When You’re Too Close to The Thing to See What Comes Next
Sometimes you’re too close to your own business to see what comes next.
Sometimes your own evolution eludes you. You know something is off, but you can’t sort what. How you’re feeling day to day in your business isn’t quite what you wanted and you can’t figure out how to shift it into something that feels a lot better.
Most founders who come to me are not starting over and they’re not starting from scratch. They’ve already built something that works. What they are looking for in our work together is not the basics - it is not what products, what services, what customers, what ways of reaching those customers, what pricing, what strategic goals will get them where they want to go. What they are looking for is: now that I have built this, what’s next? Where do I actually want to go?
It sounds simple. Perhaps more of the same. Perhaps more products. More services, more customers, more revenue. But an interesting thing has happened in the building of their business — they are no longer the same person. They have evolved. So how can their business evolve with them? This is the work we do together.
We begin by asking deeper questions:
What should I focus on now given who I am now?
What have I been to afraid to look at?
What is no longer working for me?
What change am I avoiding?
What is my next right move?
With that lens, we hold every part of their business up to the light. Through that lens we revisit their offers, their positioning, their revenue, their team, their ops, their customers. But underneath it all, we’re really asking: is the business you are building taking you where you actually want to go?
This question elicits different answers. Answers that require something else entirely: self-awareness. A willingness to go just as deep on your own ish as you do on your quarterly revenue planning. Who have I become? What lights me up now? What old patterns and behaviors am I allowing to run my business? How do I shift out of them? Who do I want to become instead? And how will my business support this growth rather than hinder it or keep me in old boxes now that I see the boxes for what they are?
People often ask me why I have so much trauma and coaching training for someone who works with clients on their businesses. “It’s just revenue and spreadsheets, finding customers and creating products for those customers, no?” No.
Running your own business will shatter every long-held belief you’ve had about yourself. It will lead you to look at all the parts of you, all the behaviors of you, all the coping mechanisms you’ve developed to get where you are now, all the stories you are telling yourself (and have been, for years) about who are you are, what you get to have, what’s allowed for you and what’s not. This is serious stuff that requires a skillful mentor to help you balance it with care and safety and playfulness and joy in equal measure, where appropriate, in a way that does not create harm.
Who you are in your life is how you run your business.
Everything you love about yourself shows up in how you run your business.
Everything you don’t love about yourself shows up in how you run your business.
So when we work together, we are working together at both levels — the business and the human running the business. This is how my work with clients differs and why it is so effective for founders.
It has been an honor to do this work for 30 years and I marvel at the one thing that has not changed over hundreds of clients and businesses —> my job is simple: bring fresh eyes to what you’ve built and to who you’ve become as you’ve built it. I find patterns. I ask better questions. I help you see what you can’t see from inside your business, from inside you. Together, we design a thoughtful edit of the business you’ve already built so it aligns who who you’re becoming and how you want your work and life to feel every single day.