Building an audience requires you to take up space. And that can be pretty difficult (even dangerous) for many of us. Whether because of gender, race, sexuality, neurodivergence, disability, or individual trauma, there is no small number of us who learned to take up...
Every choice we make has a trade-off. When I decide to lace up my running shoes and log 4 miles before work, I’m trading another 45 minutes in bed for the energy I get from moving my body before I sit down at the computer. When I choose to knock off a couple of hours...
I have a reputation for being a decisive, proactive, making-things-happen kind of person. I’m quite proud of this. But really? It’s a facade. What others admire as fearless action-taking is just careful branding. I’m actually an anxious reactor. Oof. Even though I...
I have a confession, dear reader: I’ve been learning how to draw. I’m a 38 year-old woman who spends each evening making and erasing little digital lines on my iPad in the hopes that one of those lines will make me happy enough to continue. Like countless others, I...
How do you know what works for your business? And once you have something that's working, how do you maintain your confidence in the face of outside influence? How do you objectively weigh new information without denying your own knowledge & experience? These...
“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.
I could sum up the existential journey of most business owners like so: Make it up as you go. Learn the rules. Break the rules. Make your own rules. Our culture and economy organize around rules. In school, we learn the rules (both explicit and implicit) so that we...
I’m fascinated by the way that different people can look at the same problem and ask wildly different questions to solve it. This fascination is one of the reasons I became a podcaster. I wanted to ask entrepreneurs about how they arrived at their ideas and...
As you make your New Year’s resolutions, intentions, commitments, vision boards, or goals, a gentle reminder: Your goals do not define you or your worth. The other day, I was thinking about my "origin story." It's the story of why I started a business in the first...
Messages urging you to fix yourself or fix your business are all around. It's all part of the annual ritual of improvement that is the New Year. Most of these messages revolve around invented or exaggerated “problems” that can be easily solved if only you’d buy this...
What Works offers in-depth, well-researched content that strips away the hype of the 21st-century economy.
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