I was consulting for a client recently, talking about her thriving (yet very new) business, when she confessed something I’d not imagined she’d been battling with.
It’s the same thing that so many small business owners deal with, and it happens after the self-employment honeymoon has faded and the excitement turns into routine… It’s when you have to do the real grunt work of building something from the ground up. Some months are encouraging, others are not, and some are brutal. She wondered if maybe she should return to corporate life – not forever – but just part-time as a consultant, until the business feels more stable.
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone say this, and I doubt it will be the last because in theory, it’s not a bad idea is it? Years ago an artist friend shared advice her mentor gave her that stayed with me. She encouraged her to get a “real job” while she built her artistic career because, as she explained, creativity flourishes when fear isn’t sitting beside you every day.
If your rent is paid, your groceries are covered, and your bills aren’t keeping you awake at night, you’re free to create because you’re no longer creating from a place of desperation.
There’s a lot of wisdom in that. I don’t dismiss her advice for a second – financial pressure can shrink our imagination if we aren’t driven by hardships (few are), and many extraordinary artists, writers, and entrepreneurs built their dream while another job supported them in the background. This is also true if you’re single and have no partner to lean on during the hard times or you have a partner but he’s unemployed, or if you have kids to look after.
I find that philosophy very good… I really do. There’s so much wisdom in taking enough pressure off yourself financially that your creativity has room to breathe, and I’d never criticize someone for working another job while they build something meaningful because, for many people, it’s exactly the right decision.
I’ve discovered over the years that once I leave something behind, I rarely go back. In fact, the harder life becomes, the more determined I am to keep moving forward. I don’t like reopening old chapters simply because they’re familiar. I want to know what’s waiting in the next one.
I feel this way about places, too. I would never move back to Boston, even though I loved growing up there. I wouldn’t move back to any of the other states I’ve lived in either. Those places shaped me, gave me memories, taught me lessons, and helped me become the person I am today, but that’s exactly why I don’t need to return to them. They served their purpose. They prepared me for wherever life was taking me next.
The same has been true throughout my life. I don’t make big decisions impulsively. If I leave a job, a relationship, a city, or a chapter of my life, it’s usually after months of thinking, questioning, worrying, and trying to convince myself to stay. By the time I finally make the decision, I’ve already done the emotional work. I’ve learned to trust that version of myself because she thought about it far longer than the version of me who might later become lonely, nostalgic, or afraid.
I learned this lesson in my twenties after the end of my first serious relationship. We’d been together for seven years, and ending it was one of the hardest decisions I’d ever made. I cried more than I thought possible, questioned myself, and wondered if I was making the biggest mistake of my life. Then, after we’d broken up and I had started dating someone else, he appeared at my door one Sunday morning with roses, dressed in a suit, and asked me to marry him.
Instead of saying no immediately, I told him I’d think about it. We agreed to meet for dinner a few days later to talk.
During that dinner, he looked at me and said something I’ve never forgotten.
“If you really wanted to marry me,” he said, “you would have said yes the moment I asked, which is why I’ve decided now that we shouldn’t actually get married at all.”
He was right. My gut had already made the decision months earlier. Fear, nostalgia, and familiarity had simply tried to convince me to question it. My hesitation was my answer. He married someone else and so did I. I never once regretted leaving him. I’ve never once wanted him back.
I’ve carried that lesson with me ever since. Going back has never made me happier. It has only ever made me feel as though I was settling because I was afraid to discover what might happen if I kept moving forward instead.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve never wanted to build my future by looking over my shoulder at my past.
As my client and I continued talking, I asked her, “What do you think consulting is going to give you?”. She answered almost immediately. “Stability.”
I’m not entirely convinced consulting is as stable as we often imagine it to be. Especially here in Germany at this moment when the economy sucks. Companies reduce budgets, projects disappear, contracts end, clients change direction. This has happened to me a lot. Consultants are hired, and consultants are the first to lose their jobs when a company has to slim down. Stability isn’t guaranteed simply because someone else signs your paycheck for a few months. What she was really searching for wasn’t stability at all. She wanted certainty, and certainty is something entrepreneurship has never promised any of us. It has honestly never been promised to any human being. We learn this as we grow and age and mature.
“The only certainty is that nothing is certain,” is a quote I often refer to in these moments.
The more we talked, the more I realized she was looking everywhere for her answer except at the exact place where the answer already existed. INSIDE OF HER.
So I asked her another question, “Why are you looking for another company to consult for?”
She paused.
That’s when I said, “Why don’t you consult for yourself?”
There was a silence, and I could almost hear the idea settling into place.
Because here’s what I know about consultants. They don’t walk into a company on Monday morning questioning whether they’re qualified enough to offer advice, and they don’t become emotionally attached to every decision they make or interpret every setback as a personal failure. They arrive with curiosity, experience, objectivity, and a job to do. They thrive on building something and seeing the results from that hard work. They look carefully at what’s working, what isn’t… Then they develop a concrete strategy, prioritize the next steps, and help the business become healthier than it was before they arrived.
They are simply professional.
A professional doesn't rely on motivation or emotion to do the work.
But something strange happens when the company is OUR own.
Instead of thinking like experienced advisors, we become anxious dreamers. Every rejected proposal becomes some kind of proof that we aren’t cut out for this “entrepreneur life” after all. We stop evaluating our business objectively because it stopped feeling like a business and became an extension of our identity and our ego is holding on for dear life. Every decision is emotional, each success is personal, all disappointments are proof that our imposter syndrome is more than a syndrome, and each time we struggle to pay our monthly overhead, we see it as some proof that we should have stayed in our former job because at least it was “safe”.
We also fear the others. The others who warned us, our parents, our partner, our friends who thought we were crazy to leave our stable career.
If our company belonged to someone else, we’d have no trouble seeing exactly what needed to happen next, and we’d treat it with great professionalism and an eagerness to grow it into something more.
If another founder hired you tomorrow because they believed your experience could help grow their business, what would you do? Would you spend weeks questioning whether their company will fail? Would you suggest they abandon everything because sales had slowed for a month? Would you tell them to stop marketing because one campaign underperformed? Of course not. You would review the numbers, analyze their offers, study their customers, improve their messaging, seek and recommend partnerships, look for new opportunities, gain some clarity around positioning, build stronger systems, and pull together a realistic plan for the months ahead. You would stay calm because that’s precisely why they’ve hired you.
Why don’t we offer ourselves the same? Why are we willing to become thoughtful strategists for someone else’s dream while becoming fearful and “small” the moment the business carries our own name?
We stop separating ourselves from the company and become so emotionally invested that we stop seeing it clearly. We go too deep into our own heads - we forget that our business is not us, it’s something we are building and so it deserves thoughtful leadership, careful planning, honest evaluation, and occasional corrections in course – sometimes even a pivot (or ten!). What our business doesn’t need is a founder who questions its worth simply because progress isn’t arriving as quickly as expected.
Perhaps that’s the shift every entrepreneur eventually has to make, right? I mean, we spend the beginning believing our passion alone will carry us, when we’re new and all fired up. Then, at about a year in, we see passion isn’t all that can carry us. A strong brand is build slowly on consistency, resilience, good decisions, and the willingness to keep showing up long after the excitement has faded. And that’s exactly what a great consultant does… they don’t rescue companies with inspiration and more ideas. They improve them through thoughtful, deliberate work and advice that gets them motivated to stay grounded, believe in the business, and to stay motivated through the hard times.
Since that conversation with my client, I’ve caught myself asking a different question whenever I feel uncertain.
If my business had hired me as its consultant, what would I recommend?
The answer is almost never “give up.” It’s usually “keep going, but do it differently.”
And maybe that’s the lesson.
Stop treating your business like a fragile dream and start treating it like the company you’ve been hired to build.
You already know what to do. You’ve just forgotten that you’re qualified to do it for yourself. Go all in on yourself and your dreams. If you’d do that for a client, why not for you?
BE YOUR OWN SAVIOR.
Love,
Holly
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.