Hey Reader,
I'm writing this from my new house (!!). I moved last week, and it's been a whole thing.
Somewhere around the bottom of the 4th kitchen box, I started thinking about how for the first 10-ish years of my career, I was scared of landing in the B2B world. Something about it felt stilted, impersonal. But here I am, having built my dream job. In B2B. And then I was wondering "how do I love what I do this much, and still feel weird about the category it lives in?"
Something I don't talk about much is that I live with a rare chronic pain condition. If you've dealt with anything like that, you know it doesn't just affect your body. It affects your mindset. It affects your career. What you can take on. What it costs you when you push through anyway.
And this move, for the first time ever, I hired professional movers.
The morning of my move, I woke up with a splitting headache. My first thought was: today is going to suck. But then, I remembered! I have help. I don't have to do this alone.
And when I was reflecting on my experience, I actually teared up a little with the relief that I didn't have to push myself to the brink to get it done.
Energy and capacity are their own very real assets in your business. Spending money to protect them isn't indulgent, it's strategy. Real strategy. For your life. For your business.
The biggest thing three years of owning a small business has taught me is discernment around my biz budget. I've learned to ask: what is this actually costing me to do myself? Not just the dollars. The outcomes. My health. My motivation. Unexpected days off. My capacity for the stuff that really, really matters.
I never set out to do marketing and design primarily for historically marginalized business owners. But that's what happened. And then it became intentional. Over the last three years, 95% of the businesses I've worked with have been women-, queer-, neurodivergent-, and/or BIPOC-owned.
And that's super important to me because owning a small business, even when the cash flow is unpredictable, is power.
It's confidence. It opens up a whole layer of the economy that is hard to quantify: bartering, trading, skill sharing, taking care of each other directly instead of feeding everything we have into an economic system built to extract. Your community, your career/job, your business can give, not just take.
So if you're sitting there right now DIYing something that feels like it's taking from you, because it feels like the responsible (or only) choice... I want you to ask yourself the same question I asked myself before that moving truck showed up. What is a DIY costing me? And is that cost worth paying?
Sometimes the answer is that the cost is pretty low, and you're happy to keep paying it. And sometimes the answer is your health, your evenings, your sanity, your capacity for the work you actually love!
If there's something you're still DIYing in your business that's keeping you up at night (literally), I'd love to hear about why you think you're stuck on it. It can be anything! Bookkeeping, marketing, emailing, scheduling...
| What's the real reason you're still DIYing? |
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Can't wait to see your answers. I always love hearing from y'all, in polls & responses.
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Happy moving forward. Onward and upward!
Lark
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