Small But Mighty Episode 12: Lara Wellman on building business to fit the life you want

One of the great things about Lara Wellman is that she’s a business coach who’s real. There’s no artifice or pretense in her approach to helping her clients and the community she’s spent years building. The Biz Studio is exactly what it sounds like—a place to design your business with the expert advice of someone who’s been there. In this episode, we discuss the journey Lara’s been on for over 12 years from retail to coach and why changing your focus isn’t a sign of failure.

It’s been just over 10 years since I met Lara Wellman on Twitter, and her life and business today is radically different than it was in the summer of 2010, primarily because she’s made intentional decisions about how she wants to grow her business to fit within her life. It’s the unwavering belief that a business should promote freedom, not shackle a business owner to the work, that drives the work Lara does with her clients.

You can learn more and connect with Lara on her website, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and join her community.

Full episode transcript:

Karen Wilson: Hello, my friends. Thanks for joining me again on Small But Mighty Biz Stories. Today, I'm excited to welcome my good friend, former business partner, and the woman known for having all kinds of ideas, Lara Wellman.

Lara Wellman: Hi.

Karen: Hi, Lara. Tell us about yourself.

Lara: My name is Lara and I'm a business coach. My business is called The Biz Studio and I love supporting small business owners to help them find clarity and figure out how to take action to build a business and life that they love and make more money.

Karen: Making more money is always, always nice because it helps you be more intentional about that life that you want, which is a big part of what you do with your clients. Do you want to talk about that a little bit and the whole idea behind how you build your business to fit the life you want?

Lara: Sure. I've been a business owner for over 13 years now, and I had a lot of different businesses as you alluded to. I have a lot of ideas and I take action on more than one of them at a time sometimes. As a result, I've done a lot of things in a lot of different ways. I've learned a lot of lessons around what it can mean to build a business that works for you. Maybe I'll back up just a little bit to the very beginning because it's where some of the biggest lessons around why I think it's so important to build a business around the life you want to have come from.

My very first business was a clothing store. First, it was online, it's called Apples'n'Oranges, and it was all children's clothing from Canadian based companies. Then we opened a bricks and mortar location. It didn't work out for a variety of reasons, including the fact that we opened the bricks and mortar in August of 2009. If anybody remembers what happened around that time, it was not greatest time with the economy. I also ended up getting pregnant with twins. For a bunch of reasons that business didn't work out, but I also didn't love having a store because I was working evenings.

I was working weekends. I was working through Christmas. I was working all this time that I didn't really want to be working. It was huge hours and inconvenient hours. I felt locked into something I didn't really want to be locked into. That's where so much of what I believe now is that you need to think about what you want your life to look like before you build your business. Because if I had thought about that, I never would have opened a bricks and mortar because I didn't really want that kind of lifestyle.

What I see people do instead is they think, I'm going to build a really successful business. Once I have this really successful business and put in the hard work, I've been told I have to put in really hard work and put in really a lot of hours. Once I've created the successful—whatever that means—business, then I'll build this life that I love, but it's not always conducive to it. What if you build a business that's going to help you get the life that you love from the start?

Karen: I love that because often as you and I both know, we have so many people in our circles that start businesses, you have this thing that you love and you think that the world needs it. You build a business around it, but there's often not a lot of thought to how that works. How building that out there will impact your own life. What are some of the struggles that your clients come to you to work out in their business and in their life that you help them with?

Lara: A lot of my clients—I get two kinds of clients, ones who are just trying to make more money and get up to this place. I have a lot of clients who come to me because they're working too much. It's not a matter of like, I can't find any clients. It's a matter of, I don't know how to handle the workload that I have. And I think that I need to do everything myself and I'm working these crazy hours and I'm going to burn out and I'm getting sick.

When you get to that point, you start to resent your business. You don't love it anymore. I say to people, "Nobody got into business to hate what they do every day, that's why you left a corporate job most of the time. You left the corporate job so that you wouldn't hate what you do all the time and resent it and feel like it's this heavy burden." Then you're like, "I'm going to build a thing that's going to give me more freedom." Then suddenly it's even worse.

What I love to do with people is show them that they do have freedom of choice and that they can make choices that work for them, and that sometimes working less or sometimes charging more is the easiest thing to do. It works really well. The lessons that have been hammered into us are work harder. It's more impressive if you don't need help to do it. Work isn't supposed to be fun.

All of the lessons we've been taught our whole lives, make us feel like we have to take on everything and we need to be certain kinds of people, Canadians are particularly bad at not wanting to be boastful. Then they don't want to tell people that they're good at things. They don't want to charge too much because they don't want people to think that they're greedy.

I think women, and mostly I work with women so I see this a lot, have a lot of these beliefs that come in and make it really hard for them to charge what they're worth, to set up boundaries, to get help when they need it and outsource things, get other people doing stuff that it's not all on them all the time. When they can start to learn those lessons, they end up being able to make more money, work less, and then start to enjoy their work again.

Karen: I was listening to a video with a couple of coaches recently and they were talking about how there's this societal thing where women from birth are basically conditioned to contract and men are conditioned to expand. It was something that I already inherently knew about the world at large, but it was just the way that that was said because so often the women that I work with because I mostly work with women as well, are afraid to do those things like increase their prices.

It's not just that they don't see it will work. They actually think they'll lose the clients they have. There's this real issue with women, not just owning their value, but claiming it openly and putting themselves out there and being more bold with it. It's challenging. I know I struggle with it and I know you have in the past as well in different ways.

Lara: There's so much going on there. I have a piece of artwork on my wall that says, "Don't believe everything you think." We are really good at making things difficult for ourselves. We make things difficult for ourselves and we think bad things are going to happen and we think everything's going to fall out from under us. There's a lot of conversations I have with people when they're really nervous like if I increase my prices, I'm going to lose all my business.

You're like, "But you have a waiting list. Do you think that's actually true? People only want to work with you. They will wait to work with you no matter what you've ever asked them for money, they want to work with you. Do you really think if you increase your pricing again, they're all going to disappear?" Is that actually true when you think about it a little bit logically and it's not? It's not true.

We have to ask ourselves that question. We all have big feelings and emotions and beliefs and fears that come into it. I'm not saying that's bad. We have that but we do need sometimes when that big fear pops up, to ask ourselves if it's true, because I think there's this tendency now to tell people to follow their intuition, which I think is good, but the other thing is, sometimes people think fear is assigned from their intuition to not do things. That's not the same thing. Fear comes up, getting uncomfortable is part of growth.

What is it, I've heard that basically life starts at the end of your comfort zone. When you go past what feels comfortable and you get uncomfortable, that's when big change happens. It's okay if it feels uncomfortable. That's not a sign that you're on the wrong path, but we've started to confuse that with following your intuition that this is a bad idea.

Karen: I think one of the things that we don't often think about is that there's pushing the boundaries of your comfort zone. And then there's a terror zone. We don't want to be in the terror zone, but you definitely do want to push outside your comfort zone because that is where the real growth happens. No one's saying you need to get into that terror zone because the terror zone doesn't feel safe and it isn't necessarily going to spur growth.

When you're talking about intuition and listening to what you think or believing what you think. I love how Brené Brown talks about it and “the stories you tell yourself.” She talks about the whole idea of those stories. I know that I have had a tendency to tell myself this story, that I'm not an entrepreneur. There's even a blog post somewhere on the interwebs that says, "Oh, I'm not an entrepreneur, so I'm not going to do this anymore." And here I am today.

Lara: I think partially bigger words scare people. It's like committing to something that they're worried that they're going to either fail at or maybe that they're going to succeed at. I have a huge fear of success that I've realized is my bigger hurdle than fear of failure, but either way, both things become true. Words like “entrepreneur,”—I did this poll once where I asked people: Do you consider yourself a freelancer, a business owner, an entrepreneur, or a CEO. Almost everybody picks business owner and my theory around why so few would ever pick CEO is because that sounds like it's going to be hard. It sounds like it's a bigger commitment than they're ready for. It sounds like people would expect more of them than they want to give, but that wasn't true.

Karen: Yet, if you go and look at a job description of a CEO, they're probably already doing that job.

Lara: Absolutely. An expert is another one. There are all kinds of people who I consider to be massive experts who are like, "I just know some stuff. I'm not an expert." I'm like, "No, you're an expert." "No, no, no. I just know something." Even if you were an expert but the idea of claiming expert makes them feel really uncomfortable because what if somebody tells them they're wrong? What if somebody who has more experience comes to them and says, "You think you're an expert, I'm an expert." All of the fear of what that word means stops you from claiming who you can be.

Karen: I remember years ago there was all this controversy about people who self-proclaimed expertise and “guru” and “ninja” and all these words that were basically the thesaurus list of alternate terms for expert. Susan Murphy wrote a really interesting article about it. One of the things that she said was that an expert isn't someone who isn't still learning. An expert actually really is interested in the topic they are an expert in, and they're looking for new information about it all the time.

That I think actually helped me change my view of what an expert is and be more okay with being called an expert because I am still learning. I know more than the average bear about marketing and I can actually use that knowledge to gain more knowledge and then help my clients do marketing more effectively in their business.

Lara: I think that's an important conversation in so many different aspects of business and life. Your goal is not to have arrived. I think we all think, "That's when we're going to feel like we've arrived. Then it's going to feel like I'm there, I did the thing"—especially entrepreneurs. There is no end because no matter how high the heights you get to, you're going to get a new idea and you're going to want to do something different and it's going to keep growing.

Really, the only arrived that I can think of is having retired, but even then it's like the end of life. When am I going to be done learning? When am I going to be done growing? I never want to be done. If you think about it that way, if I had never planned to be done growing, but I feel I can't share my wisdom until I've done learning, then I'm never going to be able to share what I've learned. I think that I've learned a lot of things that are worth sharing in the world.

Karen: Absolutely. Let's go back to Apples'n'Oranges. You opened the brick-and-mortar store in the middle of a recession. Exciting times.

Lara: Right before that economy. It was just a couple of weeks before.

Karen: I feel that because I decided to leave the corporate world right before a pandemic. Fortunately, it's gone well, but how'd you come to the decision to shutter Apples'n'Oranges, and where did you go from there?

Lara: I said, I got pregnant with twins. At the time I thought if I have a children's clothing store and I have one new baby, I can just bring the baby to work and I cannot do that with two babies. It just became too many different things. We decided to shut it down. Then I did mom stuff for a while. Here we go. We've got a little bit of a story that leads right to you, Karen.

Karen: True.

Lara: In 2009, and right as the store was closing, I feel, is when somebody convinced me to try Twitter again. I had tried Twitter a couple of times and I was like, "I don't get it. It's dumb. I don't like it." Then the third time I tried, it was when I was pregnant with twins and I was like, "Oh, I love this." I just figured it out. It was when—this was 11 years ago, 12 years ago, a long time, it's so weird.

It was 12 years ago and I learned the Twitter was a place that you could have conversations and it's a place that you could meet people. As I had the twins and I was really building this, so over the course of a year, I just really spent a lot of time connecting with people, loving Twitter, and realizing that it was this thing that people should know. I was like, "More people need to know about this." My background before I ever had a business at all was in marketing communications.

Gosh, I could just keep jumping back. Plus, my online experience started way before the internet. I've been having conversations with people online for 30 years. I did a Twitter workshop at a local coffee shop and I was like, "Who wants to learn how this works?" I'm going to get mixed up on the timelines.

Karen: You're going a little bit ahead.

Lara: I can't remember which came first, but I remember teaching people about Twitter. I remember I had a blog. There were all these different pieces. Then I met you on Twitter.

Karen: You had Apples'n'Oranges and then you started Kids in the Capital.

Lara: Kids in the Capital I started when the twins were one. That was in 2010.

Karen: We met a few months after Kids in the Capital started and we decided to start our own thing together because you had an idea.

Lara: Because I had a lot of them.

Karen: You do. We started a community blog called Losing it in Ottawa. Then about six months later you were like, "I have another idea."

Lara: There you go. See, I mixed up the timeline.

Karen: You gathered a group of us together and said, "I want to start a conference."

Lara: Right. Because I met you on Twitter. We didn't meet in real life and then start talking on Twitter. You and I met on Twitter. Then we started Losing it in Ottawa and we committed to it before ever having met in person.

Karen: That's right.

Lara: Then I was going to conferences. I went to a conference in New York City and I went to a conference in Toronto because I wanted to learn all the things about social media and blogging. I was like, "Why do I have to leave Ottawa to do this? Why do we not have a conference here?" I pulled together a bunch of my Twitter friends and I said, "Should we do a conference?" They said, "Okay".

Karen: And we did.

Lara: And we did for four years.

Karen: For four years. Out of that conference came a partnership—actually, you started your own consulting business and that's where you were doing the Twitter workshops.

Lara: I was doing social media strategies, and I knew that you had a marketing background and so sometimes I would ask you for input. Here's the story I tell all the time, the very first social media strategy I sold, I sold for $200. The very same product by the time I stopped doing social media strategies was like $3,500, the same thing. That is one of my big examples about price. I sold it for $200, sold the same thing for $3,500.

The person who got it for $200 got a really kick-ass deal, but that's all I was comfortable with then. Then I kept increasing the price and kept feeling more confident and kept realizing that that was not enough money for what I was doing and it grew. I would ask you for advice and then we just partnered for real.

Karen: For about three years, we were business partners, and we ran the conference together. Then you decided you wanted to go in a different direction. Talk about that shift?

Lara: This was after we had stopped working together and I really liked creating community. I really like supporting people. One of the most common things that had happened for me was whenever I did marketing jobs, so people would come to me and they say, "I need a communication strategy, I need a marketing strategy."

Then I would ask them all the questions you're supposed to ask people, when you do a marketing strategy, like, what do you sell? Who is this for? What are you trying to achieve in your business? They thought they knew, but they did not know. They did not know enough for me to write a good strategy. They really needed to understand their own business, their own plans, their own goals, their own products better to have a good marketing strategy.

There's two choices for a marketing expert.

Karen: Amen, sister.

Lara: There's two ways to go at that point. The marketing person has to either say, "You're not ready for me", or they say, "I'm going to go off marketing tasks and I'm going to help you figure out what you do." I started to do that a little bit and I was like, "I love this." I love helping you figure out, what do you even do? I know you think you're a marketing person, but for what? For who? What do you want to do? What do you love to do? Stop telling me you'll do anything for anybody who has money, stop it.

I started to wade into that a little bit and I loved it so much that I was like that this is what I'm going to do. If people need marketing support, I still have all the knowledge, I'll help you with that. Mostly I want to help people figure out what it is that they're doing, help them figure out what it is that they're selling, help them figure out how to run their business so that it feels good and so that they feel more confident, that they have somebody who is helping them see how good they are at what they do, like how much potential they have so that they stop staying as small as their brain is telling them they should probably stay.

Karen: It's interesting because I remember, we've had so many conversations about goals and visions and things like that over the years. When we first started working together, I was so enmeshed in the corporate world that I had such a block in seeing even a year down the road, what I wanted things to look like. I'm sure you remember what that was like. It was a little challenging, because you had that longer-term vision and I was just like, "I don't know. I can't see what the world looks like in this new way.”

That has really shifted for me in a way. I think it was one of the reasons that I was able to get back to doing a business in a more intentional way and actually leave the corporate world behind because I was like, "Oh, okay, I can do this. I can absolutely do this." Whereas I didn't necessarily believe in myself before. That's a big shift and I'm sure you see that a lot with clients you're working with.

Lara: Absolutely. Even for me back then, I think that maybe in some ways I did, but other ways I didn't, because I have so many ideas and I have so many things that I want to do that I struggle to imagine how I'm supposed to commit to anything for a long period of time. For years I struggled with what is planning supposed to look like because I'm just going to change my mind and then I'm going to have to start all over. I had to, and I've done a lot of work on this in the last four years, unpack all of the stuff that I believe about what things are supposed to look like and even just down to the idea that a pivot isn't a failure.

Let's say that if I thought that having a marketing communications business and now being a business coach was somehow a failure on the marketing side versus a leaning and a pivot into something I love more and then continuing on in my journey, that would suck. But a lot of people feel that way. They're like, "I said I wanted to do a thing, and if I don't follow through, I failed," versus, "I'm changing things. I can have a plan, I can start to see what direction I want to go in, but I'm not locked into anything. I can change my mind."

Karen: I actually recently wrote a blog post that sort of discussed this because as a business owner, you are doing things all the time that you learn lessons from. I was mentioning to you on our pre-chat that this year has been a lot of lessons learned for me. There have been things that I'm like, "Yes, this is good, want more of this." Then there have been some things that I've done that I look back at now and I go, "I really wish I had not done that to myself."

When you make the commitment, you have a contract and you need to move forward with it, it's better to go ahead and follow through. I think that the follow-through can be tricky in two ways, there's the follow-through on the ideas like you were talking about, you're just going to change your mind or whatever. Sometimes it's a good idea and you really want to follow through on it and something's blocking you, something doesn't work out. Then there's those ideas where it's a good idea, it's just not the right idea, and doing the follow-through makes no sense. We haven't been very good at giving ourselves permission to recognize that and choose the right path.

Lara: I send an email to all my clients every Friday and it asks them to reflect back on their week. One of the things I ask them to do is, tell me what's gone well? What have you done? What are your wins? Because number one, people forget to notice what they've done well because they're so stressed out by all the things they haven't done yet. That's one thing. Another thing I asked them to do every week is, is there something that you've realized this week you don't want to do anymore? Every week, just spend a little bit of timing like, is there a thing you hated?

Now, maybe some of those things, you're going to have to do in some capacity still, but is there something you can do to start thinking about doing it in a different way? What do you not want to do anymore? That's where just because you're good at a thing doesn't mean you have to do it. Just because somebody offered to pay you for a thing, doesn't mean you have to do it. Just because you're taking a contract doing a thing, if you hate it doesn't mean you have to keep doing it that way.

Karen: That's true.

Lara: Giving yourself permission to start realizing that you can stop doing things you don't like and finding new and different ways to do it is an important piece. Sometimes you are going to have to do bookkeeping. I have to do at least some of that on my own, and I'm not going to love it, but I can also outsource some of it. I can also learn how to do it in a way that makes me not hate it. I can do it with an accountability partner and then it's fun. What is the different way I can do something instead of feeling like the only option is to keep powering through stuff we hate?

Karen: I remember when we were partners—that decision we made to hire a VA, I resisted it so hard. I was like, "We don't make enough money for me to be even in the business full time, then we want to pay somebody else." It was the best thing we did. And when I started to need help, earlier this year, I didn't even hesitate to hire someone. And I did have one of those—I'm in a mastermind. My mastermind group basically said to me about my—they knew I was launching a podcast. I said, "I just got to figure out how to edit this thing." They're like, "Hire someone, stop thinking you have to do it all." I was like, "All right, fine."

Again, it's one of those things that I would love to know how to do it myself but it's not a good use of my time. It's not my genius work and it's not something that makes me money. So, why would I spend my time doing that?

Lara: I know you. I know that you have the skill set to learn how to do it and do it just fine. Even more importantly, that is not a good use of your time and you don't want to.

Karen: Yes, exactly. I mentioned all of that to say that it's not a lesson you learn once. It's a lesson you learn as a business owner over and over and over again. The more mindful you can become of what are the most valuable things that I can spend my time on as a business owner, what is going to expand my business and not contract it? That's the key thing is being mindful of those things and making decisions from a place of wisdom about what you really want. It all goes to being intentional about how you build your business.

Lara: You said a couple of things that I think are important. One is that you have to learn lessons multiple times, but also your mastermind. Having somebody, having some people who you can have discussions with that are not in your brain. Because when you think things through, you think that you're being very logical, and you've thought through all of stuff, but all of those beliefs we are talking about, all those things that get in your way, are playing a part in how you're thinking about it in your head.

Until you get it out of your head, even if you're just journaling it, but I think it's really good to talk to a mastermind, a business buddy, a coach, that's what I do for my clients, is to have that reflected back at you. I was struggling with some things in the summer. I was like, a couple of people or just coach yourself, what would you do if you were coaching somebody? I was like, "Yes-"

Karen: That's hard to do.

Lara: It's not. I couldn't do it. I ended up having a session and I was like, by 20 minutes in, I was like, "There it is. Thank you." You just need somebody who knows how to listen and help reflect back to you. Nothing that this coach did, nothing that I do, not nothing, it depends. There's the two pieces as a coach, but what she did. She was just saying to me all the things I say to my clients all the time. There was nothing that I didn't know that came up in that conversation. I just needed to get it out of my brain and have somebody help me interpret it from a different point of view.

The other piece is that sometimes it takes time. I've had clients come back to me two years after we discussed a strategy that they could implement, but they really didn't want to. They're like, "Ah." There's a whole bunch of yeah, buts that came up as we talked about it. "Yeah, but that would work for other people, but not for me. Yeah, but in my case, that's not going to work because--" I'm like, "Okay, I think you're wrong. I think this would really help you." Then two years later, I'll get a message and be like, "I finally did the thing that we talked about, and it was really good. I just wasn't ready before."

It's okay if that takes time. I get that all the time. "I think I remember you've been telling me this for three years. It's finally clicking." Give yourself some grace, give yourself some time to know that. Just because you know a thing, just because you've heard a thing, just because it didn't work the first time doesn't mean it's not going to start working.

Karen: You can have a second to kick yourself for not doing something sooner, but then you need to let it go. There's no sense dwelling on it because you made the decision you made. You just got to move on. Then it's good to keep that in mind. That's the whole mindful part of how you're building your business is thinking about those lessons learned, when the next similar situation comes along, so that you can take that other thing you learned and apply it.

Lara: That's what I'm talking about when it comes to growth. We never stop growing. We're going to grow in all kinds of different ways at different times. I don't know if this happens to you, it happens to me. "I figured it out, this is what I want. This is the big dream." Then the next minute I'm like, "I'm so irritated, I am not there yet. It's going to be hard." From the minute I fully realized what I want, then I'm frustrated I'm not there yet.

I know how to talk myself through that now but there's that piece of like, it takes time. It's just like, it can be fast but also don't expect it to be fast. It can be easy but don't expect it to always be easy. It's not a binary, it's not an either, or. It can be easy in so many more ways than you think it can but trust me, sometimes it's going to be hard. I am not promising unicorns and rainbows every minute of every day. There are parts that are not going to be fun but also, I promise you, if you look too, there are more things that can be easier than you're making them. All of these pieces, it's not an either, or. It's going to be faster than you think it can be in some ways, but don't beat yourself up if it's not fast.

Karen: I think that we were talking about something before we got started about building things in your business. You can be like me, who can tend to over plan things. Then you can be like you Lara, where you're like, "Let's just do the thing and get it done." Because perfect is the enemy of done because it's never going to be perfect. I actually say that to myself a lot. I've actually said it to other business owners, where, "It's okay, go ahead with it." I have lots of things in my business that, "I'm going to go ahead with it. It's not perfect but it was a big process for me to get there and be okay with things not being just so."

Lara: It's really easy to not do things because they're not right yet but if you don't start, you're definitely not going to do it.

Karen: It's true.

Lara: There are a lot of things that happen like that. Maybe I'll go back to an example with you and I. When we were partnering, we wanted to do this big online program, and we paid somebody to do a logo for it, and to design a whole website for it. It was such a big project for a small business. We decided that we wanted the Lamborghini when we were still riding a bicycle, next step from our bicycle-

Karen: We couldn't even afford the down payment on the Lamborghini.

Lara: That big project with the beautiful logo and the web design went nowhere. Then one day, I was like, "You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to launch a course and it's going to be--" I just sold it I think by telling people with an email, and then it was delivered by email. There were no videos, there's no membership site, there was nothing, I was just like, "I am just going to do something."

Since then, I've learned and I've changed and I've done more complex. I've often gone back to the simple because it actually is less complicated for everybody involved. I still am not at a Lamborghini level. Thinking you have to do that super big, fancy thing that it's going to look professional and it's going to make sure that it's done right. I don't know if you hear people saying, "I want to do it right this time. I want to do it right." There's nothing wrong with something simple.

Karen: Well, and something that I learned from you, although this phrasing was not yours, but recently I heard it from somebody who said, just launch it dirty and then fix it over time. Launch it, it's getting it done so that you can start to tweak something is an okay thing to do.

Maybe not if you are building something that requires safety, but if there's no potential life-threatening risks involved, perfect is not necessary.

Lara: I'm going to use one of those sayings that I always get wrong. I think it's putting lipstick on a pig. Is that the way that's saying goes?

Karen: Yes, that's the one.

Lara: The point is, with what we do for the most part, making it pretty makes no difference as to whether or not the knowledge is correct. I even did a video recently. It was a 15-second video of me lying on my couch, telling everybody that it's okay if you don't have makeup on when you tell people how to do a thing because you still know how to do the thing without makeup on.

I can record a quick video, lying on my couch, telling you how to do a thing and it is as true as it would be if I had my ring light and my makeup on. Is it better for me to do it that way or not at all? Which is basically the options at that point. Part of it depends on your brand. My brand is a little bit “hot messy” but that's what I think my people like.

Karen: Well, and I think that having someone out there with your brand is so important because perfection hasn't really helped us as a society. It actually speaks to your values, which is another thing that I wanted to bring into the conversation because part of building an intentional business is also knowing what you stand for and being able to operate your business in a way that doesn't compromise those values.

How does that come out for you in your business? How has that evolved for you over time in the various different business iterations that you've had?

Lara: Well, a lot of what it's been has been being comfortable in being more me. The more me that I am and the less—if you think back, I'm a '70s kid and then I came up and started working in offices in the ’90s and early 2000s.

There was still that air of “professional.” Everything was written in this third person and you write it very professional sounding and corporate sounding, all of that stuff, which is a thing that we have had to unlearn as we start to be authentically us.

Don't talk about politics or religion. That's a thing I'm sure people have heard. Never talk about politics or religion because you might cause controversy. Except that I'm going to talk about it because if you have different values than me, it's okay if you go away.

I don't want to try to be this generic person. I am me and I will talk about LGBTQ rights and I will talk about Black Lives Matter, and I will talk about what I believe to be important to indigenous issues and I will talk about motherhood and I will talk about the—for me, one of the things I think people appreciate and that a lot of people would have thought shocking a bunch of years ago, is that I'll tell you when things are going badly.

I'll tell you when I hate my business some days. I'll tell you when I'm overwhelmed because I've got too much stuff going on with my kids. I'll tell you that I’ve been sick. I'll tell you—I got really sick last year and I talked about it and I had an ADHD diagnosis a few years ago. I'm like, "Hey, I'm going to tell you about this."

In other days old, you'd be like, "No, you keep that private. That's private stuff." I don't know if I've gone off topic a little bit, but the whole point is the more you, you are, the more you let people see who you are, the more perfect clients show up.

It is so amazing to work with people that you really connect with. When you share who you are in that bigger way, the right people show up and the wrong people don't. I love that. Talking about who you are and sharing the real pieces of you from your values, what you believe into who you are is not a bad thing.

Even if it means, this goes to the marketing topic of getting clear on your ideal client, because people are so afraid that if they pick one client they're losing out on everybody else but when you're really clear, those people are like, "Her."

The amount of people who come to me and say, "I wanted to talk to you because I think you're going to understand me." They wouldn't know that if I hadn't shared enough of me and how I feel about things for them to see themselves in it.

Karen: It's interesting. I think a lot of that does speak to your values though, because you have this core value of being unashamedly authentic and in putting things out there that aren't necessarily the norm that really should be, like why should anybody hide that they’ve had health issues? Why should they hide mental health issues? Why should they hide their sexuality and all these?

Obviously, some of those things create safety issues, but it shouldn't. Just being really genuine and you and I share this desire to speak out about things like that—anti-racism and all of this that so many people are starting to pick up on and learn more about.

It makes me feel safer as a businessperson to speak out about those things because if it deters someone who doesn't share those values from coming to work with me, I'm okay with that. I don't necessarily want to work with someone who doesn't believe in equality for all people, because why would I help them be more successful when they don't want that?

I would like to help businesses that want that, so they can actually build that in their business as part of their own values. That's very much a value that I hold. I think that's too important to me to compromise it by working with someone who doesn't share it.

Lara: That’s the other belief or the saying or whatever you want to call it, that the customer is always right. They're not.

Karen: They're really not.

Lara: They're not always right. How many times have you heard that? How is it shocking that business owners think that they have to do whatever the client wants and do whatever anybody asks them to do because that is how you run a business. You do the customer's always right, and they are not.

Karen: It’s true. It's very, very true. You and I ran into some situations with the odd customer. It was rare, but it's not fun to be in that situation where you have to push back on the customer, but sometimes it is necessary.

Lara: Boundaries are important in all aspects of our lives. I really believe that they are good for everybody involved. They're good for us, but they're good for other people. They're good for your children, they're good for your spouse, they're good for your clients. The more clarity, the more boundaries that are the more everybody does what they're supposed to do well.

We need to stop thinking that if it's the customer's always right, or whatever other philosophy it is that makes us think that we have to do anything and everything to keep people happy or we're making a mistake in our business.

That's what I think people think they have to go to the ends of the earth and go over and above all the time. If you go over and above all the time, you’re going to run out of anything to give anybody. That's the thing. Is if you give everybody too much and then you run out of your own anything, then nobody's going to get your help anymore.

Karen: Yes, it's a recipe for burnout and hating your business.

Lara: I just want people to love their businesses. Figuring out what it is that you can do that feels good, that works well, that is not the stuff you don't want to be doing. If you don't want to write reports anymore, how are you going to re-imagine your business so that isn't a thing you have to do. It's okay to not want to do a thing.

Karen: Well, that's an interesting thing that you say, Lara. Why would you bring that example up?

Lara: I do not like writing reports, Karen. I didn't understand so much why back when you and I were still business partners. My ADHD diagnosis helped me understand so much more about it, but the-- I can write a really good report but it takes me a really long time because I spend a whole bunch of time not wanting to do it, really not wanting to do it.

A huge amount of wasted time not doing the thing I am perfectly capable of doing, but don't want to do it right now. The amount of angst and worry and stress and I don't want to do feelings would eat up huge chunks of my life when I was supposed to be writing these reports.

When you and I did communication strategies, we adapted and we came up with a strategy where I did the interviewing and a lot of the brainstorming, and then you and I would have a conversation, brainstorm some more, and then you wrote the report, and it was beautiful because I hated the report. Hated it.

Now, in my business, I don't send-- I know my own limits. I will do a strategy session with a person and I do all kinds of things with big papers and post-its and up on the wall and big ideas and I send them all the pictures and you have a recording of our conversation if we did it on Zoom, but I am not going to write you a report, I'm not going to write you a recap because if I'm going to forget or it's going to take me a long time or I'm going to be really grouchy about it.

That's not how I do things anymore. I built it so that it works for me and for the clients who want to work with me.

Karen: I think that's really important and I've actually shifted the way I work so much from back when we were working together. I don't do the big conversation and brainstorm once anymore.

I get together with my clients and we talk through every aspect of their strategy because otherwise, they don't fully absorb everything that I'm talking about because you can hand somebody—and we learned this—you can hand somebody a really kick-ass strategy and it becomes a dust collector because they don't know how to take action on it. Even with an action plan, sometimes I've seen them turn into dust collectors and it's sad because it's not cheap.

Lara: It was one of my biggest frustrations. I hated it so much. I'd be like, "You love this plan. You and I talked about it." Then, they're like, "I didn't do it." They're like, "It didn't not work. You didn't do it."

Karen: I get it because I try very hard to walk the talk and we used to talk about that all the time, if we're going to tell people to do these things, we need to be doing it ourselves. I've tried to continue that on my own and it's not easy. I don't have—I'm going to shamefully admit—I don't have a marketing strategy for my business outside of my head.

And I need to but it's not been that priority, although it's on my list to do and actually, I'm working on it already but it's just… One of the things that we talked about earlier is how you needed a coaching session because you can't coach yourself.

Well, I hire marketing help because I can't see things the same way myself about my business that I see in other people's businesses. The clarity just isn't there. You're too close to it.

Lara: Yes, and that's why my assistant and I will have like a three-hour session or when old times when we did it in person, sometimes a full day with a lunch where it would be just her pulling everything out of my brain because again, just like me, you know this stuff, it's not a matter of not knowing it. It's just that it needs to be taken out of your brain and it's hard to prioritize that stuff sometimes when it means just sitting down and doing it.

You're going to sit down and do it for a client because they're paying you. I run these accountability sessions online and the people are like, "I don't understand why this works." Because all it is a two-and-a-half-hour session, people come on Zoom, they tell me what they're going to do. An hour and a half later, I say, "Did you do it?" They'll say, "I did some of it?"

Then, an hour later, I'm like, "Did you do the rest of it?" They say, "Yes." They're like, "Why did that work?" The rule with the accountability sessions is that you're supposed to do not client work. You're supposed to do the stuff that you've been putting off, not the stuff that you know you're going to do anyway.

All of those things on your list, the important but non-urgent things like writing a marketing strategy, you come on the calls and you're like, "I'm going to spend two and a half hours doing this thing I've been putting off." Then at the end of the two and half hours, when I'm like, "Did you do it?" And you're like, "No." You feel guilty so you do it.

Karen: I think that is probably the biggest problem that businesses have is that they don't prioritize the important, they always prioritize the urgent and there's always something more urgent going on than the important stuff.

It's one of the things that, yes, I don't have a marketing strategy, but I've done a lot of important work this year. I am not beating myself up over the marketing strategy yet, but it's one of those things that I will prioritize because I know that if I don't have that in place, it will impact my business because that's what I see with my clients.

It's exactly what I see with my clients and I don't want to fall into that trap of not having that strategic foundation in place for where I want to go and what I want to do.

Lara: Sometimes if you need to put an accountability piece in place, promise somebody else that you'll do it, pay your assistant to do it with you, whatever it is, come to an accountability session when you put in an extra layer, because this is again, it's a shame thing.

People are like, "I shouldn't need to do that to just get stuff done." Great. Maybe you shouldn't, but you do. Instead of being mad at yourself that you need an extra layer of accountability to get stuff done, because it's easy to get distracted or to move on to client work, what are you going to put into place that will work?

This is that piece that I talk to my clients about all the time. Instead of fighting what you think you should do, instead, look for what works. People will say, "I want to do a thing." Let's take the marketing plan as an example, and I'll say, "Okay, so what are you going to do that's going to be different to get it done?"

Then, you would say, if you were a typical conversation they have, "This time I'm just going to do it." I'm like, "Are you? Why are you just going to do it this time instead of the 20 times, you said you would do it before?"

What are you going to do that's a little bit different that's going to help you actually take action? Just change it because if you're just going to beat yourself up because you didn't just do it, obviously that's not working. What's the plan?

If you don't do it by X date, you're going to hire somebody else. If you don't do it by X date, you owe your friend 50 bucks. What is it that you're going to put in there that makes it a little bit easier to not think of it the same way. You need to change something to move forward and through it.

Karen: I've done a couple of programs and had calls with people recently and they've said, "Okay, there is this thing that you need to take action on, what date are you going to take action I want you to email me and let me know." I love when people do that. I like deadlines. I thrive with deadlines. As long as I can't ignore them because I'm really, really good at ignoring deadlines I set for myself, but when it's someone else who sets the deadline, I don't want to let them down.

Lara: That's true for me. For some people, it's great. They're like, "Just put it in your calendar and there's a deadline in your calendar and that's when it's due." I was like, "Look it. I know it's made up. I made it up. I know it's made up. I did it." I can just as easily make up a reason as to not do it now."

Letting yourself-- I need deadlines, I need to be accountable to other people a lot of the time. Sometimes I need to pay money for me to feel like it was worthwhile. Sometimes I just need to feel really like somebody else is going to think I sucked if I didn't do it and so I'm going to play to what works for me.

My clients, when they tell me that they're going to do a thing and I ask them what date they're going to do it, they'll be like, "Oh, you're really calling me on it now." I'm like, "I know. You just said you wanted to do it. When's it going to be done by?" Let's do it for real.

Karen: It's just a way to help you prioritize it more effectively for yourself because you know it's important already. You know it's something you want to do. If you can get that help to make it happen, why not?

Lara: You'll hear people say, "She did it by herself. She didn't need anybody to help her. Isn't it amazing?" I really want to push back on the idea that it is impressive to have done something alone. It is impressive to me if you found people to help you so that you didn't have to struggle and hurt and you got to the end result faster. That's impressive.

I am not going to say I'm not impressed with people who got out of things and figured things out on their own but that is not the goal. If you can find a way to get support and ask for help and do all the things you dreamed of in a fraction of the time, how is that not impressive?

Karen: Well, I think this goes back to one of your basic why in life is building community. That's something that you've done in every single way since you started in business. It's a real strength of yours, too.

So, it's no wonder to me that you would feel strongly that having a community to help support each other, it's like a rising tide raises all boats. I might've gotten that wrong.

Lara: I know what you mean.

Karen: Yes, but it's that whole idea that we can support each other and all benefit together and I love that. I love that idea of-- Especially because it's very near and dear to my heart, women helping women and just having a community of friendship and support that makes us all better.

Lara: That's good.

Karen: It's a lovely thing. What an amazing conversation. Is there anything that you have going on in the Biz Studio that you would like to promote to the audience?

Lara: I would. I have my quarterly planning day, which is happening in December. This is a way for people to come and spend a day with me on Zoom and really commit to taking that time to thinking about their business.

What have you done that's worked? What do you not want to do anymore? What do you actually want to focus on moving forward? Then, maybe we can even talk about an action plan, but first you need to know what you're trying to go towards. I'm doing that on December 11th and I would love to share that with your audience.

Karen: I am doing that on December 11th as well which is actually one of the reasons I know my marketing strategy is coming because I've already done a little bit of work on that already but I'm excited about the planning day because I think I just need to have that day set aside and this forces me to do it.

The thing is this, the day costs—how much? $197, I think, which is like peanuts for a planning day. The value you can get out of having a group of people around to bounce ideas off of and keep you on track is worth so much more than that. I highly encourage anybody who needs to sit down and think and plan. You also have another event coming up after that one.

Lara: I have the holiday jingle-jangle. Is that what you're talking about?

Karen: Yes.

Lara: Tracy Noble and I have put together a virtual holiday party because COVID and we wanted to make sure that we did something a little bit fun. I really wanted to make sure that what we did was not just another-- As I'm hearing people have Zoom fatigue. I don't want to just like, "Uh, Zoom." We're doing some fun and different stuff. There's going to be a talent show.

Karen: Awesome.

Lara: That's right. It's very important for me in all my events to make sure that it is introvert and extrovert friendly. We have options for everybody to be as extroverted or introverted as they would like.

Karen: I like it a lot. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

Lara: Thank you for having me.

Karen: Oh, can you tell everyone how to find you?

Lara: Yes, absolutely. You can find me. My website is thebiz.studio, so www.thebiz.studio. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram and all the places. I am dabbling on TikTok, even.

Karen: Oh, really?

Lara: It's a lot of fun. I'm not very good at it yet but that's what I'm doing because it's fun and I like to do things that are fun. I have a free Facebook community. If you come-- It's called Building Your Next-Level Biz but if you go to my website or my Facebook page, you can find the link to it there, or maybe some on your show notes.

Karen: We will definitely share all the links in the show notes so that people can find you easily. Thank you again for coming on and I hope that you have a fantastic holiday. I'm sure I will see you around.

Lara: Sounds good. Thank you.