The Role of Community, Commitment, and Patience in Scaling your Business

In mid-march, I attended the Female Founders Day: Find Your North with Female Founders Collective. It was so refreshing to be back in person and collaborating with other bad-ass female founders (I also love all my male founder friends!).

There were so many wonderful lessons from the sessions; I wanted to put them all in a bow and talk about my takeaways and the big concepts that drilled home for me.

1. One of the main things I noticed was how powerful it was to be in a room of other women business owners. If you do not have a community – find one. It’s lonely owning a business. This surprises me because there are over 12 million small businesses in the US, which is NOT new. You don’t have to be alone. To keep this somewhat finance related – there’s a cost to your loneliness. All the lost productivity you have from feeling alone costs you something. Tie an hourly rate to that and figure it out. Find your people.

2. Know your numbers. I accidentally wandered into the bootstrapping sessions with the founder of Hedley & Bennett. Ellen’s story of how she bootstrapped for eight years and then only when she was ready took on a convertible note – was founder GOLD. Two things she said are just the best:

Once she felt like the company was getting away from her, she took it back and started redlining every single invoice every week! – do this, be like Ellen.

And then, in the end, she said to hire a fractional CFO – I’m biased, but I agree 100000%- thanks for the nudge, Ellen!

(my firm Copper8 Strategies provides fractional CFO Services!)

3. Be patient, enjoy the journey, say no, and know your values. These are all related. It is HARD to wait. Waiting sucks. I’ve been right beside clients that are waiting, waiting for revenue, waiting for funding, waiting for product market fit, waiting for roles to be filled. Not only that, but I’ve experienced this in my own business- waiting for that perfect moment when the growth will come. It’s hard. Enjoying it, saying no to things that are not aligned, and really understanding what you value is the only path. There’s no wrong goal, but once you get off track to your goal – it’s hard to recover