Entrepreneurship For Humans

“The Squeeze” occurs when you’ve run out of capacity in your business.

You simply don’t have the time, energy, or mental bandwidth to do more, and so you can’t really see a way for the business to grow. Still, The Squeeze convinces you that if you just rearranged the pieces or tried a little harder, you could force some fresh growth.

But alas, you just end up squeezed into a different arrangement of the same pieces.

In other words, you use what’s familiar to try to work your way out of the Squeeze… and so you can’t quite escape because “what’s familiar” is what got you into the Squeeze in the first place.

To actually alleviate the Squeeze, you have to take a completely different perspective and see things in a new way. And that’s how talking things out with others and learning how they see things differently really helps inspire opportunity.

Now, I know it’s challenging to have those conversations or connect with people who see things in different ways. That’s one of the reasons I started this podcast 5 years ago; I desperately wanted to bring wildly different perspectives to small business owners like you who were feeling The Squeeze. It’s also why I bring business owners together through community and events, as well.

I don’t have a new conversation for you today, though. Instead, I want to share my own observations—sort of a grand total of what I’ve added up over the years of my own business-building, my interviews, my personal conversations, and my coaching & community-building.

This is a look at what I see when I look at a business and what I hear when I talk to a business owner.

It’s the overlap of opportunity and sustainability that drives the work I do with small business owners.