The 3 simple shifts that take women business owners from owner-operator to CEO of a business that runs without them.
(An insurance-specific masterclass is in the Agency Collective.)
Real strategy, real numbers, and real stories from the businesses I coach. New essays each week.
When someone in your local market thinks of your category of business, who comes to mind? For most categories, the answer is a list of about four names. Not ten. Not twenty. Four. The four local businesses that...
Keep reading →You are good at what you do. You are not good at selling it. This is the most common self-assessment from small business owners who find themselves with capacity to take on more clients but cannot reliably fill...
Keep reading →Most small businesses do not have a marketing plan. They have a list of marketing activities. A newsletter they sometimes send. A social media account someone posts on a few times a month. Maybe a referral program that...
Keep reading →Most small business owners hear recurring revenue and think subscription software. Netflix. Spotify. The tech companies that sell access to a product on a monthly basis. This is a narrow read of what recurring revenue is. Recurring revenue...
Keep reading →How much does it cost your business when a client leaves? Most owners have never run this calculation. They know intuitively that losing clients is bad. They do not know how bad, which means they cannot make informed...
Keep reading →Most small businesses want more referrals. Very few have a referral engine. The difference matters because hoping for referrals and running a referral engine produce completely different results. Hoping produces the occasional unpredictable referral, usually from a particularly...
Keep reading →You started charging hourly because that is what everyone in your industry charges. An hourly rate felt honest. You were selling time. You put a number on the time. The client paid for the time used. It seemed...
Keep reading →How many revenue streams does your business run on? For most small businesses, the honest answer is one. Maybe one and a half, if there is a small product line that supplements the main service. Everything else is...
Keep reading →Your revenue is the same this year as last year. Maybe slightly up. Maybe slightly down. Either way, flat. The first instinct is usually to blame marketing. More leads. Better funnel. Bigger ad spend. More social media. The...
Keep reading →Your business has a rhythm. You just have not written it down. Every small business operates on cycles. Some are industry-standard. Some are client-driven. Some are seasonal. Some are tax-driven. All of them repeat. And yet most owners...
Keep reading →Most small businesses have some version of an operations manual. It is usually a folder of Word documents, a Google Drive littered with PDFs, or a wiki someone started two years ago and no one has touched since....
Keep reading →The tools were supposed to make the business easier. For a while, they did. Then a new tool came out that was better. You added it. Then another. You added that too. Then a team member recommended a...
Keep reading →Most small business owners do not have a weekly routine. They have a calendar, which is not the same thing. A calendar is where meetings happen. A routine is a deliberate design of what the owner's week looks...
Keep reading →Small businesses lose people for three reasons, in roughly this order: they stopped being heard, they stopped growing, or they got a better offer somewhere else. The third one you cannot always prevent. The first two you can....
Keep reading →You have tried to delegate. It has not stuck. And you have quietly concluded either that your team is not strong enough, or that you cannot let go, or both. Neither conclusion is usually right. The honest answer...
Keep reading →The standard small business onboarding is not an onboarding. It is an apology. The new hire shows up on Monday. The owner is sorry they do not have a proper plan. The new hire shadows someone for a...
Keep reading →Most small business first hires fall into one of two categories. A friend or family member who starts helping out part-time. Or a stranger hired into a vague assistant role with no clear definition. Both patterns produce the...
Keep reading →Here is a test. Take the client workflow you have in your head or in your existing documentation. Hand it to the newest person on your team. Ask them to run it on a real client, start to...
Keep reading →You have been meaning to document your processes for three years. You are still meaning to. The reason is simple and it is not about discipline. Documentation, done the traditional way, takes hours of uninterrupted writing, and uninterrupted...
Keep reading →You are going to build six SOPs this year. They are going to live in a shared folder your team already uses. They are going to be short, practical, and genuinely useful. And the order you build them...
Keep reading →When a small business owner hears the word process, they usually hear bureaucracy. Red tape. Corporate overhead. Something that belongs at a company with ten thousand employees, not a company with seven. This misreading is why most small...
Keep reading →When most small business owners think about operations, they think about something that big companies do. Enterprise software, org charts, process engineers, SOC 2 compliance, training departments. None of that applies to a business with seven people and...
Keep reading →Every business owner knows the question by heart. How do I grow faster? It is the default lens. The default podcasts. The default advice. The default shape of any conversation with a peer at any conference. Almost no...
Keep reading →Your revenue was down twelve percent last month. How did you feel? If the honest answer is something like I felt like I was failing, personally, as a human being, you have an identity problem that will, eventually,...
Keep reading →Think about the life you are actually living, not the one on Instagram and not the one you are trying to get to. The kids you have. The spouse or partner or solitude you have. The body you...
Keep reading →Every January, you write down a new set of goals. Every December, you look at the list and realize you hit maybe one or two of them, and you are not sure what happened to the rest. Most...
Keep reading →You are at your desk at seven. Your first team member arrives at eight-thirty. You are still there at six, finishing things up. They left at five. This has been the pattern for years, and you have told...
Keep reading →At the end of a twelve-hour day, you have two options for how to feel about it. Option one: you were busy all day. Back to back. Never stopped. Your calendar was full, your inbox was moving, you...
Keep reading →The honest reason most small business owners skip quarterly planning is not that they do not believe in it. It is that quarterly planning feels like something you do when your life is already in order, and theirs...
Keep reading →Walk through your office on a Wednesday afternoon and count the number of things that are paused waiting for a decision from you. Not big things. Small ones. An email that needs an approval. A vendor invoice that...
Keep reading →Close your eyes and describe last Tuesday. Most small business owners can give you the broad strokes. A meeting at ten. Client work in the afternoon. Email throughout. Something on the phone around three that took longer than...
Keep reading →Why does your business exist? If the first answer in your head is "to make money," that is fine. It is true, and it should be true, because a business that does not make money is a hobby....
Keep reading →When someone asks where your business will be in two years, what happens in your body? For most small business owners, the honest answer is a low-grade shrug. You know it will be bigger. You hope it will...
Keep reading →The word CEO gets thrown around a lot by small business owners. It is on LinkedIn. It is on the website. It is on the business card. The honest question is whether the work behind the title actually...
Keep reading →It took Laura six years to notice. A successful bookkeeping practice. Eighteen clients. Two part-time helpers. Consistent five-figure months. On paper, a business. In reality, a job with extra steps. The moment she noticed was a Tuesday in...
Keep reading →One useful idea. One honest behind-the-scenes story. One tool I actually use. Every Tuesday.