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Rooted & Relentless is the business strategy podcast for entrepreneurs building service-based businesses designed to grow, adapt, and last. Business strategist Steph Rubio shares practical guidance on a range of topics meant to help you sell, scale, and stabilize.
Think sustainable business growth, revenue strategy, systems, capacity, client experience, and the founder leadership required to turn your skills into a successful, sustainable company.
Steph Rubio (00:00)
It's gonna help you stop treating every challenge as uniquely yours. you suddenly realize you're not that special after all. I mean, you're really special. You're very special, but not special in that this is uniquely yours. You suddenly breathe a sigh of relief because you realize that what you're facing are typical challenges of running a business.
you take it as a personal failure until you hear five or ten other women say, that happened to me too. And now you can stop spiraling and you can start evaluating.
What's up, what's up, what's up? Welcome back to another episode of your favorite podcast on all things business, life, the realest of the freaking real, rooted and relentless, where you can count on me to always clear out the bullshit and get straight to the root of what we need to hear, know, do to move in this online business space that we all love to love and sometimes.
Maybe not so much. Anywho, today we're getting into why trying to run your business alone could be costing you. But don't worry, there's a lot more to it that's not as boring as that sounds. Basically, I found myself talking about this years ago. I found myself creating a mastermind for it. But I found like most things in the online space, it's been eaten up with the marketing messaging of everyone has a community, so everyone wants you to buy a community.
And I don't want the power in this and why it's necessary to get lost in all of that mud. So here I am bringing you the realest of the real. Entrepreneurship can feel lonely. And while that's kind of by design, like it's not intentional, it just happens in a traditional workplace or traditional, like one thing I talked about a lot last year when I sold the mastermind is gone are the days, especially since post-COVID, and everyone started working from home where you could like walk across the hall and
and ask someone how to get through this area where you were stuck. Years ago I worked in an office, wasn't corporate, but it was in an office setting in a financial planning firm. And all of the admin had like their own little space kind of in an area. I had my own office and across the hall there were a couple other admin and we would walk across sometimes they would walk across and ask me questions and I would ping some ideas off of them. And after years of working
From home, I realized how much of that not only was I missing. Initially working from home, I think we were all pumped. We were like, fine, like no one's talking. We can focus, not get interrupted, all of that, right? But after years, not only was it lonely, but it actually stifled our creativity and slow rolled the process. If I can walk across and talk to you about where I'm stuck and we can ping ideas really quickly and in five minutes, I have it sorted out.
Or I sit in my office alone and I think about it and I can't figure it out and I put it off and I come back to it and I spend five hours. Which one's more productive for your business? Right? This was someone else's business, but same thing. Loneliness is definitely like a symptom, but it's not the whole problem here.
The bigger problem is that that isolation can actually stifle your creativity, your way of thinking, right? It can slow roll decisions, it can make you avoid decisions versus when you make that with other people, when you talk it out loud, and this isn't only decisions, these are opportunities and stuff too, right? If you don't have the opportunity to say what you're after out loud, how can people possibly help you find that? One of the best things that I ever, ever, ever did for my business was join community. And it's not
Way most people think. I joined a mastermind. And some people do that because of the knowledge, the education, the tools, and the resources they want to get. I didn't. I joined for proximity. I joined because being able to hop on coaching calls and share my insight and expertise was the fastest way for people to see the power in what I do and what I bring to other people's businesses. So I paid for the proximity.
For people to see what I do because when they see me and hear from me and see my expertise and their jaws on the floor, then they can go and tell other people about that. Then I become rememberable, right? Memorable, rememberable. Good grief. When you're the only person who's evaluating the business, questioning the assumptions and making the decisions, your blind spots are going to stay blind. You need space to think.
But you also need perspective. I've talked a lot lately about pausing to plan and the power and doing that for your business and stabilizing and deciding proactively where your time, energy, and money is going to go instead of reacting, knowing what you're going to do quarter to quarter to get the results that you wanna get, right? But also you can do that in isolation and still come out a little shorter than doing that in community.
because of the perspective you're missing for the other people who are also growing and building, who have varied experiences where they can lean in with ideas and get just as excited as you are about this new direction you're taking or what you're cooking up and things like that. Reflection done entirely alone can still leave you trapped inside the same thoughts, the same fears, the same assumptions and patterns that you started with.
Entrepreneurship is one of the only careers, because it's not exactly a career, right? Where people are expected to make high-stakes decisions every single day, largely alone. You start your business, you gotta figure out how to tell people about it, you gotta figure out how to sell, you gotta figure out how to deliver, you have to on shaky knees figure out if it's all working, if people still want it. We decide what to sell, we decide what to charge, we decide who to hire, we decide where to invest.
We decide where to pivot, we decide which opportunities to pursue, we decide what to stop doing. We decide whether the business is working, whether we are the problem, and somehow we have normalized carrying all of that inside of our brain.
We we talk a lot or see people talk about entrepreneurship being lonely, but I think loneliness is the symptom.
Isolation is the actual business problem. Cause when you make every decision alone, you're missing the perspective. And that matters because you cannot see your business objectively all of the time. And one funny way that I see it is people come into like the mastermind or start working with me and they will be embarrassed almost with how messy the area of their business is.
That is their area of expertise. Like, take a COO, for example, comes in and is really embarrassed about the fact that their operations are a mess, even though they do it for other clients. And I'm like, I talk about this all the time with people. And the reason is you are all the things in your business. And you're only one thing in their business. You get to go in your client's business and only be the COO. So of course you're gonna excel at that. In your business, as an entrepreneur or solopreneur.
You are the CEO, you are the lead marketer, you are the lead sales, you are the lead client success person, you're the lead developer, right? You're all of these. So it's actually natural to put the thing that you're best at last in your own business because it's what you can do best, like in your sleep, right? You can do it manually versus what you're not good at, you have to be prepared, you have to work at. So when you're too close to it, you know every mistake. you remember every single slow month. You're emotionally attached.
To your offers, your clients, your goals, and your ideas. That's why it feels so defeating when you miss a goal or someone says no to you, right? That's why we react emotionally because we're closest to it. You're carrying all the financial pressure. You're trying to protect yourself from failure while also pushing yourself toward growth. So it's a blessed little catch twenty two, there isn't.
That's a lot of noise and chaos for one person to sort through alone.
When you're running your own business, you don't have someone that's saying something like, That timeline's unrealistic, or we have already tried that, or I think you're overlooking something, or have you tried it this way? Or here's what I'm seeing lately, or that problem is happening across the whole team.
You may have people around you, clients, followers, family, and people who love you and support you. But that doesn't necessarily mean you have peers who understand the decisions that you're carrying because they're carrying them too. There's no solidarity there, right? You ever had to try to have a conversation with like a partner or family member who just glazes over or gives you terrible advice based on their own scarcity? That's not the people that we want. They they serve a purpose, but it's to love us.
and go out to lunch with us. It's not to give us business advice, right?
The people in your personal life may support you deeply and still not understand why a pricing decision can consume your brain for days on end.
Your clients know their experience with your business, but they don't know the full operations behind it. Your audience, your followers, they see the polished output, but they don't see the trade-offs or the uncertainty or the pressure underneath it all. Your team, they're the closest to you and they may understand many parts of your business. But depending on their role, it's not their vision. It's not their responsibility to make it come to fruition.
It's their responsibility to support you and making sure it happens. So isolation is not always caused by a lack of people. You can have people around you and still be isolated. It's often caused by a lack of the right people at the right time having these conversations with you.
When no one is there, when nobody is there to question your interpretation of a situation or or something that you're looking at and reviewing, assumptions start sounding like facts. And that is dangerous for you. A difficult week might be nothing's working. One client objection becomes nobody can afford this. So I need to go create a new offer or I need to change my pricing. One exciting conversation becomes I should pivot my entire business.
Because they need this. The market clearly needs this because one person asked me for something new. One slow launch becomes this offer's dead.
Isolation gives every decision more authority than it actually deserves. And it doesn't mean those emotions are bad or irrelevant. We should feel the emotion, but we should act on the logic and the data and what's real.
The right perspective, the right room, the right community will help you shift that and helps you ask questions like, is this a pattern or is this noise? Is it a moment in time? Is it a signal I should pay attention to? Or is it noise? Is this evidence or fear?
Is this opportunity aligned or merely exciting? Am I solving the actual problem? What am I too close to? so when you're thinking of some of these questions, like is this a pattern or a moment? This is how you lead your business. As you start to learn how to, using data, using planning, using review points, looking at the full picture, you start to realize where.
Patterns are because, say one slow month, that's not a pattern that you necessarily need to pay attention to. Two to three consecutively, being slower year over year, you know, we're in July, August time frame, September time frame. So you look at July, August, September timeframe of twenty twenty five, are you growing about the same or is it actually a huge difference? That's a pattern and something you should pay attention to.
But noise online, what's hot right now, everyone needs to go get a sub stack or a blog, that's noise. What does your business require? Where are you marketing and showing up based on what your people are consuming and what's getting them to take action? Better decisions do not always come from someone giving you the answer.
They often come from someone asking you more questions so that you come to a better decision yourself.
I believe deeply in reflection. I mean, I've been talking about this for weeks now because I've seen the power in pulling it way up to pause and look at what's actually going on. Reflection and planning are absolutely a necessary part of your business, but reflection is not automatically objective just because you sat down with a pen and notebook and journaled out what you're thinking, what's actually real and what's actually happening. You can reflect and still reinforce the same assumptions and the same patterns that you've been operating in.
You can review your numbers and still act out of fear.
you can identify a problem and still misdiagnose the cause of that problem.
You can write pages of what feels wrong without ever reacting.
This is one reason why I'm a big advocate of not planning annually alone. I have said over and over and I will, again, the past couple weeks on the podcast, I've been talking about the power in pausing to plan annually, pulling it back up, thinking about your business long term and where you want to go. Like what outcomes and what results? What do you want it to look like, feel like? What are you doing? What kind of money? Yes, you have to do all of that. And then you have to decide what you're going to do.
in the next year to make that a reality, right? Where you're spending your time, energy, and resources. And that's how you stabilize. And that's how you steer and make decisions throughout the year to come and get yourself closer to it. Doesn't mean plans can't change. Like we've talked about a lot of that.
But annual planning alone can only take you so far. You can go to a hotel. I know someone who does this. I've talked about that again recently on the podcast. Go to a hotel, spend one day at the spa, spend another day hold up in the room, casting your future vision, getting clear on where you're taking the business the year ahead, and still not execute half of that plan or it not be the full, complete plan that you actually need or where you need to be spending that time, energy, and money.
what would be more beneficial and what I've seen work again there's that solopreneur component you hold yourself up in a room instead of doing it together. When I did this kind of annual planning with small tech startups, you know, up to like 50 people, the leadership team with me would go to a location. We would do annual planning, but also quarterly, we would go to a location to do our reflection point in a group because then you had the various leaders of each function, your marketing and your sales
and your operations people pulling in and talking and pushing back and asking different questions, going deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. Because that fifth and sixth layer, that's where you get to the root of what a problem may be or where you actually need to be spending your time versus doing it yourself and it feeling like you checked that box. You took the time, you're ready to go.
For example, in a room like that, in a room with other people, if instead of that one hotel room where you locked yourself up, you got together with like five peers and you all did something like this together, and you say something like, My marketing was inconsistent last year, someone else might ask something like, Well, was the problem inconsistency or were you unclear about what you were selling? Like, why was it inconsistent? And that way you know how you're going to make it consistent.
But also strategic. So you're showing up consistently, but doing the things you should be doing, talking about things in a way that you should. You might say something like, in that room alone, you might write something like, I need more leads. But in a group together, someone might push back and say, Is it more leads that you need? Or do you need to be selling to the ones that you already have? You might say something like, I need to hire this year. Someone else might ask you,
Do you need more capacity and is that the right hire? Or do you need to remove work that you shouldn't be doing at all?
You might say something like, I'm tired of this offer. This offer isn't making me money. Someone else might write, ask you, Are you tired of this offer? Or are you tired of what it's doing to your capacity? Are you tired of the way that you're delivering it? Because there may be tweaks or a way to outsource that. There may be different solutions you haven't thought of because you can't when you're closest to the problem and you're planning in isolation.
That is the value of differing perspectives. It helps you go beyond your first feeling and your first explanation for something. Again, that five or six layers deep.
The right room with the right people can change the quality of your decision making. And leading a business is one long string of decisions. Community like that is often marketed as belonging. And belonging absolutely matters. Feeling understood absolutely matters. Having people who celebrate you for who you are absolutely matters. That can be what helps you keep on keeping on, if you will. But the right community.
Is also a strategic business asset.
The right room can help you spot patterns faster, pressure test ideas, identify blind spots, separate emotion from evidence, help you see where you are already a machine and so good, but you haven't spotted it yourself. Today on our mastermind call, which is a community, the first person who went was talking me through how she doesn't know when to say no.
A project that someone wants her to do, or when to pause and start them at a later date, and like how to determine that and how to have that conversation. And so while that's a capacity conversation, right? She's at capacity, she's working on delegating, she has grown fast, and now it's time to find efficiencies so she can scale. One of the pieces of that conversation were she pulled she said a couple things that I pulled out because she was identifying the problem, the pattern that she was having.
She identified it herself. She just didn't realize that. She didn't have the the consciousness. She didn't see that. But she said something about fear that she wasn't doing it out of fear, fear that they wouldn't want to work with her anymore, or something like that.
and that she had a gut reaction that she should have waited two weeks or started them at a certain date. So with all of my advice, with me talking about the capacity, how she can first monitor capacity and be sure of her capacity and then look for ways to create capacity, I also talked about and made sure that she recognized that she already had some of these answers herself, but she couldn't spot that without being in this community. The fact that she said she was operating that way out of fear.
And that her gut reaction, she should have paid attention to her gut reaction, it was already giving her the answer, but she was avoiding her instincts and she couldn't spot that those were actually powerful pieces of this situation. And she probably never would have and would beat herself up for months or continue to say yes to people at misaligned timelines and burn herself out, which we'll be talking about in the next episode, had she not come to community and brought this up.
Which means she can avoid unnecessary mistakes, which means she can make decisions more confidently, which means she now knows to check her capacity and just communicate with her people confidently about when she can start projects and when she can't. She can see options that she would not have generated alone. That is the power in community. You're not only gaining encouragement and cheerleaders in the right community, you're gaining access to more perspectives, more lived experience, more questions and more ways of thinking. Let's talk about that lived experience for a second.
In my life alone, I have two decades of experience. Someone else, five decades of experience. That's now seven decades of experience you have between two people. Put that into a collective of 10 people, and you're getting varied perspectives and lived experience over decades, over decades, right? What is the value in that? That's going to shorten the distance between uncertainty and clarity.
It's also gonna help you stop treating every challenge as uniquely yours. When you sit in a room full of 10 other people and hear what they're up against and how they're navigating decisions and what they've been through and what they're working on and what they're excited about and what's driving them crazy, you suddenly realize you're not that special after all. I mean, you're really special. You're very special, but not special in that this is uniquely yours. You suddenly breathe a sigh of relief because you realize that what you're facing are typical challenges of running a business.
And it comes down to the same things, reflecting, making these powerful decisions, doing it in community and proximity so that they're better, sharper. And you do this repeatedly through the years. You pull it up for the top level, then you execute back down at the norm. That's normal stuff.
You think you take it as a personal failure until you hear five or ten other women say, that happened to me too. And now you can stop spiraling and you can start evaluating.
Sometimes you might think an idea is brilliant until someone asks a question that exposes an underlying gap you aren't prepared to answer. Now you can fix it before you spend six months building it.
Sometimes you might be about to abandon something that is working or would work really well with one tweak and someone else comes in, spots that, helps you tweak it and saves you a whole lot of wasted effort, tears, blood, sweat, and all of that.
The smartest business owners and the most successful are not the ones who never need support. They're the ones who understand that their own thinking has limits. Again, some of the most successful and powerful CEOs I've seen, and some of these corporations I was supporting were the ones, and this isn't just CEOs, these are, you know, management and team leaders. Some of the best leaders are people who understand that the diversification of thinking is a power move. Instead of creating a leadership team where everyone thinks and acts like you.
The power move is actually finding people whose exp perspectives, lived experiences, experiences, all of that complement yours but aren't exactly the same. You don't need a room full of people who agree with you. That's not beneficial at all. Unless you're walking around with as the one person who knows everything, can do everything, is everything, is the most successful. Like you probably won't be listening to this podcast. You need people who can ask better questions.
Who can challenge your assumptions with love, who understand the stakes of what you're up against because they're up against it too. The scaries and the lack of security of running your own business, all of that. They can recognize patterns, they can offer context, they can expand on your opinions, give you more options, different ways of thinking. Again, think about a room of five or ten people if you're planning with them and how many.
rooms they've been in in the past year where they've had conversations with people and picked up new ideas and different ways of thinking that they can now share. You're not really in a room with five or ten women, physically, yes, but you're in a room with 50 plus because you're picking up all these tidbits through the game of telephone and giving you again fresh ideas and perspectives. I don't need people who automatically tell me I'm right. That's not helping me at all. I need people who help me see what I cannot see.
And that's especially important for smart, capable women like us, because we're often the ones who other people look to and come to for this kind of support. We're the strategist, the fixer, the leader, the caregiver, the one who knows what to do or will figure it out, blood, sweat, and tears, baby. And that competence can quietly become isolation.
Because when everyone sees you as capable
It becomes easy to assume that you can figure out everything alone, that you don't need support. Being capable does not eliminate your blind spots. It just makes them easier to hide.
As we move into the second half of the year, there will come a point where you need to pause and you need to plan for the future of your business. That's a part of leading your business. If you're not already doing that, go carve the time out on your calendar now. You cannot sustainably lead a business over the long run by constantly reacting and just operating week to week. You cannot do that. When you do this, but I also would encourage you.
Not to do it in isolation, not to just carve that time out on your calendar. Grab a peer and ask them if they're willing to do it the same. Ask them if they're willing to meet you at a location and do it and make it fun. Take your big notepads that you stick on the wall and all of that. Cause when you hear other women work through their businesses, their questions will sharpen yours. Their decisions will reveal options for you.
Their stories will give you language for what you've been feeling, but you couldn't really put into words or name. You know the relief that comes from that. Their patterns will help you spot your own. You learn from every conversation in the room.
That's why planning and community, it's not a group of women sitting around giving each other random advice. Done well, it is structured perspective.
This is the difference between planning your entire year ahead in your head.
And making one after your thinking has been expanded, challenged, and clarified.
People tend to think like community is either something they don't need or something they'll invest in when their business gets bigger and their problems get bigger, once we have more money, once we have more time, once we feel more established. But I think that actually gets it backwards.
The right relationships are part of how you build a healthier, clearer, more sustainable business in the first place. Because you need space to think. You need time to reflect.
But you also need people who can see beyond the limits of your own perspective.
You are never supposed to carry every decision, question, fear, data point alone, close to your chest, by yourself. Community is not a luxury you need to get to one day. It is infrastructure for the long term sustainability of your business.
Steph Rubio (22:52)
Until next time, this was another episode of your favorite podcast on growing a real as fuck business.
That supports your real as fuck one true life. Rooted & Relentless by your girl Steph Rubio. Stay in touch. Holla if you hear me.