between those two things, between the sort of economic contraction and pressure that we feel as small business owners and humans trying to figure this out in the world.
00:00
We've also seen so much climate destruction this summer. There are fires raging in many parts of North America and Europe and elsewhere. As I record this and my heart goes out to anyone who is impacted by those who has lost belongings or homes or people in them, it's really hard to witness and, of course, even harder to go through. And all of that is on my mind as I'm recording this Back to Biz Refresh series. It's definitely hard to feel like this work is important in a time of so much collapse and destruction.
00:00
And also, feels more important than ever to be gathering people, to be coming together, to be figuring this out. I still believe that self employment can be a really beautiful liberatory journey. It has been for me and for so many others who I've met through this work. And I wanna hold on to that even in the face of so much struggle. So that's why this Back to Biz Refresh series is also a how to make pivoting fun series because some of us have just been pivoting over and over again for the past six years.
00:00
I don't really think that's changing. I think part of being self employed is learning to love the pivot. So this week, we are going to love the pivot together. We are gonna make it fun, and we are gonna find ways to enjoy and embrace new versions of ourselves even if they are, you know, sort of phoenix rising from the ashes in a really challenging world. So all of that shared. Let me tell you what's coming up this week and what you can look forward to. So in this Back to Biz Refresh Series, I am going to offer a few fun refreshes, thoughtful refreshes for you with the help of some very special guests. So tomorrow, you are going to get a quick and free brand refresh with the wonderful Alex McGinnis of Arco Iris Studio. Alex is a designer who helped me with my book sales page last year. He's helping me a little bit with the off the grid rebrand, bouncing ideas with me.
00:00
And I truly love her work, so I'm so excited to bring you this conversation about how you can refresh your brand, your business visuals before the fall. I find that sort of a little visual polish, it's just kinda like putting on a new outfit. It's like, oh, I feel great today. And that helps me approach my work differently or head to the office differently, you know, if I'm actually wearing a different outfit when I used to go to an office. So we're gonna start our Back to Biz Refresh there with you and your brand.
00:00
After that, I've invited Taylor Apollonio on the podcast to talk about how to refresh your home office. So I did a full renovation of my home office this summer. I knocked out a window, turned it into a door, repainted, reorganized, and I am loving it. If you're in the interweb, you've probably seen I have a brand new beautiful quilt in the background of all my Zoom screens. So my home office refresh has really helped me just like love going to work each morning again.
00:00
And I'm gonna talk to Taylor about how we can all have that sort of experience. Even if your refresh is just a tiny reorganizing of your laptop home screen, we'll talk about how that home office refresh can help bring you into fall with new energy. I also spoke to Amina Al Tai about how to refresh your ambition with ambition in some scare quotes there as we head toward fall. Amina wrote a wonderful book called The Ambition Trap, and that book is really all about why ambition can be beautiful, how it can be a natural unfolding of our desire for more life, and also how ambition can be co opted by the powers that be to sort of like drive us all toward, you know, the norms of capitalism's endless growth. And so how do we be ambitious without falling into those traps?
00:00
I talked to Aminah about that to give us all the ambition refresh that we might need before we get to fall. And then the final piece of this series is going to be a bit of a little back to biz refresh from me. I am doing an episode on how to set up your tiny biz tech for $50 a year or less. You heard that right, $50 a year. I wanted to put together a guide to more affordable systems and software because as I said earlier, I know so many people are feeling financially crunched this year.
00:00
I'm talking to so many business owners who just like do not have the funds that they used to have. And so I thought it could be fun in a certain sense to sort of talk about how I might build an online business that really doesn't cost very much money to run. So I'm gonna talk about that in the Tiny Biz Tech episode, and that will be your Biz Refresh Series. We will talk about how to make pivoting fun through all of these different lenses. And I wanna say that sometimes your business needs a true overhaul.
00:00
Sometimes you have to go back to the beginning. And this series isn't about how to do that. We're talking about how to sort of shift some of the outer layers of your business, your brand, your office, as well as how to dig into some of the more structural pieces, your tech, your ambition, and how refreshing all of that can allow you to move through changes and pivots with more ease and make them more enjoyable. But if what you need this fall is actually to really tear your business down to the stakes and rebuild it all over again, I would love to invite you to join us in the interweb. We're gonna have some real support for that this fall.
00:00
And you can hop on the waitlist right now and doors will be opening next week. So this series comes out all week this week, and then all of next week, doors to the interweb will be open to the waitlist only. So if you're new around here and you don't know what the interweb is, it's our annual membership for creatives, artists, freelancers, and small business owners who want to connect with their values, share their work, and make money online without social media. So everything we do here at Off the Grid, all the things I talk about, the ideas I give you, we actually put it into practice together inside the interweb. We have almost 300 members now all over North America, Europe, some in other parts of the world who are building beautiful businesses and creative practices that don't rely on social media.
00:00
And our schedule for this fall includes just, again, some really supportive and connective events and offerings. We're going to have monthly intention setting and momentum building sessions. We're going to have workshops on brand positioning, on building a referral network, on some magical modalities that I'm excited to bring in. We're gonna do a five day email list growth challenge together. I'm gonna offer some office hours so you can really ask me those questions about how to build or rebuild your business.
00:00
And we have coworking parties where we gather for a day and kinda drop in, get some work done, do some Pomodoro sessions, and then head back into what I'm sure is your busy life. So the interweb is my favorite place to hang out online. I think every person who runs a community says that about their community, but it's not just my favorite place. I have the testimonials that say it's other people's favorite place to hang out as well, and I'd love to invite you in. So if everything I've said here in this little series opening episode is resonating with you, if you could use more support and camaraderie this fall, head to the show notes and put yourself on the wait list.
00:00
That doesn't mean you have to sign up. It just means that you're gonna get more information from me about the interweb when doors open next week starting Monday, August 24. And if you love the series this week, maybe you're not sure if the interwebs for you right now, but if you like these episodes and conversations, I think you'll love what we're up to in that community. So again, you can find out more at offthegrid.funinterweb or find the link in the show notes to join the waitlist. And I'm really excited to be bringing you this series and to be opening doors to the interweb next week.
00:00
Now, before I go, I had to tell you about one more thing. So while you put yourself on the interweb waitlist and you're in those off the grid show notes, you might see something else there that I really want you to know about. So this series is only happening because of our wonderful sponsor, Kind. So you may remember that in the spring, nine to Kind sponsored our Astro and Biz Planning Summit. It was so wonderful. I got to use their planners and show them off to the community as we gathered for those astrology and business planning sessions. And since we are headed into back to school or as I'm calling it back to biz season, nine to Kind is back to offer us discounts on their amazing planners, which are anti perfectionist planners. They are for those of us who want to get things done but need a little support, not becoming perfectionist people pleasers in the process. I've been working with Nine to Kind's annual possibility planner this year and absolutely loving it. I'm also a big fan of their daily notepad.
00:00
I really love the digital version of that for daily planning, and you can get discounts on all of those things if you head to 9tokind.com/pages/offthegrid or just head to the link in the show notes. Lauren of nine to kind is offering 25% off analog products and 50% off of the digital planners. So even if you haven't used a digital planner before, you could try one out. See if it works for you. Very affordable investment with these discounts from Nine to Kind.
00:00
So thank you so much to Lauren and Nine to Kind for sponsoring this series. Again, it's only happening because of her and the planners. So thank you, Lauren. And dear listener, if you're interested, please head to the show notes. Please check out the link. Please show Lauren some love. Grab a planner. Join our Substack. Explore the website. There's so much greatness that she is offering. And I haven't mentioned it yet, but, like, Lauren is a therapist who made these planners to support all of us. And if you get the full possibility planner, includes some therapeutic practices, Just like a lot of support in Lauren's nine to kind planners, which I really appreciate. Because let me tell you, I used to be like a hardcore planner person, and then my planner became like the bane of my existence because I felt like it was just like judging me and berating me all the time. And I didn't really start using a planner again until I got my hands on these planners from Nine to Kind. So that's our sponsor for this series.
00:00
Again, I'm very grateful to Lauren. I'm very grateful to all of you for tuning in. And there's so much greatness to come. I can't wait to bring you my conversations with Alex, Taylor, and Amina. I can't wait to share the tech stack episode. I can't wait to hopefully see you in the interweb when the doors open next week. I'm just really, really grateful to be back, to be here with all of you. Thank you for supporting my summer break. Thank you for supporting the show. There's so much to come for us this week and beyond.
00:00
And again, even though times may be hard, I'm so glad that we get to gather to support each other and to continue figuring it out together. If you take nothing else away from this episode, please know that you are not alone. I would love to hear from you. I'd love to see you in one of our communities. And until next time, you can find me and everyone else here off the grid. That was an abridged version of Social Media by Surfer Boy and Rectangle. To hear the entire song, find Surfer Boy on Spotify or head to the link in the show notes. Thanks so much to them for sharing the song with us, as well as to Melissa Caitlin Carter, who sings our theme song that you hear at the start of every show. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. And if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you will download the free leading social media toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit.
00:00
Until next time, I will see you off the grid.