Flourish & Grow to CEO: Episode 1

Welcome to the Flourish & Grow to CEO Podcast! We’re so glad that you’ve joined us in our journey to create this show, a long-time dream for both of us.

We met in 2018 Lisbon, Portugal on a month-long coworking trip through my company, Adventurous Life, and hit it off instantly. The next year, Jane joined Adventurous Life on another trip, this time to Australia, and we knew we had to work together.

Having had personal experience with the challenges that arise when a business doesn’t have strong foundations, we knew that we had to share what we had learned, both our successes and our failures so that other business owners could create sustainability and ultimately, scale and leverage for maximum profitability and impact.

Most small business owners simply don’t have comprehensive foundations created for their business, and more importantly, they don’t understand how these foundations must interconnect and work cohesively together. This supportive structure is imperative if you want to run your business like a CEO, instead of what we call a “GigMaster”, meaning you work from gig to gig- and this is the difference between you running your business or having a business that runs you.

Over the last year, we’ve been working on a program for women entrepreneurs, aged 50+ (because we are), who are currently making in the $50-100k range in their business and are finding the break-through to the six-figure mark elusive.

After spending much of 2020 collaborating on how we wanted to serve the coaching and consulting community, we realized we were in our own start and stop pattern because we were doing the very thing that causes a business to stall – we were trying to create a business by executing in fragmented tactics, rather than looking at our business as a whole with interconnected strategies.  It was then that we decided to be more deliberate in defining the vision for our company, create the strategy and then outline the tactics that needed to be implemented that would drive us toward our vision.  Our vision is ensuring that no business owner should have to live with the chaos and unpredictable income like a gig master when there is an opportunity to step into the leadership position of the CEO who runs a predictable and profitable company!

This is how the podcast was born. We both love rich conversations that offer something of value, and we are passionate about sharing useful information.  We also both love to entertain and hope that by offering some levity and light-heartedness, people will realize that although building a business can be tough, it’s important to have a sense of humor and resilience about it all.

We welcome your comments, questions and suggestions as you listen to episodes of the show and we hope you take away helpful nuggets you can use in your own business to scale and grow to CEO.

In this, our inaugural episode, we talk about:

1. A common recurrent business problem: why being a Business Owner is so challenging and the one thing that no one really teaches you but is fundamental to business success.
2. The gig-master trap: why just getting clients isn’t enough and how to set yourself up as the CEO of your business so you have more time and make more money.  Pam shares her personal experience with this.
3. Starting a business is like building a home: you can’t think about the details before building its foundations.  Understanding the 8 pillars and how without those in place, your business is always going to struggle.