building a business around life, not the other way round

A business minimalist on how one small decision, registering her business through e-⁠Residency, quietly made every other freedom possible.

Saskia Mardi is an e-⁠resident and business minimalist with over 20 years of experience in business operations. After nearly a decade running her own minimalist business and helping hundreds of founders simplify and systemise theirs, she shares how building around what matters most gave her the freedom to work and live on her own terms.

Becoming a mum changed everything

My business story starts where so many women's do. I became a mum.

I'd spent ten years in corporate operations by then, working my way from personal assistant to office manager. And as I looked down at this tiny human I'd created, the thought of leaving her with strangers to go work a day job felt insane.

We figured if we both reduced our hours, my husband and I could split staying home with her. I asked my employer for reduced hours. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible. It was all or nothing.

I refused to choose between my life and my work, so I built something better instead. No grand vision. No five-year plan. Just a clear idea of what mattered, what I was no longer willing to do, and a stubborn commitment to building something that worked around my life, not the other way around.

Building a business between nap times

What began as a necessity, pieced together between nap times, slowly turned into a business that has grown with my life ever since. Time constraints meant I had to be conscious of how I spent my most limited resource, time, and it turns out I was able to build it in half the time it took most. Looking back, it was the first move of what I'd later call business minimalism, long before it had a name.

So I built a business I could run from my laptop, whenever and wherever I wanted. What I hadn't planned for was my Dutch business registration being a lot less flexible than I was. A few years later, being the serial immigrator I am, the inevitable happened. We decided to immigrate. The plan was to return to Australia after a year on my husband's island home of Bali. That's when I learned that if I left the country, my business would cease to exist.

Finding e-⁠Residency, and putting it to the test

With no fixed location on the horizon, and no idea how I'd keep running things, I was scrambling for options until I stumbled on an article about a tiny country I knew almost nothing about, quietly rewriting the rules for people like me. I found e-⁠Residency and jumped on board straight away.

And we put it to the test almost immediately.

What was meant to be a temporary pit stop in Bali, turned into a multi year stretch when the world shut down for Covid.

Estonia's e-Residency programme let me build a business as borderless as our life had become. It doesn't matter where I actually am. I carry the credibility of a European business with me wherever I go. With e-Residency, coupled with Xolo handling the bookkeeping, tax reporting and invoicing, and Wise for moving money across currencies, I could truly run a borderless business.

Through immigration, worldwide shutdowns and more change than most businesses are ever asked to survive, my business stayed simple and consistent while almost everything else changed shape around it. That's the part about stability people get wrong. It was never about staying still. It's about having one thing that doesn't move, so everything else can.

What life looks like now

These days, that steadiness shows up everywhere. My mornings start with my and my family's non negotiables – a solo sunrise walk by the beach, checking in on our mini "homestead" (our veggie patch and chickens), breakfast with the family, and twice a week the first item on my to do list is homeschooling my daughter.

After that I switch hats. Every day of the week has its own job, so I never waste energy deciding what I should be doing. Monday I focus on my own business, content, outreach, the work that moves the business forward. Tuesday through Thursday is delivery, client work, the actual doing. And Friday is mine, self-development, a field trip, whatever my brain needs that week.

We eat lunch together as a family, then I continue on with work while my husband and daughter continue with whatever their latest project is.

My clients are mostly spread across Australia, Europe and North America, so I run set call blocks and execution blocks rather than deciding day to day what deserves my attention. I lean heavily on simplicity and systems here, for the same reason I lean on them everywhere else in my life and business. I don't have the time, or honestly the desire, to re-decide things I've already decided. Past me has done the work. Mapped the processes, built the systems, made the calls in advance, so present me only does what's actually necessary. It's the same principle I build into every client's business: structure isn't the enemy of freedom, it's the gateway to it.

Turning structure into a business

I run The Business Minimalist now, working as a Business Minimalist Mentor and Verified ClickUp Consultant for founders who look like they've got it all figured out, but behind the scenes are a high-functioning mess. Big vision, real revenue, clients coming in, and still somehow held together by sticky tape systems, scattered Google Sheets, memory (or lack thereof), and sheer determination.

They built a brand. The clients came. Their revenue grew. But with growth came complexity. It's not that they don't have enough time, or that they're stretched too thin. It's that they've been trying to do too much, without the systems in place to support them.

Structure has always come naturally to me. It's the thing I can't help but bring to a room, but for my clients that's not the case. Not because they're lazy, but because visionaries and organisers are rarely the same person. I get to be the structured head for people who are busy being brilliant at everything else.

I help them untangle the chaos, pull the business out of their head, and simplify and systemise it all, creating calm, clarity and capacity.

Most of what I build lives in ClickUp, one centralised source of truth that automates the busywork away, from client intake forms, through service delivery, to day-to-day ops. Nothing lost in someone's inbox. Nothing living only in someone's memory. Mostly I do this through ongoing 1:1 mentorships for founders who want a strategic partner in their corner, and complete custom ClickUp builds. Same principle running through all of it: minimise, systemise, organise. You can see how I work at saskiamardi.com.

My advice for women considering this path

If you're a woman building a business around a life that refuses to sit still, whether that's a family, a move, or a version of success nobody handed you a template for, my advice is this: sort the unglamorous part early. The processes, the systems, the backend nobody sees. It's not the interesting part of the story. But it's the part that lets you keep telling it, wherever you end up next.

Get clear on what success actually looks like to you. What you're actually trying to achieve. Then only let onto your task list the things that move you closer to that. Everything else, you ditch.

For women especially, e-⁠Residency makes that easier to pull off in practice, not just in principle. One steady business that doesn't care where you live, or why you moved, means you get to make decisions about your life first and let the business follow, instead of the other way around.

You don't have to do it all, be it all, or offer it all. You just have to do what matters, and build it on a foundation solid enough to hold.

Want to hear more from Saskia? Follow her on LinkedIn or tune into The Business Minimalist Podcast for more insights on simplifying and systemising your business.

Check out e-⁠Residency to learn about building a borderless business around the life you want.