Our Journey with Simplicity

The other day I was going back through our photo archives and I came across one of my favorite memories. It was a photo of the beloved Skoolie, parked against a stunning Arizona skyline at dusk. The kids look so happy. Gabriel and I are beaming. It was taken one week into our mammoth adventure across the country and brings back so many emotions as I remember just how magical that season of our life was. 


The more I investigated the photo, the more it made me think. I could make out a flurry of tire tracks, which nudged me to remember what a struggle it had been to position the bus in the perfect place to catch that exact shot! The environment around us looks like something out of a storybook, but it was a wrestle to get it right.


…. And while this adventure was everything we were looking for, I had to pause to remember the crazy journey we’d been on leading up to this moment ...

The Process of Culling 

See, in the months building up until that point, Gabriel and I had made the wild and fabulous decision to reduce our 5000 sqft home into a 248 sqft school bus. This meant that we had to get rid of A LOT of stuff. It was a grueling process. To help you get a mental picture, the entirety of our Skoolie could fit inside the living room of our house - that is how extreme our move was. And it took a lot of work to get there. 


The first couple of rounds of culling were easy. There were simple decisions, duplicate items, unnecessary junk that, honestly, we were happy to be rid of! But after the sixth, the seventh, the eighth round of culling, things get a lot tougher! 


I was going full-on Marie Kondo on the kids, getting them to hold their toys and asking them whether they ‘sparked joy’. Anything to ease the process of saying goodbye to some beloved items. Bidding farewell to sentimental or valuable items was emotional to say the least.

Living Simply: Life Lessons

The process of down-sizing and choosing a minimalist lifestyle has taught us so much. We walked away with a new belief: That less is more.


Our ‘less is more’ mantra plays out in a variety of ways in our family life:

• We have made a commitment to choose experiences over materialism.
• We stress way, way less than we used to. 
• We realized that when we had more ‘stuff’ cluttering our world, we didn’t place much appreciation on what we had. Now that we live with less, it makes us live with a higher value and appreciation for what we do have. 
• Living with fewer options makes it quicker and more streamlined to make decisions. 

Grow Your Online Business With Us: The Simple Way

When we first started The Mayes Team, we had no idea what we needed. So we got all the things. 


We stockpiled on everything we thought that a successful brand or online business needed. Organization tools such as Trello and Monday? We got ‘em. Social media planners and scheduling applications such as Later? Check. Domain names? You bet. Free online marketing toolboxes that had all the right plugins to monitor our conversion rates and pull analytics? We had it all. 


When I look back at our first brand, Englexis, I sometimes joke that we really had all the gear and no idea. 


If you are looking to grow your online business with us, we don’t want you to make the same mistakes that we did in our early years as a company. Maybe you are stuck at the same point that we were: all the gadgets and gizmos but still not seeing any growth. Or maybe you haven’t got anything off the ground yet. Maybe you are exhausted by reading business blogs informing you about ALL the various tools you need to make a splash - and it all just feels too overwhelming! 


As you grow your online business with us, the best advice I have for you is to declutter. Wean away all the excess, and strip your business back to the bare essentials. The more we have grown as a business and the more that we have studied other successful online businesses, the more we’ve become convinced that there really are only THREE TOOLS to see your business flourish:

1. A place to host your product(s) 
2. A way to gather information
3. A portal to collect information

Grow Your Online Business With Us: The Information Exchange

When you are shopping at Target, or Rite Aid, or Nike - or any major retailer - do you notice how they will always offer for you to join their rewards scheme at the checkout? Maybe they offer a credit card, perhaps a loyalty program, maybe an insider’s discount. Let’s break down what is actually happening here. At the checkout, you are being offered a discount on products that they already know you are interested in. In fact, you are literally a guaranteed sale at this point, mere seconds away from handing over your bank card. So why offer a discount now? 


What is actually going on in this transaction is that the store is providing you with a quick and sure-fire way to hand over your contact information. They’re looking to gain your first name and your email address, and are willing to give you a discount in the process. That says everything we need to know about how valuable they deem your contact information to be! 

This got us thinking. How do we create the same valuable information exchange in the online space? If you are trying to grow your online business with us, then you want to make a note of this. We realized that the three essential tools that we listed earlier, ultimately translate to the following:

1. Website
2. An email service provider 
3. A merchant to collect money

Keep it Simple! 

The aim is creating an online site that functions so simply that you can guarantee this information exchange. This means simplifying the website to make it as easy as possible for people to make their purchases. This might mean establishing automatic monthly payments, creating a truly passive income where your customers need only provide their information once and you can start making money in your sleep. 

You also need to make that information exchange as simple as possible. Check out our blog Learn How to Make Lead Magnet Landing Pages in Just 10 Minutes for a deep dive into our strategy. Remember, the all-important information that you are looking to acquire is their email address and their first and last name. With this information, you’ll be able to craft email campaigns with a personalized welcome line. We know that personalization is key since emails with a personalized header are 26% more likely to be opened! 

Start De-Cluttering Today

If you feel stuck building your brand right now, the reality is that you might have way too much going on in your website and that you need to seriously declutter your brand and take it back to the foundation. 


Ask yourself: What do you have going on that isn’t necessary? What functionalities are not contributing to building your email list?


Trust us, you don’t need the flashy items. You need to focus solely on growing that email audience. Perhaps it is time to start the process of decluttering today. For us, the process of decluttering actually involved saying a total goodbye to Englexis and restarting our business dreams from scratch!



It might sound overwhelming, but one of the greatest lessons that we learned from downsizing was to simply take it room by room. One step at a time. Decluttering slowly but methodically until we were dealing with a far more manageable project! You’ve got this. You can do this. And you’ll be so grateful to strip down to the simplicity of three simple tools once you do!

Have questions about this blog or what it takes to launch a successful business? Don't hesitate to reach out to us!