The Business That Got You *Here* May Not Be the Business That Takes You *There*
After 30 years working with businesses, I've learned that the hardest moments rarely happen when everything is falling apart. They often happen when what you built actually worked. Unexpected cracks often appear when your business finally has the shape of the thing you once hoped to build. You did it! It exists! You have clients and revenue and staff! So why doesn’t it feel nearly as good as you thought it would? Why isn’t it fitting into your life as you had imagined? And why are the next right steps so unclear?
Let’s first acknowledge what it took to build what you have built. To get where you are right now, feeling proud it exists, but knowing you are now ready for a shift. For an adjustment. For a subtle or not-so-subtle realignment. You are ready to refine your businesses so it supports the life you actually want to live.
Not everyone has what it takes to have a vision and see it through. To create something out of whole cloth simply because you believed it should exist. Despite the raised eyebrows, cautious advice, and well-meaning "if you think that will work" conversations with friends, family and colleagues you trust. To build any kind of business takes moxie and you should take a moment to pat yourself on the back for it all — you did the thing.
But sometimes what can happen between creating the thing and launching the thing, in between launching the thing and maintaining the thing, and in between maintaining the thing and growing the thing, is that we become a different founder in the process. That amount of work and effort and creation and trial and error and two steps forward and three back again and again changes a person. Often we’re so focused on the phases of the business that we’ve neglected to notice it no longer aligns with who we are and with how we need our business to run now.
This is the moment where I have spent my career meeting founders — standing in the space between the business they built and the business asking to emerge next. In the confusing gray area between the business that got you here and the next right steps in your business to get you to where you next want to go. For most founders, it shocks them to realize that after all their hard work, they need to shift things so their work, their company, and their team supports who they’ve become in the process of building it all. Because building a business changes you. I’ve seen it first-hand for 30 years. I’ve been in those rooms, at those conference tables, and I know exactly how to help thoughtful founders take the next right steps to ensure their business evolves as they evolve — in every season of their life.
Businesses are living, breathing things. They evolve and change as their founders do. That’s the magic of it all and the best businesses are the ones that are truly one of one. That could only be built by one founder, one way. They are the brands and products and services we adore. To be visionary enough to create something out of nothing means you are ever-aware of what needs to evolve, to shift. Founders have such a keen sense of this and that natural tension of where their business is now and where they want it go next is the work I find most compelling.
I've spent most of my career helping other people clarify their ideas, businesses, and next moves. It has been an honor and I’ve learned so much! In The Work Worth Building, I'll explore the questions that sit beneath building a meaningful business: what to grow, what to release, when to push, when to pause, and how to make decisions when there is no obvious right answer.
You can also expect something much deeper: what it really takes to be a founder with purpose in the face of ever-shifting goal posts. How to lead with integrity, how to do your own work so you’re showing up for yourself and your company and your team and your customers in ways that feel fully aligned, fully you. How to get so quiet and so clear about your next steps so what you build next and what you shift into next reflects the highest and best use of YOU and the way you want your life to look and feel every day.
Here's to building businesses that not only work — but work for the people we've become and take us somewhere we actually want to go.
Onward,
Callie