At the time I’m writing this, Leslie Anne Eades is running her first 100-kilometer race. It’s a new distance for her, but still part of a familiar rhythm as an endurance athlete.
She’s also an artist, traveler, life coach, retreat host, and Podia Pro who helps people see their full potential and make decisions in their businesses that are aligned with their life and heart. And she does all of this while living part-time in a van, traveling and working remotely.
Along the way, Leslie has learned that training for an ultramarathon is pretty similar to building a business.
You don’t prepare for a 100km race by chasing quick wins and doing everything at once. It’s about showing up consistently, adapting when conditions change, leaning on your training and experiences on the tough days, and trusting that each step builds toward something bigger over time.
While others optimize for growing their business at all costs, Leslie focuses on building something that can support her life for years to come, and still feels joyful to work on every day.
Here’s how Leslie is building a creative online business designed to last for the long haul.
Your past experiences can be a strong foundation
Leslie’s entrepreneurial journey began more than 10 years ago as an event planner and hospitality consultant. She worked closely with individuals and organizations to plan meaningful experiences, listening carefully and translating people’s desires into outcomes they would enjoy.
When the pandemic disrupted in-person events, Leslie’s work shifted, but her skills didn’t disappear.
The ability to listen deeply, design great experiences, and help people make aligned decisions became the foundation for the business she’s building today.
Together with her partner Matt, Leslie started LMNTL, a coaching and retreat business focused on personal transformation. They run an online community, host events, and offer life and business coaching to support people on journeys of self-discovery.
Rather than starting from scratch, Leslie leaned on her training from her event planning days and adapted her experience to fit a new format and new passion. The work she put in ten years ago carried her into her new chapter with LMNTL.
Use tools that reduce friction so you can scale and stay flexible
When Leslie and Matt started LMNTL, they knew they needed tools that wouldn’t limit them as their ideas evolved. That led them to Podia.
“Podia was a really perfect one-stop shop for everything that we needed, and we could grow together,” Leslie remembers.
Because Podia allowed them to sell products, host events, run a community, offer coaching, and structure programs in flexible ways, they weren’t boxed into a single model as the business grew and changed.
Podia became the central hub for LMNTL’s website, community, and email list, eliminating the need to juggle multiple tools and making it easier to stay organized and consistent over time.
Having reliable systems in place gave them the freedom to follow where their business was going, and keeping things simple meant it was possible to run everything while still traveling and working remotely. (No need to cancel a weekend hiking trip to fix a bunch of broken integrations!)
The right tools set them up for the long haul, and they didn’t have to waste time and energy managing tech. Instead, they could focus on more important things, like growing their audience.
Growing community through events and affiliate collaboration
Community is the center of Leslie’s business. And growing a community, like training for an ultramarathon, takes time.
The LMNTL online community is a space where members connect, share experiences, and support one another. And that space didn’t grow through aggressive marketing tactics, but through trust and real relationships built over time.
Many of the people who’ve been part of the LMNTL community the longest joined because of one-on-one interaction, like a helpful conversation or personal invitation.
To support this, Leslie is intentional about creating opportunities for genuine engagement. Emails to her list always invite replies. Content gives people space to reflect and respond. And when Leslie and Matt meet new people on the road, they personally invite them to attend events and join the community.
Leslie also hosts live events specifically about the community itself, giving newcomers a chance to see what it’s like and what they can expect before joining.
While this grassroots approach can feel slower at first, it leads to deeper engagement and a stronger foundation for growth.
LMNTL also hosts live workshops and collaborative events with guest speakers. Those speakers participate as affiliates, inviting their own audiences and earning a commission for any signups they bring.
“It’s worked well for our guest speakers to be able to invite their audience and earn a commission,” Leslie shares.
“Podia’s affiliate feature is set up in a way that allows us to not only build our community of people who are attending the event, but also make it easy for our community members and co-creators to invite people into the space and be rewarded.”
Leslie makes collaboration easy by providing affiliates with ready-to-use resources.
“We try to make it as easy as possible for affiliates, too. So we’ll provide a packet that has email templates and Instagram post templates that they’re welcome to use.”
When it’s easy for affiliates and collaborators to promote an event, more new people join, LMNTL’s community grows, and the affiliate partner earns more money. Everyone wins.
Bringing your online community together with real-world retreats
Now imagine you’ve found this great online community, and you have the opportunity to spend time together in person!
Over time, LMNTL evolved to include in-person retreats that extend the online community into the real world.
These retreats pull directly from Leslie’s background in event planning while allowing her to offer deeper, more personal experiences. Each retreat is designed for rest, transformation, or both. Meals and logistics are handled so attendees can fully exhale and focus on what they need.
“All of our retreats have a structure and an itinerary, but everything is set up as an invitation so people can do what they feel like they need to do,” Leslie shares.
These retreats fill up fast, and most attendees come from within the LMNTL community itself.
Members invite friends, share their experiences, or make personal introductions. Leslie and Matt also extend direct one-on-one invitations to people they meet through travel, networking, or other work.
LMNTL also has a website and sales pages with retreat information, so some attendees find them through search engines and join that way.
When someone signs up for a retreat who isn’t part of the community already, they also gain access to the online community before the event and remain connected afterward.
Attending an in-person retreat and spending time together virtually in the community are two experiences that reinforce each other, and most people end up doing both to continue their self-discovery and build long-term friendships with other members.
“At this point, almost everyone in the community has been to an in-person retreat, which makes the space so much more valuable,” Leslie says.
The key to a long-lasting business is giving it room to evolve
Part of building a business for the long run is giving it room to change.
“My proudest achievement isn’t a specific moment,” Leslie shares. “It’s continuing to trust myself, trust the process, and continuing to evolve with my business.”
Early on, she remembers having a clear idea of what “making it” would look like.
“When I started my very first business, I had this idea of what it would look like and what it would mean to make it. I thought, once I got there, everything would just work.”
“But what I’ve learned is that it all changes, it all evolves. And once you get to the place where you think you’ve made it, you have so much more information than you did when you started. For me, the work I felt led to do changed as well.”
Paying attention to moments of resistance or disengagement helped Leslie know when it might be time to pivot.
“When I feel like I’m talking to no one, or I have seasons where people aren’t engaged as much, it can make me feel like quitting,” she explains.
“The story I could tell myself is no one’s listening, no one cares, no one’s engaging. But I know the work I’m doing is important, and my people are out there, so I let these periods inform me that something needs to change. Maybe it’s time for my business to do something new.”
One of those changes was removing the LMNTL community’s free tier. Instead of having a bigger community with lots of free members, the group would be smaller with only paying members. While the decision was difficult, the impact was immediate.
“The moment we saw the biggest shift in engagement was when we removed the free tier,” Leslie says. “The result was that everyone in the community was really excited to be there, and we could pour our energy into those members instead of constantly trying to attract new people.”
LMNTL still offers free content through newsletters and resources, but the paid community has evolved to be a space for deeper connection.
“Everything just feels a lot more aligned, and it felt like we were honoring what we were creating by offering only the paid tier.”
Taking the next step, not the whole race
During an ultramarathon training session earlier this year, Leslie completed a difficult 15-mile run and felt completely spent. Her mind jumped ahead to the full race distance.
“If I can’t do this, how am I gonna do 60 miles?” She thought, “This is impossible.”
Then a different realization surfaced.
“You don’t need to do 60 miles today,” she told herself. “You just needed to do 15. We’ll do 60 down the road. This is part of the process.”
That insight carried Leslie through difficult training days and business challenges alike. Instead of trying to build the perfect version all at once, she focuses on the next aligned step.
That mindset has helped her navigate growth, change, and uncertainty without burning out — and it’s the advice she shares most often with creators.
Trust each phase of your process. Build for the long run. And remember that businesses, like endurance races, are completed one intentional step at a time.
If you want to build a business that grows with you — with community, people, and sustainable systems at the center — you can try Podia free for 30 days and start building something that lasts.
