Simone Jennings of The Lightworking Group on Building an Aligned, Sustainable Business Without Burnout

Simone Jennings is a Spiritual Business and Lifestyle Coach, marketing strategist, and the founder of The Lightworking Group, LLC. With over 15 years of experience across marketing, branding, and spiritual practice, Simone helps purpose-driven women turn their ideas, gifts, and lived experiences into businesses that feel both aligned and profitable. By blending strategy with spirituality, she supports her clients in building brands that honor their energy, values, and real lives, not just external definitions of success.

 Please share a brief introduction and your business:

I’m a spiritual business and lifestyle coach, marketing strategist, and founder helping women turn their gifts, ideas, and hard-won wisdom into businesses that actually fit their real lives. For over 15 years, I’ve helped purpose-driven women build brands and offers that feel aligned and profitable, without burning themselves out in the process.

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Through The Lightworking Group, I help spiritual, creative, and purpose-led women build businesses rooted in clarity, intuitive leadership, and nervous-system-friendly growth. Through my agency, The Four-Eyed Marketer, I help bring those big, beautiful ideas to life through branding, messaging, design, and marketing. At my core, I believe strategy and spirituality belong at the same table, business works best when it honors your energetic capacity, and success should feel good long before it looks good on Instagram.

Are you a mamaprenista?

Give yourself grace, mama. Stop measuring yourself against unrealistic standards of balance. Managing a business and a family at the same time takes flexibility, honest expectations, and a lot of self-compassion. Some seasons will be more business-heavy, and others will require you to be more present at home. That does not mean you’re failing at either.

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What has helped me most is building my business around my real life instead of trying to force my life to fit around my business. I pay attention to capacity, protect my boundaries, create systems and support where I can, and give myself permission to rest when needed. You do not have to earn success by exhausting yourself, and you do not have to choose between being present for your family and honoring your own ambition.

Take us back to when you launched? What was your marketing strategy?

When I first launched my business, my marketing strategy was heavily focused on community building. I had hired a coach whose method centered on growing an audience and nurturing that community into a high-ticket offer. In many ways, it worked really well. It helped me grow my reach, build visibility, and create a space that attracted deeply aligned people. At one point, I was bringing in around 170 new community members a month, which felt huge at the time.

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What didn’t go quite as smoothly was the part where the community was supposed to turn into paying clients. I wrestled with monetization, offer creation, and messaging for a while because I didn’t yet know how to bridge the gap between people loving my content and actually hiring me. I eventually started booking discovery calls and signed my first high-ticket client, but I also had a bigger realization: I had built my business around a model that looked successful, but didn’t actually feel comfortable or natural for me to sustain. So the strategy did work, just not in the neat, linear, “and then everything was perfect” kind of way. It helped me grow, but it also showed me that alignment matters just as much as results.

Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

I always knew I wanted to work for myself. Even as a child, I had a strong sense that I wasn’t meant to follow a traditional path just because it was the expected one.

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A lot of that came from watching my mother, who was a single mom and worked incredibly hard to climb the corporate ladder. I admired her work ethic, but I also saw how much she sacrificed personally and how unhappy she was in work that didn’t truly light her up. That stayed with me. It taught me early on that success without fulfillment can be exhausting.

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That entrepreneurial pull showed up young, too. In high school, I ran a jewelry business where I styled and created custom pieces. It gave me an early taste of what it felt like to turn creativity into something tangible and build a business around work that I genuinely loved. Even then, I was drawn to creating something meaningful and making people feel seen. I loved watching someone light up when a piece felt like the perfect finishing touch or helped them express themselves in a way they hadn’t quite known how to before.

What accomplishments are you the most proud of to date in your business?

What I’m most proud of is that I’ve built a business that feels like an honest reflection of who I am and how I want to live. I created something that blends strategy, spirituality, creativity, and impact in a way that supports both my clients and myself. In a world that often rewards burnout, performance, and building for appearances, I’m proud that I chose to build for alignment, sustainability, and real transformation instead.

What is one thing you wish you had known when you started your Entreprenista journey?

I wish I had trusted my own instincts sooner and given more value to the knowledge and experience I already had. When I stepped into the online space, I leaned heavily on the perspectives, strategies, and advice of others, and while some of that was super helpful, I didn’t always give my own intuition and experience the same level of trust.

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What I’ve learned is that outside guidance can be incredibly valuable, but it works best when it’s being added to a foundation that already feels solid within you. For me, that foundation had to be built on confidence in what I know, what I’ve lived, and what I can feel is right for the business I’m creating. Once I became more anchored in that, I was able to take in support without losing myself in the process.

What did you do before starting your own business?

Before starting my own business, I worked in marketing, communications, design, and brand strategy across corporate, creative, and entrepreneurial spaces. I spent years helping brands communicate clearly and connect more effectively, while building a strong foundation in everything from graphic design and content to messaging, campaigns, and brand development.

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At the same time, I was also cultivating another side of my work through spiritual practice, including certifications in Reiki and spiritual coaching. Eventually, I realized I wasn’t here to keep those worlds separate. I was here to blend them. So when I started my own business, it felt less like starting over and more like finally building something that reflected the full range of who I am and how I’m meant to serve.

What made you take the leap to start your own business?

I took the leap when I realized I couldn’t keep being everything to everyone on a schedule that was clearly designed by chaos. At the time, I was working a corporate job during the day and serving spiritual clients in the evenings and on weekends. I was passionate about the work, but I was also in the process of adopting my kids, and it became clear that the pace I was keeping wasn’t something I could sustain without burnout and exhaustion.

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I knew I still wanted to make an impact. I just needed to do it in a way that didn’t require me to sacrifice myself in the process. So I decided to blend my background in marketing and branding with my spiritual practice to create an online business that could reach and support women in a more sustainable way. That decision changed everything. It allowed me to build a business that reflected not just what I was good at, but how I actually wanted to live.

Do you have any recent wins?

One of my biggest wins from the last year has been stepping more fully into visibility by becoming an executive contributor for multiple magazines. That was a meaningful milestone for me because visibility has not always been the easiest stretch for me. Saying yes to being seen in a bigger way felt both exciting and uncomfortable, which usually means growth is involved.

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What’s been beautiful is seeing what opened up on the other side of that decision. It has led to three awards, multiple article features and podcast interviews, and new collaborations with other founders and leaders. More than anything, it reminded me that when we stop hiding and allow ourselves to take up space, opportunities have a way of finding us.

Who are your customers?

My customers are spiritual, creative, and purpose-driven women who know they’re meant to do meaningful work, but don’t want to build success in a way that costs them their peace. They’re often coaches, healers, service providers, creatives, multi-passionate founders, or high-functioning women in demanding roles who are ready for a more aligned, sustainable way to grow. They have big ideas, deep wisdom, and a desire to create something impactful, profitable, and true to who they are.

What's your top productivity tip?

• Build around your energy, not just your calendar - Stop building your schedule like you’re a machine. I’m a big believer in working with your energy, not just your calendar. Some tasks require creativity, some require strategy, and some just require you to answer the email you’ve been side-eyeing for three days. When you start matching your work to your actual capacity instead of forcing everything at once, productivity becomes a lot more sustainable and a lot less dramatic.
• Don’t overcomplicate what can be repeated - Create repeatable systems for the things you do often. Decision fatigue is real, and a lot of people waste energy reinventing tasks that could easily be streamlined. Templates, workflows, content frameworks, and batching are not the sexiest answer, but they will absolutely save your sanity.
• Finish before you finesse - A lot of us are not actually stuck because we have too much to do. We’re stuck because we’re overthinking, over-editing, and trying to perfect things before they’ve even had a chance to breathe. Getting something done will teach you far more than endlessly polishing something no one has seen yet.

What's your favorite business tool?

My favorite business tool right now is Movement.so. I love an all-in-one platform, mostly because I prefer my business operations with a little less chaos and a lot fewer logins. It’s helped me bring my programs, courses, podcasts, products, and memberships into one streamlined platform, which makes it much easier to create a clear customer journey and a smooth experience for my clients.

I’m especially drawn to tools that support both functionality and user experience, and this one does that really well. It’s clean, mobile-friendly, and helps me simplify the backend without sacrificing the client experience, which is a win in my book.

What's your approach to work-life balance?

My approach is that work should fit into my life, not the other way around. I’m not interested in building a business that demands constant overextension and then calling that ambition. I care a lot about meaningful work, but I also care about peace, presence, rest, family, and having a life that feels good to live.

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So for me, work-life balance looks more like work-life integration with boundaries. I build around my real capacity, stay flexible when life needs more from me, and try to create in ways that energize rather than deplete me. Balance is not about perfectly splitting time down the middle and I don’t think the goal is perfect balance every day. The goal is building a business that doesn’t require you to disappear from your own life in order to succeed.

How do you avoid burn-out?

I work around a schedule that supports me, not one that looks impressive to others. I take breaks when I need them, listen to my body, and try not to keep pushing once I can feel myself heading into depletion.

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I’m also big on boundaries, supportive tools, and creating in ways that actually energize me. I’ve learned that burnout doesn’t just come from doing too much. It also comes from doing too much in ways that don’t fit you. So I pay attention to what helps me feel clear, grounded, and creatively alive, and I build from there.

What advice do you have for aspiring Entreprenistas?

My advice for aspiring Entreprenistas is to trust yourself sooner, start before you feel fully ready, and stop waiting for everything to look perfect before you make a move. Learn from others, absolutely, but do not get so busy following everyone else’s roadmap that you forget to value your own instincts, experience, and perspective.

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I’d also say get visible, get active, and collaborate. Business grows a lot faster when you’re willing to build relationships, connect with other people, and put yourself in rooms, communities, and conversations that expand your world. Some of the best opportunities come through genuine connection.

Simone Jennings is redefining what success can look like for modern entrepreneurs. Through her work, she challenges the idea that growth must come at the cost of burnout, instead advocating for businesses built on alignment, sustainability, and self-trust. Her journey is a reminder that when you stop forcing yourself into models that don’t fit and start trusting your own instincts, everything begins to shift.

If you’re ready to build a business that actually fits your life, surround yourself with women who are doing the same. Join Entreprenista League to connect, learn, and grow alongside a community that supports your vision.