Entrepreneurship for humans
Featured Essays & Articles
Featured Podcast Episodes
EP 364: The Abundant Value of Virtual Assistants with Janice Plado Dalager
Consultant and virtual assistant Janice Plado Dalager joins Tara for a conversation about the unique skill set that virtual assistants and other support professionals bring to small businesses. How VAs end up mistreated by entrepreneurs—and the gendered and racialized components of these relationships that make mistreatment more likely. Why emotional labor is an undervalued skill for support pros, as well as why it should be a key part of how this work is compensated. How small business owners can check their own behavior to make these working relationships more humane
EP 363: Making The Hard Call With 90-Day Business Launch Founder Michelle Ward
I’ve known When I Grow Up Coach Michelle Ward almost as long as I’ve been working for myself. So when she emailed me a couple of weeks ago to ask if she could come on the pod to talk about how she’d retired the When I Grow Up Coach brand and gone all-in on her 90-Day Business Launch program, I said: hell yeah!
This is a story about wrestling with long-term success and the decision to go a different way. It’s also a story about recognizing that, any time you make a big move, things like money and marketing won’t magically stay the same. And finally, it’s a story about recognizing abundant long-term opportunity over short-term consistency.
Now, let’s find out What Works for Michelle Ward!
EP 357: Building A Business Based On What Matters With Coach Mara Glatzel
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much we take existing systems and ways of working for granted—and then find ways to operate within those conventions that make us feel like we’re honoring our values. Instead of getting clear on what actually honoring our values looks like and then deciding whether we can participate in existing systems and ways of working—or whether we need to create something new.
And that’s where today’s conversation with coach, podcaster, and writer Mara Glatzel begins. Mara is the host of Needy, the creator of Tend, and the kind of person I naturally think of when I think about operationalizing values. But what you’ll hear Mara tell me first is that, a while back, she realized that the kind of life and work she wanted for her clients wasn’t the kind of life and work she had structured for herself.
That’s easy to understand since Mara’s values and the values her business is built on run counter to the values of capitalism and workism.
What I’d love for you to think about as you listen to this important conversation is what you take for granted as you build your business. What assumptions do you bring with you? What shoulds and supposed-tos get in the way of fully realizing—and operationalizing—your business’s values?
Mara and I unpack how she did that for herself and what’s come out of the process—and I think you’ll find the conversation a creative jumpstart for considering how you could do things differently too.
Now, let’s find out What Works for Mara Glatzel.
EP 341: Taking Better Care Of Each Other with Wanderwell Founder Kate Strathmann
What can you do with your business if you look beyond your individual needs and your individual success?
That’s a really exciting question to me.
What kind of impact on the collective could this business have? How I can I use this business to meet others’ needs, too?
These questions don’t have many easy answers. But they’re fertile ground for imagining different ways of doing business.
It’s with this in mind that I want to share my conversation with Kate Strathmann. Kate and I share many similar concerns about the state of online business and the even the broader small business, freelance, and gig economies.
As always with my conversations with Kate, this might be confronting at times. You might be nodding along, digging on what we’re saying, and then all of a sudden feel a twinge of recognition that isn’t as nice.
But none of this is aimed at your personal responsibility for where we’ve gotten as a market or even the things you’ve done in your business.
Our goal is to explore some big, hard questions about how we do business and how we can better take care of each other.
Stay tuned to hear us talk about the messages we consume that make it hard to imagine things a different way, why focusing on individual success causes us to devalue the care work that goes into making our businesses work, and why small business owners feel trapped between the worker class and the owner class.
Plus, Kate offers some powerful questions for reframing the potential of your business and gets super pragmatic about the choices we can make without becoming a martyr for the sake of positive change.
EP 336: Marketing Without Scale With Brand Strategist Felicia Sullivan
Today, I’m talking with Felicia Sullivan, a brand strategist who has built a thriving business on marketing activities that don’t scale. Felicia works with startup founders and small businesses doing $10-20m in annual revenue—folks who aren’t looking for business help on Instagram.
So Felicia spends her business development time on 3 things: coffee dates, writing long-form articles geared directly to her prospective clients, and referrals.
This episode answers some of the questions I’m most frequently asked about when it comes to marketing businesses that aren’t built on online courses (which, you know, is most of them).
Get ready to take some notes.
EP 335: Finding The Right Strategy To Market Your Business with Savvy Social Podcast Host Andréa Jones
Social media celebrity is not a requisite for success—no matter how many attractive business influencers give you the impression that it is.
But you don’t have to take my word for it.
This week, I’m talking with Andréa Jones, the founder of OnlineDrea, a social media marketing agency, and the creator of Savvy Social School, a training community all about social media marketing.
After all I just shared about building an audience, this might seem like a strange segue. Why talk to a social media marketing expert when it seems like you might not have to do this whole social media thing the way you have been?
Well, it’s because Andréa understands that finding customers is different from building an audience. She understands it because she helps people do both while also being acutely aware that the growth of her agency isn’t driven by building an audience.
This conversation gets into the relationship between building an audience and finding clients—both as they relate to Andréa’s business and as they relate to her clients’ and members’ businesses.
I love this conversation because there’s a bunch about what Andréa actually does with social media in her own business, there’s a bunch of insightful observation about what’s happening out there in the marketing world, and there are some really actionable ideas you can use, too.
EP 326: Creating Sustainable Structures & Systems With Superscript Marketing Founder Anna Wolf
Our core competency gives us a big leg up on creating operational sustainability, financial sustainability, as well as personal & social sustainability.
And that’s the thing about investing in your core competency. It’s not just an opportunity to make an aspect of the business work better—it’s an opportunity to make the whole business more sustainable.
This week, as we continue our series on opportunity, keep this idea in mind because my guest has fantastic example of this at work.
Anna Wolf is the founder of SuperScript Marketing, a content marketing agency serving financial brands and professionals. Anna’s story can be told through a series identifying core competencies as opportunities.
First, she identified as personal core competency and pursued that. Then, she identified a new capability—and core competency—the agency could use to make their work more impactful. And then finally, Anna focused on an overarching core competency that’s empowered her to make her company much, much stronger across the board.
Anna and I talk about how she got into content marketing for the financial sector in the first place and how freelancing turned into an agency that, eventually, focused on productized services. We also talk about how getting obsessed with systems & processes helped her to clarify the agency’s key core competency—and the operational shifts that have come with it.
EP 322: Building A Stronger Team With Productive Flourishing Founder Charlie Gilkey
This week, we’re examining how we nurture the relationships we have with the people who work with us.
I’ll be honest with you: there are so many different places I’d like to take this episode. There are so many of the lessons I’ve learned that I’d like to pass on. Luckily, the lessons I’ve learned have largely come through conversations I’ve had on this very podcast!
And there’s one conversation in particular that I come back to time & time again. It was my first interview with my friend and founder of Productive Flourishing, Charlie Gilkey.
Looking back on this conversation, I can see that there were already lessons that had started to come into focus about how I work with people and what it looks like to nurture relationships with team members. But what I can also see is how much this conversation actually helped to solidify those learnings into how my thinking & approach have changed since.
Charlie and I talk about the operational components of the mindset shift I just dug into. We talk about the art of management, whether for one or for many. We discuss what prompted him to bring his core team on as employees instead of as independent contractors. And how we keeps his team—and himself—from becoming over committed and overwhelmed, as well as how he structures his time to enhance his creativity.
EP 227: Raising Your Prices With Confidence With Content Marketing Strategist Abby Herman
Abby and I talk about how she ended up working for so little and what she needed to do to raise her prices. We dive into all the feelings that came up around raising her prices and discovering the real value of what she was offering.
EP 224: Building Confidence Through Consistent Action With Shatterboxx Design Founder Jamie Varon
Jamie Varon made a big lifestyle change over the last few years and I wanted to know where she found the confidence to do life differently as a small business owner.
We talk about the year she spent living and working in France, how she’s redefined satisfaction for herself, and how she balances setting goals with finding peace in what already is. We also talk about the very real implications these changes have had on her business and professional success.
