Marli Klaus knew she wanted to leave corporate life. What she didn’t know was what she’d do next.
She was earning a high salary in corporate HR, raising three children, and looking for meaningful work. When she discovered sleep consulting, the idea clicked. She’d already helped her children through different sleep challenges, and friends were asking her for advice.
Turning that experience into a successful business meant months of building her offer at night, before sunrise, on weekends, and during her commute, all while working full-time. Today, Marli owns The Cradle Coach and The Cradle Coach Academy, and has processed nearly $700,000 between them through ThriveCart. She’s also simplified a complicated WordPress setup of around 20 plugins into ThriveCart’s checkout and funnel tools, and moved her flagship course into ThriveCart Academy.
Her biggest result isn’t just business growth. It’s having the flexibility to be present with her family while building something that matters.
From corporate HR to running her own business
Marli didn’t start with a grand business plan. She started with a question many working parents will recognize: what kind of business could she build around her home life?
“I was working in corporate and I knew that I wanted to start a business and leave corporate, but I didn’t know what business I wanted to start,” she says. “I wanted it to be something meaningful, something I really cared about.”
Sleep consulting gave her a way to combine personal experience with a clear need. Each of her three children had brought different sleep challenges, so Marli had spent years researching books, websites, and advice until she found approaches that worked.
“I was the go-to person in my friend and even work group that people would call and say, ‘Your kids sleep great. What did you do? What am I missing?’” she says.
Sleep consulting was a clear path forward, offering meaningful work, and a business she could grow.
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7 months to transition out of full-time corporate work
Because Marli had a high-paying corporate job, she didn’t want to simply quit and hope the business worked out. So she got certified as a sleep consultant and started building her offer while continuing to work full-time.
Her schedule was already full. She had a typical workday, three children, and all the responsibilities of family life. Business-building had to happen in the gaps.
“I had to do a lot of work after my kids went to bed, before they woke up in the morning, on the weekends, during my commute to work,” she says. “I was doing it knowing I was working toward leaving my job and being able to do this full-time. So I was willing to sacrifice that chaotic schedule in order to meet my ultimate goal.”
Marli did both jobs for approximately seven months before leaving corporate. The decision was financially scary, but time was the bigger issue. “I didn’t have the time to market the business more. I didn’t have the time to take on more clients,” she recalls.
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From solo consultant to buying an established business
In the early days, Marli did everything herself, under her own brand: marketing, sales, support, admin, and sleep consulting.
The business changed again when she bought The Cradle Coach and The Cradle Coach Academy in 2023 from an established coach who was looking for a buyer. The sale included both brands, products, websites, email lists, students, customers, as well as two team members. Her first priority was building trust with existing students, not rushing to change everything. Her HR background, especially her experience in change management, helped ease the transition.
Today, one sleep consultant handles client-facing work for The Cradle Coach, while her executive assistant supports both businesses. Marli focuses on content, marketing, and The Cradle Coach Academy students. Her team handles more of the fulfillment, leaving her to do the work only she can do.
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Replacing a WordPress maze with a simpler setup
The acquisition exposed a problem many growing online businesses face: a technology setup that expands one tool at a time until nobody is sure how it all works.
When she bought them, the two businesses ran on WordPress with a large collection of plugins. Some supported courses, while others handled upsells and different parts of the customer journey. Marli estimates that moving to ThriveCart, plus Showit for site hosting, replaced or removed the need for around 20 plugins.
“For an entire year, I didn’t even know all the things we were paying for,” Marli says. “We would get a random charge from a plugin that was an annual fee and I would be like, ‘What even is this?’”
The setup she’d inherited was expensive and hard to understand. The WordPress site had also become slow to load because of all the plugins, which was bad for both user experience and SEO. Search engines such as Google take page speed and user experience into account, so this cleanup mattered beyond convenience and cost-savings.
“Taking over a business versus building it from scratch, it’s difficult to know what’s necessary and what’s not,” she says. “I knew I needed to remove all those plugins but it took time to figure out what I could remove or what was going to be detrimental to the business.”
Moving the website to Showit and using ThriveCart for checkout, funnel optimization, and course delivery gave the team a cleaner, more cost-effective setup.
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Finding ThriveCart and moving faster
Marli had heard other coaches and business owners talk about ThriveCart, but the decision came after she took over the two businesses and knew the old setup had to change. A Black Friday offer gave her the push to make the move.
“I was searching and was like, ‘I have to make a decision. I have to move away from this mess that we have right now for systems,’” she says. “I came across the ThriveCart Black Friday sale and I was like, ‘This seems to make the most sense based on what I need.’ So I went ahead and did it.”
She started with ThriveCart Pro+ for The Cradle Coach Academy, then later added a second account so each business could have separate data.
Marli used a template for her first checkout page, then duplicated it for other products and updated the details. “Once I’ve set up the checkout pages the way that I like them, it’s super easy to just duplicate, make small edits, and move on,” she says. “We’re able to move with more speed than we could in the past with WordPress and all of the other systems that we had.”
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Moving the flagship course into ThriveCart Academy
One of the clearest proof points in Marli’s story is moving The Cradle Coach Academy’s flagship sleep consultant program into ThriveCart Academy.
Priced at $4,200, it’s The Cradle Coach Academy’s most involved course to move. Marli transferred the first modules, then handed the rest to her assistant.
The team also moved quizzes from Typeform into ThriveCart Academy’s native quiz feature, removing another external tool from their tech stack. Other courses will move over in stages, but the biggest and most complicated program is already there.
“Moving the course into ThriveCart Academy was pretty easy to do,” Marli says. “I did the first few modules and then I handed it over to a VA to finish the rest of it just to protect my time. Everything was kind of moved over for us from the previous course platform, and we just had to go in and edit and make sure that it was correct.”
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More value from every sale
ThriveCart has also helped Marli make more of the offers she already has.
The Cradle Coach Academy mainly uses order bumps, while The Cradle Coach uses upsells on its courses, giving customers the option to add a 30-minute support call. Around 15% of course buyers take it.
“It’s not a huge income increase, but it’s definitely enough to make an impact,” she says. “Having that upsell opportunity and the bumps on Cradle Coach Academy has been a pretty good increase as well.”
ThriveCart Pro+’s built-in affiliate tools have removed another layer of the previous tech stack. Before ThriveCart, the business used a separate affiliate platform. Now the team can manage their affiliate partners from the same place.
The joint venture feature has been especially useful. Marli partnered with an external specialist to create the newborn care specialist program, with a percentage of the first 100 sales going to that partner. ThriveCart handles the split, so Marli doesn’t have to track sales and make manual payments.
“With the joint venture specifically, I would say that probably has saved me around 10 hours per month,” she says. “With the affiliate management, it’s probably more like two to three hours a month that we’ve saved by not having to manually process payments or manage multiple systems for those payments.”
Over the three years since taking over the established businesses, Marli says sales have grown by an average of 10% a year. Thanks to simpler systems, she has more room to act.
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Building a business around family life
Marli’s definition of success isn’t about working fewer hours in a day or week; it’s about gaining control over when the work happens, something that wasn’t possible when she worked in corporate.
For example, this past summer, she didn’t put her children in summer camps. They were home with her, and she worked around family time by using weekends when her husband was available and Mondays when her parents could help look after the kids.
“Success to me is having a business that allows me to have the flexibility that I want, to be fully present for my life, and not feel like I have to constantly put my life aside in order to build a business,” she says.
That flexibility comes from leaving corporate at the right time, building a team, simplifying the technology, and creating offers that can sell without Marli handling every step.
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Marli’s advice for fellow entrepreneurs and coaches
Know the numbers before you take over a business
“Fully dive into all of the data and ask all of the questions that you need to ask,” Marli says. “Make sure there is data to back up the answers you’re getting, and don’t take everything at face value.”
Don’t let shiny object syndrome run your business
“Focus on the most important things and look at the data,” she says. “Let the data guide you instead of jumping into things that aren’t really going to move the needle.”
Start before you feel ready
“A lot of people get stuck in research and thinking, ‘I need to know more before I can take action,’” Marli says. “The best way to learn what works is to take action and actually do it.”
Keep things simple
“Anytime you can find one platform that can allow you to do a bunch of different things really well without adding on 10 different things, that is going to be the best way to go,” she says. “That was a game changer for us with ThriveCart.”
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A faster path from idea to checkout
Marli’s favorite ThriveCart feature is the ease of creating checkout pages. She can turn an idea into a working offer in minutes.
“If I get an idea, I know that it’s going to take me a matter of minutes to turn that idea into an actual checkout page I can send somebody to purchase, versus in the past taking me days or weeks to take something from idea to fruition,” she says.
That speed gives Marli more time for marketing, students, her team, and family.
Her lesson is simple: use systems that work together, keep the business as simple as possible, and build around the life you actually want to live.
