Tired of the daily grind?
I know exactly how you feel. Just over 10 years ago, I was stuck in law school, and working a draining part-time job I hated. I wanted freedom — time to travel, pursue my passions, and spend more hours doing the things I loved.
That’s when I discovered what it meant to be a lifestyle entrepreneur.
Lifestyle entrepreneurs build businesses around their lives, not the other way around. They focus on freedom, flexibility, and doing meaningful work on their terms.
If you’ve ever wondered how to become a lifestyle entrepreneur, this guide will show you how.
I’ll share how I turned my passion into a life-first business and what steps you can take to create your own path.
Let’s jump in.
Table of Contents
🌟 What is a lifestyle entrepreneur?
A lifestyle entrepreneur is someone who builds a business around their ideal lifestyle. Unlike traditional entrepreneurs who may work around their business, lifestyle entrepreneurs design their business to fit their lives, not the other way around.
A lifestyle entrepreneur is someone who creates a business to improve their overall quality of life.
Believe it or not, you can create an incredible lifestyle and make seven or even eight-figures a year.
Richard Branson could even be considered a lifestyle entrepreneur, and he obviously does exceptionally well for himself.
A lifestyle entrepreneur focuses both on meaningful rewards and financial gains.
Your lifestyle business can involve something that you’re passionate about, but it doesn’t have to. As long as your work revolves around your lifestyle and not the other way around, you’re a lifestyle entrepreneur.
Most people prioritize profits over passion and security over lifestyle design, and honestly I can’t blame ‘em.
Life is first and foremost a game of survival, and it’s usually safest to hold a traditional job.
The lifestyle entrepreneur on the other hand puts fun and happiness in the “survival category” along with money and security.
After all, each breath could be your last, so you might as well get paid in awesome experiences as well as money.
💡 My lifestyle entrepreneur definition
For me, a lifestyle entrepreneur starts with the question “What type of life do I want?” before they ask “What kind of job do I want?”
Both are important questions, but I think happiness should be your #1 priority.
Am I glutton for fun? Well…yes, but that’s not the main reason that I put happiness first.
When I’m happy, I’m more energized and more productive.
I problem solve more creatively and ask smarter questions.
If your business doesn’t align with the life you want to live, you’re selling yourself short.
When I stepped away from becoming a lawyer to build my personal brand, I was putting lifestyle first and taking plenty of risks along the way.
I knew that if I failed in the pursuit of my ideal lifestyle, I could at least live with that.
What I couldn’t live with was never trying.
With that said, the path of the lifestyle entrepreneur isn’t for everyone.
Navid Moazzez
Lifestyle entrepreneur & global citizen
Here are a few tips to help you decide if becoming a lifestyle entrepreneur might be right for you:
The core principles
🔥 Benefits of becoming a lifestyle entrepreneur
Think you’re ready to strike out on your own as a lifestyle entrepreneur?
These days, anyone has the ability to spend more time with their family, eliminate awful commutes, and gain financial freedom.
Here are some of the top benefits of becoming a lifestyle entrepreneur:
1. More time with family and friends
It’s a grim thought exercise, but when you’re withering away on your deathbed, do you think you’re going to regret not spending enough time in the office?
My point exactly!
Something that you might regret, though, is not spending more time with your friends and family.
Like everyone else, I have a list of things that scare the BLEEP out of me, but nothing is more terrifying than a life of missed opportunities and regrets.
When my younger brother unexpectedly died from an accident in 2013, it snapped me out of the traditional path and made me more willing to take risks that could enhance my life.
I committed to spending everyday working towards a more ideal life.
That same year, I started navidm.com and embarked on my entrepreneurial journey.
2. Discover your optimal work hours
Tim Ferriss, the author of The 4-Hour Work Week, is a one of the world’s most well-known lifestyle entrepreneurs.
He’s a unique guy to say the least, and it didn’t take him long to discover that his most productive working hours didn’t fall between 9am and 5pm.
When it comes to writing, Tim catches his biggest waves of creativity in the late, late evening — sometimes well past midnight.
It would be pretty hard to make progress on his books if he held a regular job, but Tim doesn’t do regular jobs.
He sets his own hours, works when he’s most productive, and plays when it’s most enjoyable.
Timing is everything when is comes to crafting the ultimate lifestyle.
3. Focus on your strengths
Anytime you have to learn a new skill, there’s a period of lost productivity.
You lose even more time as you improve that skill, and by the time you really know what you’re doing, you could’ve hired someone else to do it four times over.
Becoming a lifestyle entrepreneur allows you to focus on your strengths and outsource the rest.
If you don’t have a background in something or simply don’t like doing it, there are plenty of people who’ll be willing to do it for you.
4. Infinite personal growth potential
It’s impossible for me to know where my motivations or interests will lie five or ten years from now.
Let’s pretend for a second that I never left law school and right now I was trapped behind a desk.
In this situation, it would feel hard to break free.
As a lifestyle entrepreneur, you get to switch up what you’re currently doing in the relative blink of an eye.
This fluidity is a priceless asset to personal growth.
5. More freedom and flexibility
Sometimes things come up.
When you have a regular job, you don’t necessarily get to go with the flow and take advantage of life-changing opportunities when the arise.
How many transformative experiences does the average person miss out on over the course of their career due to schedule conflicts alone?
10? 20? 50?
When you run a lifestyle business, you get to rewrite the script so that you don’t miss out on incredible experiences.
6. Build an all-star team
Most people find themselves surrounded by whatever random people get hired by same corporation, and the majority of employers all face the same dilemma — they’re limited to applicants who live within driving distance of the office.
What are the chances that these people are the top-performers who are going to bring out the best in you?
Next to none!
When you run your own lifestyle business, you get to build your team from the best candidates that the world has to offer.
I like those odds better than playing the workplace version of Russian roulette.
7. Potentially unlimited income
Income is the single most influential part of living the best life possible.
It can open doors you never thought possible.
When income is both passive and scalable, you have a recipe for almost unlimited income.
The only limits are your imagination and your ability to solve important problems for your audience.
That’s an empowering reality — one that will get you out of bed early and make you hungry to seize the day.
🚀 How to become a lifestyle entrepreneur in 10 steps
Exactly how do you become a lifestyle entrepreneur and design the perfect online business around your desired lifestyle?
- First, you have to know yourself incredibly well.
- Second, you need to decide what you’re good at so that you can use it to provide value to others.
- Finally, you have to connect with the right audience, earn their trust, and improve their lives while enhancing your own.
Here are the steps you’ll take along the way:
Step 1: Design the perfect day and reverse engineer your ideal life
If your life was on an endless loop that replayed infinite times, how would you live each day?
Before you can start brainstorming ideas for your online freedom business, you have to define what your perfect day looks like.
Once you do this, you’ll have a crystal clear image of how you want your life to be.
Start from the second you wake up and lay out every detail of your perfect day..
Each time I do this exercise, I see myself waking up in different locations, so I know that travel is part of my ideal lifestyle. It’s one of the many insights that I get out of this exercise.
By the time you finish, you’ll have an outline of your perfect day, and it’ll act as a filter for eliminating business ideas that don’t sync with your ideal lifestyle.
Step 2: Make a list of lifestyle goals that are deal breakers
This step should be part of everyone’s process for living a happy life, but most people slack on it or ignore it entirely.
Without defined boundaries, your work can easily take over your life.
You need to draw a line in the sand when it comes to lifestyle design and refuse to cross it, no matter what.
For me, this was saying “NO” to working behind a desk for a law firm.
Sure, I would’ve had a secure income and fewer uncertainties, but it wasn’t going to make me the happiest version of myself.
I decided that this was a deal breaker, so in 2013, I got serious about designing an exit plan.
Step 3: Make a list of your areas of expertise
You’ll have the best chance of success if you focus on your strengths because they’ll give you a competitive advantage.
Coming from law school, my professional skills were pretty diverse.
I started my personal brand website with no real direction — the only goal being to share my entrepreneurial journey, make connections, and see where it took me.
Although this strategy ended up working out well for me, I recommend you take a more systematic approach.
Decide what you’re most knowledgeable about and start your brainstorming there.
Or you can always consider hosting a virtual summit in your niche where you bring on other experts in your field (that way you don’t even have to be the go-to expert from the beginning… you’ll quickly build your brand and business by association).
Step 4: Make a list of your passions and interests
As a lifestyle entrepreneur, you’re going to put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into you work, so you might as well be passionate about what you’re doing.
There are going to be plenty of bumps along the way, maybe even some hair pulling and feet stomping. Your genuine interest in the work you do will be what pushes you through these rough patches.
Whatever you do, don’t settle on a business idea just because it’s in a promising market.
That would defeat the whole purpose of becoming a lifestyle entrepreneur in the first place!
Find the happy medium where your expertise overlaps with your passions and interests.
That’s the sweet spot where you can create the ideal life.
Step 5: Find your ideal customers
It isn’t enough to have a great idea for a product or service if you don’t have a clear picture of who your customers are.
This is why starting with your strengths, passions, and interests can be so helpful, because it makes it easier to pick a profitable target audience.
Use your insider insights to make a detailed audience persona:
This last question is the most critical because you’ll need to provide value by addressing their pain points.
Even more importantly, you’ll need to be confident that your audience can afford your services.
Instead of isolating a specific income group, I packaged my Virtual Summit Mastery course at different price points:
Mitch Asser was a personal trainer with zero experience online when he launched his first virtual summit.
He generated six-figures in revenue and grew his email list from zero to over 35K subscribers over the course of multiple virtual summits.
Selling all-access passes to his online events continues to be his primary business model. That’s one of the coolest things about hosting virtual conferences — they can be an entire business model on their own.
Step 6: Establish an online presence.
You’ll need to create a home base online where people can come and check out your services.
Here are some of the successes and struggles of my first 6-7 months online:
I had built a solid online foundation, and even went the extra mile with starting my own podcast, but it didn’t get me the results I was hoping for.
Then I started hosting virtual summits, and it put my lifestyle business on steroids.
Step 7: Connect with your audience and offer value
Once you have your target audience, you’ll need to connect with them and offer significant value.
To do this, you’ll have to…
This can be a slow and arduous process when you’re learning how to start a blog, podcasting, and guest posting to make industry connections and gain exposure.
By the end of May 2014, after almost a year of grinding the old school way, I came across virtual summits.
It seemed like hosting a summit could be a viable way to rapidly grow my email list, generate revenue, and build authority while growing my brand.
I decided to transition from just blogging and podcasting to hosting my first virtual summit.
My very first online event, The Branding Summit, transformed my entire life and business for the better.
The Branding Summit generated over $20K in profit and 3,000 new email subscribers.
I quit my part-time job at a bank in Sweden and moved abroad with my girlfriend to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
The month after my summit, I generated $40K in revenue, mostly from affiliate sales of Ramit Sethi’s online course.
It was a jolting moment in my life that helped me realize the incredible power of becoming a lifestyle entrepreneur.
Step 8: Grow your audience
Hosting my first virtual summit exploded my growth, but I realized that they could do a lot more than just jumpstart by business.
As of today, I’ve hosted and participated in dozens of of virtual summits.
One of my more recent summits, List Building School, generated over 26K new email subscribers and multiple six-figures in revenue.
It’s fair to say that the more summits you host, the more you’ll grow your audience, and virtual summits can work at any stage of your online lifestyle business.
Caitlyn Pyle ran an online membership site where she taught people the ins-and-outs of making money from home.
Business was going well, but she felt that she was missing out on a lot of earning potential.
With her first summit, Caitlyn grew her email list by 60K subscribers and generated $500k in revenue in just two weeks.
Virtual summits do more than just boost growth and generate revenue…
People were so interested about my success with virtual summits that it motivated me to create Virtual Summit Mastery 1.0 in 2015.
Step 9: Focus on what feels right and charge what your worth
When you offer undeniable value to your target audience, you get to charge what your worth and focus on what feels right.
By the time 2016 hit, I was ready to launch Virtual Summit Mastery 2.0 and acquired tons of new case studies from successful students.
My knowledge of virtual summits became a highly marketable asset to dozens of lifestyle entrepreneurs.
You can accomplish the same thing in any niche.
Brian Appleton used virtual summits to generate $225K in revenue within the first year of his online business as lifestyle entrepreneur in the insurance industry.
Just as it happened for Brian, your income can scale along with the value you provide, and your lifestyle will improve along with it.
In 2016, I traveled throughout the USA to New York City, San Diego, and Austin.
I lived in Barcelona and Cancun, where I moved into a dream penthouse right on the beach.
My first real affiliate launch for Virtual Summit Mastery brought in $200K in revenue that same year.
I was able to expand my team and further boost my growth.
It was an incredible year where I made over $600K in revenue (with very high profits), and I was crafting a life that would’ve never been possible if I had played it safe and stayed on the lawyer path.
Step 10: Study, optimize, and scale
Just because what you’re doing now is getting results, doesn’t mean that you’re getting the best results possible.
You should always be learning, optimizing, and trying your hardest to scale what’s already working.
Why?
Because it’s always easier to optimize what you’re doing now rather than starting from scratch.
During 2017 and 2018 I attended many masterminds and events around the world (I even spoke at a few as well)… I made some great relationships, and relationships are a resource that fuels growth even more than revenue.
But don’t just optimize what’s working for your business, study what’s working for your happiness.
After all, the ultimate goal of becoming a lifestyle entrepreneur is to improve both your quality of life and you income.
The two should improve at the same rate.
👥 Real-life examples of successful lifestyle entrepreneurs
Don’t think that you have what it takes to become a lifestyle entrepreneur?
Think again…
People from all backgrounds have gone on to crush it with their location independent businesses.
There’s no reason to think that you can’t do the same.
Here are some examples of lifestyle entrepreneurs who forged their own path and came out victorious:
📚 Best lifestyle entrepreneur books
The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco reveals why traditional financial advice keeps most people broke and how to build wealth fast.
❓FAQ – top lifestyle entrepreneur questions
Below you’ll find some of the most common questions I get when it comes to becoming a lifestyle entrepreneur.
What is a lifestyle entrepreneur?
A lifestyle entrepreneur creates a business designed around their ideal lifestyle. It’s not just about making money — it’s about building freedom, flexibility, and fulfillment into your life. The work supports your life, not the other way around.
How is a lifestyle entrepreneur different from a traditional entrepreneur?
Traditional entrepreneurs often focus on scalable growth, building large teams, or creating businesses they can sell. Lifestyle entrepreneurs prioritize balance and personal goals, even if that means staying smaller or choosing simplicity. The focus is on creating a life you love while earning enough to support it.
Can anyone become a lifestyle entrepreneur?
Yes, but it’s not for everyone. You need self-discipline, clarity about what you want, and the willingness to take risks. If you’re drawn to freedom, value your time, and are okay with uncertainty, it might be right for you.
Do I need a lot of money to start?
No, you don’t need a huge budget to begin. Many lifestyle entrepreneur businesses start with minimal upfront investment — whether it’s offering a service, selling a digital product, or consulting in your area of expertise. What matters most is identifying a clear audience and solving a problem for them.
What kind of businesses work well for lifestyle entrepreneurs?
Think online-first: coaching, consulting, digital products (like courses or eBooks), virtual summits, freelancing, affiliate marketing, or niche membership communities. The key is flexibility and income streams that let you work on your terms.
How do I know if lifestyle entrepreneurship is right for me?
Ask yourself:
-> Do I value time freedom over job security?
-> Can I take responsibility for my own success?
-> Am I okay with some risk and uncertainty?
-> Do I have skills or interests that I could turn into a business?
If you answered yes to most of these, you’re already thinking like a lifestyle entrepreneur.
Is passive income real, or is it just a buzzword?
It’s real, but it’s not magic. Passive income comes from putting in work upfront—like creating a course, hosting a summit, or building a product—and setting up systems to keep earning down the road. You’ll still need to maintain those systems, but the payoff can be worth it.
How much time does it take to build a lifestyle business?
That depends on your starting point and effort level, but it’s not an overnight thing. Building something meaningful could take months or even a few years. Consistency is key. Working smarter—not necessarily harder— will help you make sustainable progress.
Can I run a lifestyle business while I have a full-time job?
Absolutely. Many people start on the side before going all-in. Choose something manageable that doesn’t drain your energy entirely. It’s smart to validate your idea before quitting your 9-to-5.
How do I start as a lifestyle entrepreneur?
-> Define your ideal day and the lifestyle you want.
-> Make a list of your skills, strengths, and passions.
-> Identify ways to solve real problems for an audience.
-> Start small, test your ideas, and iterate along the way.
What are the biggest challenges lifestyle entrepreneurs face?
The biggest hurdles often include:
-> Staying self-motivated without a boss or structure.
-> Learning to wear many hats—marketing, sales, customer service, etc.
-> Resisting the urge to compare your journey to others’.
-> Balancing long-term goals with short-term responsibilities.
Can you really make good money as a lifestyle entrepreneur?
Yes, but success isn’t guaranteed. Earning potential depends on the business model, how much value you provide, and how well you connect with your audience. Some make six or seven figures; others make just enough to support their dream lifestyle. It’s about striking your own balance.
What’s the first step I should take?
Start by defining what success means to you. Without clarity on the life you want, it’s easy to fall into the same hamster wheel you’re trying to escape. From there, align your business goals and find an audience to serve.
Do I need a large audience to succeed?
Not at all. A small, engaged audience can go much further than a large, disconnected following. Focus on building trust, delivering value, and solving their problems. Some call this the “1,000 true fans” theory —getting deeply loyal customers who truly support your work.
How do I balance work and personal life as a lifestyle entrepreneur?
Set boundaries early. Decide how much you want to work and stick to it. Delegate or automate tasks that drain your energy. Remember, the point of this is to enjoy the life you’re building, not get buried under endless to-dos.
What if I fail?
The fear of failing is normal. But ask yourself what’s worse — failing or never trying? Treat failure as feedback. If something doesn’t work, tweak your plan, and try again. The lessons will guide you, and the freedom you gain might just be worth the risk.
🏆 Next steps: become a lifestyle entrepreneur today
Are you ready to take the first steps towards becoming a lifestyle entrepreneur?!
Ultimately, your product or service has to help your audience solve their biggest problems.
If you scratch their back, they’ll scratch yours by supporting your business and transforming your life.
Whenever you’re ready, here are 5 ways I can help you:
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