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Navigating Entrepreneurship and Grief with Heather Bax · Spiral Tending

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And welcome to Spiral Tending Podcast, where we untangle the spiral of perfectionism, burnout, small business woes and wins, and the quiet exhaustion that so many of us healers carry.
0:17
I'm Andi, your guide on this journey toward a lighter, more authentic ways of showing up for yourself, for your clients, and for the work that you are meant to do.
0:27
I am so glad that your craft is in this world.
If you are listening right now, chances are you've felt it.
I know I have.
The slow drain of giving everything while forgetting how to refill your cup.
Maybe you're wondering if there's another way to hold space without losing yourself in the process.
Well, guess what? There is, and it starts with community.
And this brings me to something so close to my heart.
I have been working so hard on this project for so long now, and it is the Spiral Collective, formerly known as the Healers List Serve.
This isn't just another subscription, okay? It is a place for us healers who are ready to step away from performance pressure, bullshit professionalism, and reclaim our intuition and how we support each other through this big tech BS hell we're in.
You know what I mean? I'm so over it.
Anyways, we explore topics every month via Together about money, ways to restructure your business in late-stage capitalism how we can support one another, cross-promotion, so many other themes that emerge for all of us small business owners so whether you're tuning in today because you need some gentle encouragement or because you're curious about joining us inside the Spiral Collective, know this: you belong there.
Let's spiral inward and outward and do it freaking together because I am so over small business isolation.
All right, let's jump in.
Today we have a wonderful guest.
Her name is Heather and She teaches small business owners how to wrangle their work and find their flow.
Let's jump in Hi, Heather.
Thank you for being on the show today.
Why don't you just begin by telling people who you are, what you do, and anything else that you think is pertinent? My name's Heather Bax.
my business is Small Business Rodeo.
I help small business owners to wrangle their work and find their flow, primarily, I'm doing strategy and systems work with folks so that they can go from being overwhelmed to feeling more on top of everything in the back end of their business and more strategic about what they're doing, and also confident about running experiments within their business and adjusting things as they go.
How did you get into that work? I have a circuitous path to entrepreneurship.
I had a dog training business, then I thought I was gonna be a web developer, and I worked in web development, then I opened a brick-and-mortar store, and then I took all the experience that I had from previous work in small businesses and became a small business advisor.
I have a degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in public policy.
I studied public policy and minored in social justice and social entrepreneurship.
I thought that I was gonna go into nonprofit work and public administration when I was in school, and everything just totally went a different direction, and I've been just following...
the path has been unfolding as I go in my career.
nothing is very straightforward having such a varied experience with different types of small businesses really helps me to help other people, Yeah I had two different IRL businesses.
a lot of the business support you find these days like business coaches and advisors, are focused on online business and marketing and not on the foundations of business.
coming from, having a brick-and-mortar and a service business that is in person I have a lot of experience with the foundational elements of business, and some of that can translate well into online business in a way that folks who have only ever had success in the online realm might not know about some of the other elements, how did you become a dog trainer? that's so funny 'cause I'm going to dog training school, so just tell I graduated early from college, and all of my friends and my roommates were still in school.
I thought that I wanted to go potentially to DC and try to work with my public policy degree in DC.
I was like I'll wait year until everyone else graduates, and then I'll figure out what I'm gonna do."
in the meantime, I got a job at a veterinary hospital, I was working as a receptionist in a veterinary hospital, which is an extremely underrated job experience for a young person to have.
It was so helpful to me in so many ways because I'm very introverted and I was very shy at that point in my life.
working as a receptionist, particularly in a place where people are worried and upset about what's happening with their pets, and dealing with financial strain at the same time it's a challenging group of people to be doing customer service with.
I learned so much about compassion for people in those situations and how to hold space and be with people who are having a hard time, while also maintaining the boundaries and expectations of the job and what we needed from people to be able to do our job.
So it was great training ground.
never do it again at this point in my life, but as a young person it was really helpful.
that was supposed to be my temporary job and then I ended up being there for several years 'cause it sucked you in I think there's a lot of trauma bonding that happens in the vet med world.
after working with her for a while, I ended up starting my own business, a combination of dog walking, pet sitting, and dog training.
the theme of my entire career thus far is getting really burnt out and then switching it up.
Yep what's interesting about dog training is that it's really people training.
Yes.
nobody really thinks about that, one of the hardest parts about dog training is that you have to reset people's expectations because when they hire a dog trainer, they're like, "You're gonna come fix my dog."
And it doesn't work li- it-- That isn't ever gonna be a thing that happens.
So yeah, it's a lot of dealing with people which I think I was okay at.
And I found it to be exhausting, Totally because people never did what you want them to do yeah Yeah.
dogs are much easier.
It's just the people that are a lot harder.
Yeah.
it always is.
Yeah how did you go from being a dog trainer to a brick-and-mortar person? So in between those, I thought I was gonna be a web developer, so that was-- I went and did a coding boot camp and learned, how to code.
I will say I don't think that coding boot camps are a good value, and now that there's AI, it's like a whole different world than it was 10 years ago when I was doing this.
But, you don't finish the coding bootcamp like, "Okay, I'm ready to be a web developer."
It's now you have a introduction to web development, and you have to still learn a lot, and you're not really competitive in the job market.
But I didn't really want a theme of my career as like non-traditional ways of going about things.
I didn't really wanna work as a web developer for someone else.
I wanted to be a web designer, which before I did the coding bootcamp, I didn't really realize that those were two different jobs.
So I just went in "This is what I need to do websites."
And it wasn't, and nobody stopped me and was like, "Hey, I think you actually just wanna be a designer."
So I did the whole thing, learned JavaScript, whatever and haven't used that knowledge basically at all.
So that was a big waste of time and money, except that I do think that learning how to code really helps your brain think in a problem-solving way that's very structured.
So that was a helpful, skill that I got from learning how to code because debugging code is very...
we have to find the problem and figure out how to make it work, and it's very structured.
And it's a lot of problem-solving.
So learning how to code, you're actually learning, they're called languages, the different ways that you can code different things and like different backend and front end things, and it is like learning a language.
So I did that, and then I ended up working for this is the like this.
I'm like, "Please path.
No, I love it.
It's comforting I think it is nice for other multi-passionate entrepreneurs to hear that you can have a really crazy path and still end up somewhere that is where you wanna be ultimately.
it's the lessons we learned along the way, right? So I ended up working for a web development agency that was a fully remote agency, and that was my first hands-on introduction to the whole online business world because almost all of our clients were online businesses we were coding WordPress websites.
And I was doing a range of different things.
At one point, my job title at the web development agency was Systems and Technology Guide, which is not a job title.
That is a fully made-up position.
But I was helping folks with the technology pieces that interfaced with their website but were not their website, Yep figuring out how to integrate their tech stack and automate it Cool which was really interesting, and I enjoyed that work.
And I was tired of sitting at a computer all day every day.
Yep I was burnt out on that, although I had no idea what true burnout would look like or feel like for me I naively thought that was like, this is what it is.
Also at that time, I took a yoga teacher training, because I never became a yoga teacher.
But I was like, I really love to learn.
It's like this is something I'm interested in, and I just wanna deepen my knowledge around it, and maybe one day I will actually teach or do something with this, but I never did.
I have a few clients now who are yoga teachers, and I have a lot deeper understanding of their world because I did that yoga teacher training, And then, the store came about...
people often ask me how did you get into doing this?" and the answer is there's no origin story that's "Oh, wow, that was so meaningful to her.
my shop was in, a very small town in North Carolina.
It's called Saxapahaw, and it's on a river in an old cotton mill.
And I still live right up the road here, so it's my community.
It's an unincorporated village full of amazing people doing really interesting things.
I was walking down the sidewalk in front of the mill one day after I got breakfast at the restaurant there and saw that the retail space was available for lease, and I was just like, "Somebody should put a gift shop here.
We really need a fun, artsy gift shop here."
And then I was just like I guess I'm gonna do that."
Yes.
Maybe I should do that.
which is ridiculous, like the audacity to just be like, "I can open a store here with no retail experience" and no money.
Like there was no plan.
I didn't have investors.
It was just like Really insane for me to decide to do that.
But It worked out really well for many years.
We had handmade products, lots of local makers.
Almost everything was made in North Carolina.
We had a paper goods section and greeting cards, and then we had a bulk bar, so we had bulk home and body care that you could bring your own container and fill up.
Which was in all natural facial care products and different gifts And we did workshops and it was really wonderful and created a really cool community of makers and artists and people who wanted to shop locally.
it was very fun.
And having a retail store is so much work.
Yeah.
nobody stopped me.
Nobody was like, "Hey, are you prepared to do this?" It was just like things happened and I was along for the ride.
if I had known how hard it was gonna be, I never would've started.
But I do think that's like the story of all entrepreneurship.
100%.
Yeah I known or had you known or anyone, we'd be like, "Why would we do this?" Oh my God.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was wild.
I signed my lease on the space in January of 2019, and we opened in April of 2019.
when the COVID pandemic hit, it was less than a year old, and I did not have an online store and was just barely trying to grow this little shop in this town.
So that was a wild ride, and we shut down the shop We shut down the shop, It was mandated by the state, but we would have anyway because it's honestly hard now thinking back to the mindset that I was in then six years ago.
And I think in so many ways, and maybe we wanna talk about this, but I think in so many ways, we're all still in the survival mode that we Yes in March of 2020.
It never left, even though the world has changed in many ways.
Anyway, that's a tangent.
But so we shut down for the amount of time that we had to shut down, plus some, because I was, very hesitant to reopen even though they told us that we could.
And during the time that we were shut down, I created an online store, learned all that I could about Shopify and "Okay, now we're doing e-commerce.
This is a whole different adventure that I was unprepared for, and I guess I'll learn overnight."
I did some different things where I had a gift certificate sale, and folks could buy gift certificates to help us through the shutdown and then use them later to make it through that time of being shut down.
And then we reopened, and I hired my first employees and they started in August of 2020.
And then my dad passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly in the beginning of December of 2020.
So that was, a whole thing that totally rocked my world and changed everything for me personally.
I had just hired two employees, and so the day after I got the call from my mom that my dad had died, I had to call them.
December is holiday season, so for brick-and-mortar retail, that week that my dad died was, our biggest week of sales for the year and funds the rest of the year and the next year.
So it was a critical time for the shop and I just couldn't function.
So I called my new employees the morning after I found out that my dad died sobbing.
I was so embarrassed as their boss to call them could not get the words out.
I need to figure out the schedule.
I've gotta go be with my mom.
I don't know what we're gonna do.
And they just stepped up so beautifully and held me through that holiday season I have no idea how we even got through that holiday season.
And the next year I had a new employee and she...
Like we were coming up on the holiday season, and she was like, "Okay, so what did we do last year?" I was like, "I have no idea."
she was like, "Okay, so how did we handle that last year?" I was like, "I don't know."
I was fully not in the business for the last holiday season.
I have no idea what we need to do.
I have empathy for folks who are running their own business and lose someone in their family, It's It's so hard.
It's really hard.
And I think it's hard if you're working for someone else too, but in a really different way.
I'll finish my long story of entrepreneurship, and then we can circle back to grief.
So I had the shop for a long time, and I was working through the grief of losing my dad and the post-COVID still COVID world that we were in.
We wore masks.
We mandated masks in the shop for two years which meant because North Carolina is a battleground state where people have different opinions about how things should happen, we got a lot of pushback about mandating masks in the shop for so long.
Wow it was a really small space, and I was, very uncomfortable with people coming in while it was still such a scary world to me.
Yeah we required masks until after the vaccine had been around for a while.
And then we gradually relaxed that restriction.
And I think the grief and little T trauma of COVID is so mixed in with the trauma of losing my dad and the grief of losing my dad because they happened at the same time that it's hard for me to untangle, what was happening and what was affecting me.
I think when I think about those years that I had the shop, it was like the most beautiful place and like people and things that were happening, and also some of the hardest times of my life at the same time.
Which I think is often the way that it is with grief and just like existing in the world with the grief of loss.
But I got to a point at the end of 2023 where I was just like I had been not taking care of myself in the way that I probably needed to be able to hold all that I was holding.
And I wasn't making enough money to feel like the exchange of the amount of time and energy that I was putting into the business was unbalanced, right? Like I was putting so much of myself into the business and not getting back what would have felt good for me.
I was at a point where I needed to either expand the business or close the business.
If I wanted to make more money, I would've needed to expand.
I knew what I would need to do to expand it, and I had an abundance of ideas.
when I thought about doing that, I couldn't do...
I didn't have anything left.
Yep.
So I decided to close the business, and That's interesting We have no way to contextualize businesses closing other than them failing.
Yep.
And so that was a lot of The feedback that I got was like, "Oh, I'm so sorry that you have to close your business."
And I was like, "I'm not sorry, and I don't have to.
I am choosing to, Because I wanna put myself first in a way that having this business won't allow me to."
Because the thing with retail is we were only closed on Mondays, And even with a team of people, if everybody's sick or, somebody's car breaks down or whatever, I'm on the hook for those six days a week.
you can't just close, especially on a Saturday or a Sunday, because those were the days that we made our money, and if we closed, then I made no money.
So it really is such a beast that demands so much of you, and I loved it.
I loved the work, and I just couldn't keep doing it.
So I made the choice to close the business which is also somewhat...
I know-- Are you into human design at all? I feel like I know a little bit Okay.
not...
I'm into it.
I'm studying to get certified in human design because I'm fascinated by it.
And as we have discussed, I love racking up certifications for the hell of it.
No, it is incredible.
Please never stop In human design, I'm a projector, and so there's five main types, and the projector is one of the...
They're called non-energy types.
we don't generate our own energy.
We borrow it from other people.
human design is about energy management and how to best work with your energy.
for me I'm not meant to be on for 10 hours a day, like in a store talking to people.
It's not the best use of my energy and skills and talents.
So that business, even though I loved it and I was good at it it wasn't the best fit for me and the lifestyle that I wanted and the energy that I had to give.
I looked at all that and said, "Okay, I'm gonna close this business."
I knew that when I closed that business, I wanted to get into consulting because I think that is more of my strong suit and it is this business model that affords me the lifestyle that I would like to have.
Yep so that's the long story Okay.
of my path here.
I love how you're like, this one."
I'm like, "Fuck yes."
It's refreshing to hear someone follow their heart, even if it's like, "I don't know, we'll figure it out as we go."
That is all that business is, So what a skill.
It sounds to me like you've had a shit ton of grief in your journey There's the ending of your business, your dad, COVID, but also the grief of what am I doing? My life is changing There's been so many transitions.
How do you connect grief and business together? I think grief is a portal to creativity.
I think anyone who's been through, not to rank grief, but there are different types of grief.
if you've been through a type of grief that totally stops your world then you know what I mean when I say that it's a portal, because it totally bends time.
my experience of grief was that It snapped everything into focus in a way that nothing else could have done for me.
All of a sudden nothing mattered except being with my mom and honoring my dad and whatever felt like I was honoring my dad at that time was what mattered to me.
Yeah I think that in that space, I had some of the most...
this feels weird to say, right? Because you don't wanna say the path to creativity is to be in the worst pain of your life.
But being in that space where time stops and everything is in sharp focus can open up creativity.
it really did make my creative self come to the forefront, because all of a sudden everything was, stripped away that was blocking that, like, all of the distractions and the heaviness of the world It was like I have one focus right now, which is this pain that I'm feeling that I don't know how to handle, and I can't do anything else, so I just have to be with this pain.
And when you slow down enough and just sit still with your pain, there's so much more clarity and creativity, and I think empathy.
Losing my dad really made me so much more compassionate for other people because everyone's fighting a battle that you can't see, Yes Whatever people say.
But you don't know when you talk to somebody in the grocery store if their dad died last week.
Yep I don't know that really answers your question how is grief related to business? I think that clarifying effect that grief has can be really helpful for understanding what you wanna be doing, who you wanna be serving, how you wanna show up and what legacy you wanna have also it's like you're standing at the beach and you feel the grief move through you, but all is life before and ahead all at once, and you're like, "How do I want to live my life?" "Do I wanna be doing this? Is it working for me? Maybe.
Maybe not how I want."
It's so clarifying.
I am with you there.
Yeah.
I think what was interesting for me is, like I said, I hadn't had the shop for that long when Dad died, and he was so proud of what I was doing, so I felt like I needed to keep doing it.
And then there's this part of you that when you lose someone who's really important to you, and my dad and I were close.
every choice that you make after they're gone is now I'm living a life that he doesn't get to witness.
Yep letting go of the business that was, like, the last thing that he saw me doing and was proud of me for was hard.
And we bought a house last year, moving to a new house was hard, and I got married last year, that was hard.
So it's like all these choices after are hard, I ended up clinging to things for longer than maybe I would have if I wasn't in that place of grief because of how hard it is to move forward knowing that person isn't gonna be there with you.
Yeah.
It's both like the biggest catalyst and also like your feet are in at the same time.
As you're saying all this, I'm just like, God, like being a small business owner and being human is so not talked about especially when it's pretty much you.
Like you sounded like you were on call no matter what.
That's A, lot for any human, not realistic, but in our society, that is how things go.
How were you managing being human, and how have you taken that to your work now? I think I've always been pretty naturally good at being tender with myself.
Which I don't know where that came from...
When I was in intense grief, right after Dad died, I was very gentle with myself.
I did not force myself to do things that were too much or too hard.
And I learned very quickly how much I needed to lean on other people, which is also, a gift that grief gave me, which is that I, number one, saw how many people were showing up for me in that time, and number two, realized how important it is to me to show up for other people when they're in these periods of grief.
when someone dies, everyone comes and circles around you for the first week or two, and then one day you wake up and it feels like everybody just forgot or moved on, and you're, still in the hardest period of your life.
what I took away from that was when someone is grieving, to show up and check in on them a month after whatever happened two months after, three months after and see how they're doing after, the initial rush of people showing up for them because that was so important to me.
many folks who lost someone during the COVID times, a lot of people did lose folks from COVID or in the natural process of death during the time that there was COVID.
Funerals were very interrupted.
The grieving process that we normally go through didn't happen in the same way.
So we did not have his funeral until eight months later when it felt like it was safe for a large group of people to gather, and by then everyone had moved on.
So it was not the same as it would have been because of the outpouring of support right when he died, but then we didn't see any of those people in person.
that was a hard thing that anyone who experienced a loss during COVID would understand from not being able to see people in the hospital to the grieving process looking different.
I'm sorry, I've gotten off track of what you asked.
Oh, part of it yeah.
You asked how I was able to hold on to being a person during grief.
And yeah, I don't know that I have real thoughts on that because I couldn't not tend to me, tend to Heather during that time, because it stopped my whole world and physically and emotionally, I couldn't do anything else but be with how I was feeling.
And I guess maybe other people have a different experience of grief where their emotions and physical experience of their emotions is not so at the forefront.
I've been doing somatic therapy for a long time, so I have, more close contact with my feelings than some people do.
I don't know that's helpful for anyone else, but that was my experience You just gotta keep going, but also have to tend.
It's the weirdest natural...
I don't know.
we all die.
It's very natural, but It's like inherent.
We know how to do it without Someone guiding us.
Okay, so you had this massive whirlwind of time the past six years.
How are you doing now, and how has this shaped you? What's interesting is that I really thought when I closed down the store that I would I'm gonna tend to my burnout, and I'm gonna solve this problem, and I will get to a place where I've arrived and I'm no longer burnt out."
And that just I-- If that place exists, I have not been there yet.
To me, it is a mythical fairyland that I've never seen it.
And it's a little bit of like, wherever you go, there you are, right? Like I-- my job is different, and I am still the same person with the same patterns and the same orientation to work And I have learned a lot and am doing many things different.
I'm not fixed.
I'm not solved.
There's no arriving at a different place.
That's my experience.
after I closed the shop, I took a job as a project manager part-time that I thought was gonna give me time and space to breathe and come back to myself.
what I learned rather quickly is that I am unemployable.
I really prefer being my own boss.
it wasn't the right...
this happens all the time for many folks in business.
I see a lot of my clients doing this too, where they're like, "Okay, this feels really bad, so I'm gonna do the opposite."
And then as it turns out, the opposite also is not correct.
There's some titration that needs to happen.
It's not, "Okay, I was feeling really burnt out running the shop, so I need to go work for somebody else."
Like no, the answer was, I still wanna work for myself, but in a totally different way, and there's middle ground there that I, hadn't explored, We can talk about how society tricks us into black and white thinking in so many ways.
Yeah.
I see this with therapists, I'm burnt out with therapy, so what am I gonna do?" And I'm like, "You can do so many different things.
Your world has just opened and begun."
there's this narrative like you reach that place and then everything else goes away.
But I think that's where the creativity really comes in, do I want next? What can I see?" Yeah.
Yeah, it's a really common thing.
everything that I see my clients doing, I realize later I'm also doing it's harder to see for myself.
I need other people to help me see it Shoemaker's kids have no shoes or whatever.
I can't see my own patterns, but I can see it in other people But a lot of what people do is they're trying to solve the wrong problem.
I say this all the time, at least once a session, I'm telling people, "Let's solve the right problem."
So instead of saying, "I'm super burnt out, and so I need to get a totally different job," we need to solve the problem of you being burnt out.
What does that look like? There's many different creative solutions and nine times out of 10, folks jump to the wrong solution for them, There's just right or wrong for you as the business owner.
So we have to back it up folks will come to me and they'll be like I have to switch to doing an online course because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, And my response is always back it up and see how you arrived there, because I don't know if that's the right answer, but let's talk about the problem first and see if we can think of five creative solutions to this problem and see which one feels the most right."
Because that linear, here's a problem, here's a solution, let's do the solution, okay, that created more problems is usually not where we actually wanna go.
But it is this black and white thinking, driven by I have many icks with the online business world and online business coaching and what a lot of folks are presenting as the solution to business problems that is often not correct.
And most folks who are teaching business in some way are doing it in a one-size-fits-all way or in a, "I did it and you can too," kind of way.
unfortunately, what that means is then their students are like I took one class with this one person who did this one time and then said, 'This is the solution for all therapists.
They need to do it this way.'"
And so that's the solution that they jump to instead of examining the problem and looking at what do the shades of gray look like and how can we tailor solutions to your business.
So I have many gripes Yeah.
with the business world.
It's Yeah.
nasty.
Yeah.
I think that they do a really good job hyping people to get in like almost like a manic state of yeah, if I just keep going, if I just keep going.
But at some point when you just keep going on this thing, you're like, I'm just paying more and more subscriptions for things that aren't actually feeding me or bringing me people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a real problem, and it's because it's not super profitable as a business coach or advisor to be like, "Actually, you need to slow down," and "Don't buy my course.
Sit with yourself for a little while and think about it."
And that's often what people need is to sit still and think about it.
Most people, when they come to me and they're really overwhelmed, the first thing that they say is, "I need systems.
I need systems.
This is...
i'm really overwhelmed, and I know I need systems, and my systems are terrible."
what they actually need is to back up three steps before systems, and do a little bit of world-building, because they don't know what world they're wanting to create.
Where are the places that you want people to go? What are the borders of your world? How does it operate? What are the experiences that you want people to have within your world? many steps come before setting up tech tools and automations to support your business, and that's the easy part, Setting up the tech tools and figuring out how to link things together and automate to support you doing less busy work and administrative work in your business, that's the easy part.
The clarity and definition of "How do I design this business in a way that supports my energy, my goals, and my clients, and is a market fit for what I'm trying to do?" That's the hard part.
And that's the part that we have to do first, because otherwise folks will do what you're saying, which is just "Okay, now I need to do this thing, and I need to do this thing, and I'm gonna add on this room to the house, and I'm gonna replace the roof, without like, where do you wanna live? Like what type of life do you wanna have, so- And what kind of do you really wanna give to this business? Do you know what is you're building? Do you have capacity for that? Do you want to be fully online? Do you want to be more of an educator versus one-on-one? I see this a lot in myself and the Healers' listserv, especially with therapists, because we literally have zero business education, but we are running a hard business.
And we have all these parameters of self-disclosure and licensure The way to market suddenly gets narrow or so it can feel.
I don't think that's fully true.
and I think that stepping back, even when you're in survival mode will get you farther, ironically, than just the same fucking narrative over and over.
it's that saying slow down to speed up, and it's almost always true.
But you have to slow down and look at where you wanna go in order to get there faster, 'cause otherwise you get shiny object syndrome and you're chasing different things Or like propping people up as your guru when they don't have the lifestyle that you wanna have.
They don't have the clients that you wanna have.
They don't have any idea what it is that you're wanting to do.
What you could give a piece of advice or a little tiny don't know, like a little tiny stone for someone to put in their heart pocket, what would you offer them around everything that we've talked about? that's a hard question.
No, you can say multiple or none I think what I would say to anyone wanting to build something, whether it's a business or a community or an art practice or anything clarity is a prerequisite for discernment.
clarity can come in many different forms, but in this world where we're so full of information all the time discernment is really important.
We need to know who we wanna listen to or what inputs we wanna take in and what's right for us as we're growing or building what we wanna build.
It is very challenging to have discernment around what is right for you if you have not done the work to be clear on where you wanna go I love that.
I'm gonna put the little heart stone in my heart and keep it there.
Thank you.
I just really wanna reflect, it's been so nice talking to someone who goes where the wonder and curiosity is, So thank you for bringing that.
How can people find you? My website is smallbusiness.rodeo
and you can read more about my services there.
And I do have-- We'll put it in the show notes.
I have a free guide to simple tech stacks, which is a Notion template and a guide through thinking about what technology you're using to power your business.
And it has a business tools mega list at the bottom, which is lots of different software that I've used with different folks, you can sort it by business model, so that might be helpful for if you're looking for an idea of "What CRM do I use? What can I use to edit photos?" Whatever.
There's a bunch of different suggestions there.
But yeah, smallbusiness.rodeo,
and I do send out a weekly-ish newsletter.
I haven't the past few weeks but I'm gonna get back on the horse of sending out a weekly newsletter, which has tips and mindset shifts around building a small business with intention and not just being at the whims of the online business marketing world, Hell yes.
Fuck them.
Thank you for coming.
Goodbye for now Thank you