He also grew up in a small town – a very small town called Elmo, Missouri. And that small town upbringing has informed his approach to life and work in profound ways. So much so that he has built a consultancy around the values and vibe he associates with his small town roots.

He called that consultancy Small Town.

Talking to Randy about this got me thinking about my roots, and in particular the ones I don’t share with just anyone… the ones that go deep enough that they might not be obvious to people who don’t know me, but have shaped and fed my choices and values from my earliest days — and likely always will.

For instance: my mother grew up on a farm, in the wilds (she’d say “the bush”) of northern Ontario. Bedtime stories in my childhood often consisted of Laura Ingalls Wilder-style narratives of trying to eke out a modest life in an environment that was often hostile: sheets that froze to the walls of a poorly-insulated house in the winters, beds shared by several siblings, encounters with forest creatures, and profound gratitude and appreciation for the simple pleasures in life.

My dad was a United Church minister, a theological scholar who loved poetry, music, liturgy, and scripture in equal measure. From him, I learned to savour and treasure words, to hold language sacred, to excavate layers of meaning and history beneath these crude but beautiful tools we use to try and grasp a little of this life.

My parents were (and are) devoted to community, to collective action, to generosity and respect, and those values shaped me. In many ways, they’re the roots of what I do now.

A pause, here, to acknowledge that not all parents instill values we share, that lineage may be traced apart from blood and DNA, and that your roots may have required (re)planting in more fertile soil. I’ve chosen to focus here on my blood line, but you may find more nourishment in your milk line or your story line.

So here’s your curiosity experiment for this week:

• What are the roots that shape and nourish you?
• How do you connect to those roots in your daily life?
• Where might your roots want more fertile soil?

I’ve been in business for myself a long time. But before I started my first business, I never imagined becoming an entrepreneur. It was a label that didn’t seem to fit me well. I associated “entrepreneur” with values I didn’t share, and behaviour I didn’t want to adopt.

Hustling for the sake of hustling, for example.

“Me first” self-promotion.

Greed-driven strategies.

You know, the grossest, lowest common denominator, makes-your-skin-crawl kind of stuff.

It bothers me a lot that while there are lots (and lots and lots) of entrepreneurs doing things differently, the top ten lists for business books and podcasts are mostly unfettered, greed- and scarcity-driven bullshit all the way down.

Bothers is putting it mildly. It makes me rage. In a don’t-get-me-started-or-we’ll-be-here-all-day kind of way.

Because here’s the thing: business doesn’t have to be like that.

We don’t have to take those approaches to build successful businesses. You don’t have to prey on people’s insecurities to sell them things. You don’t have to pretend you know everything to be taken seriously. You don’t have to throw people under the bus to get ahead.

You don’t need to exploit or harm anyone (including yourself) to make your business thrive.

You know this, because the moment you think about the places and people you love to spend your money with — your favourite restaurants, service providers, grocers, artists, and so on — certain feelings come to mind: fair exchange, respect and care for customers and colleagues, devotion to quality, contribution to community. Those businesses (to borrow a favourite turn of phrase from Tim O’Reilly) contribute more value than they capture, in tangible and intangible ways.

However, there’s a whole industry, and broader cultural forces, working to make you believe that making your business successful is inevitably in tension with, you know, wacky shit like cooperation, respectful relationships, having healthy lives outside of work, shared status and power, and generally leaving the world a better place than you found it.

And so we continue to accept as a given that businesses should extract more value than they create, which quite literally impoverishes the world — while the rest of us entrepreneurs feel like weirdos for doing things differently.

But you’re not interested in building yet another extraction-oriented business, are you?

Nah. Because you know there’s another way. Or in fact, many other ways.

Continue reading the full post here.

Record players have been part of my life as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, my parents set up our basement rec room with an old turntable and amp, and a handful of LPs they were willing to sacrifice to the vagaries of young children’s inexpert handling. My siblings and I held daily dance parties and singalongs – countless hours spent listening and listening to the same songs over and over. To this day, I know every word, riff, and harmony on ABBA’s Super Trouper and Stevie Wonder’s Greatest Hits. 

In my teens, my record collection kept me company through the heavy mood swings of adolescence. In my twenties and thirties, I lived with my DJ boyfriend, and our record collection occupied the second bedroom of our apartment. Of course, he had one hell of a collection – thousands of records, many of them rare treasures – and professional quality turntables. I ditched my thrifted turntable when we moved in together. But eventually, we split, and he (obviously and rightfully) got the turntables in the divorce.

And then I just never got around to buying a new one. I knew I would one day, though, so I kept a couple hundred vinyl records – just the ones I couldn’t bear to part with. I lugged those very, very heavy boxes of records up and down stairs and stairs and stairs, in and out of multiple homes, across a continent and a border, and now here we are, twelve years since the last time they were played. ⁣

As I sat in that cozy hotel room, listening to records, I remembered. I remembered my records, sitting quietly in a closet below board games and puzzles. And I remembered a part of me that had been boxed up and filed away for a long, long time.

I had lost track of it, forgot that it even mattered. This part of me that hums alive to the sound of needle on record, the feel of stylus in my hand, the mesmerizing, silent revolution of the turntable; that feels, viscerally, the warmth of the sound that emanates from vinyl; that finds comfort in the little pops and crackles of dust; that pulses along with the steady, empty rhythm of the record’s final groove.

You’d think it would be a small thing, perhaps nothing but a nostalgia trip. That’s what I thought. That’s why I let it go for twelve years. (Well, that and the fear of what small children would do to my precious records.) But as I stood transfixed in front of that record player, I knew it was not a small thing. I listened, and I remembered.

I re-membered myself. Some part of me came home.

Not every youthful pursuit brings us more closely in touch with ourselves later in life, of course. There are many things I once enjoyed that no longer evoke the same response. So there’s discernment required here, as always, to separate nostalgia for the past from reconnection to self. Audre Lorde’s essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” holds a key to discerning the difference. Reminding us that eros encompasses creative expression, life drive, and sensuality, she writes:

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible…

– Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” from Sister Outsider

“A reminder of my capacity for feeling”: that’s what I experienced. And it’s what I wish for you, too.

Here’s this week’s curiosity experiment:

• What objects, activities, or pursuits were important to you when you were younger? What brought you pleasure, then? (Spend a few minutes with this. Jot down what comes to mind, in point form. Take your time sifting through memories.)
• How did those things make you feel?
• Of the feelings they evoked, are there sensations you miss? Feelings that seem difficult to access in your life as it is currently?
• Brainstorm ten creative ways you might reintroduce those feelings into your life (even if the objects, activities, or pursuits no longer fit).

Good listeners are living treasures, because we all need witnesses: witnesses to hold space for our grief and trauma; witnesses to our commitments to our selves; witnesses to our biggest, wildest, starriest dreams, our most oppressive fears, and our tenderest, most vulnerable parts.

When a good listener witnesses us, something alchemical happens and we are able to witness ourselves differently.

I experienced this first hand earlier this week: I was talking to my friend Sarah about some questions I’ve been grappling with, and even though I’d used all my usual tricks to think them through – writing, talking aloud to myself, good old-fashioned sitting and thinking – the moment I spoke them aloud to her, my thoughts and feelings became much clearer. It wasn’t a panacea, but I knew what my next step was, and that was enough.

I see this all the time in my coaching work, too: a great deal of that work lies in inviting my clients to speak aloud what they actually want to do, and then helping them figure out how to do that. Most coaches can tell you that the speaking aloud is a good deal of where the magic happens. Once it’s been said, and my client and I both hear the ring of truth in the words, the rest is mere logistics.

So here’s the first part of this week’s curiosity experiment:

• What do you need to speak out loud, and have witnessed?
• Who do you trust to witness it?

There’s a flip side to this one, though, that comprises the second part:

• How might you become a more skillful witness?

We tend to think of the qualities a good listener possesses as inherent, but they are skills anyone can develop. I know, because I used to be a terrible listener. I’ve always been talkative, which was part of the problem – I couldn’t wait to jump in and share my experiences, opinions, or (worst of all) advice. But even a chatty, opinionated older sibling like me can learn better listening skills.

The gifts of becoming a better listener go deeper than simple reciprocity – though it does feel good to give as good as you get. It’s profoundly nourishing to connect deeply with another person, give them your complete focus, and listen without judgment. (If you have a mindfulness practice, you can think of it as another form of metta meditation, where you direct compassion towards yourself and others.) And in an era when so many of our interactions with others are performative, mediated, and shallow, allowing yourself to sink deeply into one-on-one connection is life-giving.

Heather Plett’s article on holding space is a great place to start developing your deep listening skills, or if you’re curious about how coaches learn to be better listeners, here’s a good two-page PDF on the different listening levels you can work with. Heather Plett’s article on holding space is a great place to start developing your deep listening skills, or if you’re curious about how coaches learn to be better listeners, here’s a good two-page PDF on the different listening levels you can work with.

Photo by John-Mark Smith on Unsplash

I kept complaining to friends: “We’re so busy!” And they’d respond cheerily, “That’s a great problem to have!” And yes, perhaps it is; but it’s still a genuine problem.

It’s a problem when your work life is too busy – not only because you risk founder burnout, but because you are:

• Too busy working in the business to work on the business – and as a result, you become reactive rather than strategic.
• Constantly playing catch-up, and likely dropping some balls, thereby lowering client satisfaction.
• Following the currents of the market rather than leading the way. And when your unique value lies in your expertise, you need to be leading.

There were only two solutions left for us: hire staff, or start saying no to projects.

The Upside to Turning Down Work

We chose not to hire staff for another three years. Instead, we chose to turn down a lot of work opportunities that came our way. And we did this for several reasons:

1. Expanding your team does not necessarily net you more income. It may increase your firm’s revenues, but employees don’t come with a profit margin guarantee.
2. We were still early enough in our business that we wanted to prioritize stability over growth. Once we were confident that we could maintain this level of demand over time, we agreed, we would look into growing in size.
3. It was clear that while we were beginning to carve out a niche, we were still saying yes to most opportunities that crossed our paths – and we knew that for a firm like ours, specialization was the key to both long-term sustainability and commanding higher fees.
4. Focus begets better referrals. Creative service businesses typically get their best work via word-of-mouth referrals, so if you want more of the right kind of projects, you need to make sure you’re only taking on those kinds of projects. Otherwise, you’re guaranteed to generate more referrals for the wrong type of work, which wastes your time and your prospective clients’.
5. The right clients are more profitable, thanks to the speed of trust as well as their receptivity to expanding project scope when appropriate.
6. And finally, because like most creative professionals and consultants, we went into business to satisfy our own desires to learn and grow, and those drives were better satisfied through the clients and projects that make these things possible.

The decision to stay small and say no more often was only the first step towards solving our too-busy problem, though. Next, we had to figure out two key things: which projects and clients we wanted to say yes to, and how to say no clearly and graciously.

Red Light, Green Light

When we first sat down to define our parameters for saying yes or no to projects, we expected it to be a daunting process. How in the world would we quantify all of the variables that went into a truly satisfying client engagement?

Turns out, it took about ten minutes.

We drafted a Google doc with two columns and a bulleted list in each one, and listed out the qualities that made for an immediate green light (yes) or red light (no). Your version of this might go on a couple of Post-It Notes, or a wiki page for your sales team – the format doesn’t matter, just the content. And the content is dead simple.

Here’s what goes on your YES list:

• Your minimum budget
• Projects with great portfolio potential, if your portfolio helps you land clients.
• High probability of lead/referral generation
• Projects that will allow you to stretch into a new area you’ve been wanting to explore

Some of these may be “ands” and others will be “ors.” (Enough budget is always an and.)

And your NO list might include:

• Clients/projects that don’t meet your minimum budget level
• Low-margin offerings that you don’t need to sell anymore
• Pain-in-the-ass clients (You can often suss these folks out within the first few minutes on the phone.)
• Projects that require lengthy and time-consuming proposals or pitches
• Projects that make you sigh with weariness. (Pass those off to someone who’s more excited about them than you are.)

You may also want to add an amber light column for qualities that should spark caution, rather than an outright no. In our business, for example, we worked with a number of government agencies that required extensive proposals, so that “time-consuming proposals or pitches” bullet went into the “caution” column. Just don’t put too much in this column, or you’ll miss the point of this exercise, which is to make it easier and faster for you to discern between your yeses and nos.

Saying No, Quickly and Pleasantly

OK: you have your green/amber/red light signals defined. Now, how are you going to remember to check new opportunities against your lists?

Let’s go back to basics on cultivating new habits. You need three things: motivation (and I’m hoping you have that now that you’ve read this far), ability (which you’ll have as soon as you jot down your list of yes/no parameters), and what behavioral psychologist BJ Fogg calls a trigger – that is, an existing process you have in place that will dovetail nicely with your checklist.

Reflect for a moment on the system you currently use for fielding sales inquiries: email, phone, etc. This will be a little easier with email, because you have time to craft your response. With phone inquiries, the first habit I had to build was never to make promises over the phone, but instead commit to following up by email within X days, after checking my availability. That gave me an opportunity to review my list, and bow out gracefully if necessary, e.g. “I’m sorry, but we just had several large proposals accepted and we no longer have the capacity to take on your project.”

Here’s how I built the habit of reviewing my yeses and nos before moving forward on business opportunities:

1. Set up a document with my list of yeses and nos. Note: because the idea of saying no to anything – but especially revenue! – made me nervous, I appended a little pep talk from myself at the top of the doc, that went something like this: “What I know about saying yes to the wrong projects: a) I get burned out. b) They always go over budget. c) They take up space in my schedule that I then can’t allocate to the work I love. d) They are a dime a dozen; if I’m really hard up for cash, I can always find more of them. What I know about saying yes to the RIGHT projects: a) I get energized by them! b) I make more money! c) They bring in more of the right kind of work! d) They allow me to learn! e) I write about them with exclamation points!”
2. Create a daily reminder to review the list, that pops up every weekday in the morning, before I start replying to emails.
3. Practice saying yes and no to opportunities as they came in. The key word being PRACTICE. You will slip up and forget to check your list from time to time. You will get scared about money and say yes to the wrong projects. It’s all part of the process. The important thing is, every time you use your list and say no to an ill-fitting client or project, you are making room for more of your best work.

The key thing with the trigger is: it needs to be something that you can’t forget or ignore. So if reminders don’t work for you, figure out what will. Maybe it’s your to-do list, or your calendar, or a post-it note. What is the thing you know will work? Think: leaving your gym bag at your front door so that you have to move it to get out of the apartment.

As for saying no graciously, at first I found myself somewhat apologetic about turning work down, but over time I looked at every inquiry as an opportunity to clearly communicate the kinds of projects we were focused on, because you never know when a prospect might come back to you with the perfect project. (The notable exception being pain-in-the-ass clients, which never got more than a simple, “Sorry, we don’t have capacity.”)

Not only that, but when the truth was that we were just too busy to say yes to even great projects, our experience was that being honest about how booked up we were only increased prospects’ desire to work with us. So we only ever saw upsides to turning people down, clearly and kindly.

The Bad News

I say this reluctantly but emphatically: this isn’t the kind of process you do just once. So long as you’re doing good work, deepening and expanding your expertise, and meeting new prospective clients, you’ll have opportunities to further refine the kinds of clients and projects that bring out your best work, and that are best for your business. So if you’re like me, you might want to set up a reminder for a year from now to revisit your red/green light lists and update them to reflect your current goals and reality.

It shouldn’t take long, but we tend to put it off because even though we know it’s good for our businesses to filter out the clients who aren’t a good fit, it feels hard to turn down work.

Remember, though: the more specific you can be about your yeses and nos, the easier it will be for the right clients to find you – and for you to find them. And the freedom and satisfaction you’ll find in your work will expand exponentially, on every level: financially, creatively, and in terms of your ability to live a healthy life outside of work.

Every time you say a clearer no, you free up space for a clearer yes. And those clear yeses are the projects that will build you the business you really want.

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

I’m a fan of this approach. I find it often helps us bypass the unproductive, often fearful thoughts that get in the way of us pursuing fun and purpose. There are countless ways to play with creative constraints; here are a few that have worked for me:

Making it smaller.

Focusing on play.

Sharing your work-in-progress. (Or giving yourself permission to let it be just for you.)

Setting a timer – or a deadline.

Logging out of social media.

Creating first thing after waking.

Doing what you can, when you can.

Listening to your body’s needs.

All of us have commitments, pressures, and constraints that pull us away from the creative work that lights us up. Sometimes, the most effective way to shape a creative life is to bend with the constraints, accepting the limitations of our current reality and working with, rather than against it. 

Here’s this week’s curiosity experiment:

• What constraints make you more creative?
• How can you work creatively with your current constraints?
• What would be possible if you accepted these constraints as fact, and converted them to creative fuel?

Photo credit: Agê Barros on Unsplash

I have a lot of demons, gremlins, shadow selves – whatever you want to call them – that show up on the regular. And while I enjoy a good debate with my demons, I’ve also been experimenting recently with a less confrontational approach. When I have my wits about me, I’ll turn to whichever one has shown up, and ask them what they want.

The social media addict craves connection, recognition, validation.

The maximizer wants impact, imagination, joy.

The perfectionist wants safety, security, and to feel worthy.

When we recognize the underlying needs, the demon shape-shifts into an unmet need.

Here’s this week’s curiosity experiment:

• What shadows (or demons, or gremlins) want to be embraced?
• What do they want – and how might you meet those needs?
• What changes when you see them with compassion?

Photo credit: Vek Labs on Unsplash.)

Most of us who start small businesses didn’t start out in business school. We didn’t read all the textbooks, or learn how to read a balance sheet until we’d gotten far enough to hire an accountant.

We all have lots to learn, especially in the early days. So it’s seductive when we find someone who seems to have it all figured out, and has packaged it up in a shiny, “Follow These Three Sure-Fire Steps” kinda way.

A lot of my clients come to me after having invested a lot of time and money in these systems, and they tell me they feel like failures because:

• the system didn’t work for them,
• they never got around to implementing it fully, or
• something about it just didn’t sit well with them.

I’m of the opinion that while there’s a lot of value in many of these tools and processes, they go about things backwards.

They focus so much on the outcomes – especially the financial ones – that they lose sight of what drives you.

They’re all profit margins and no purpose.
All world domination and no connection.
All quantity and no quality.

The business owners I know aren’t just in it for the $$ – sure, you want to make a healthy living, but there’s something else that gets you moving, keeps you going forward even when things are hard.

99% of the usual planning tools, marketing systems, and cookie-cutter courses are based on assumptions. They assume they know what your version of a successful business looks like – but the truth is, that’s different for everyone. Every great business is built from a set of very personal values, drivers, and preferences – and if you try to simply replicate someone else’s model, without sharing those drivers, that model isn’t going to work for you.

(And that’s not even getting into all the people who just want to sell you what worked for them, without bothering to ask themselves if it even applies to anyone outside their particular circumstances. That’s a whole other rant.)

So instead of jumping straight into planning frameworks, I always start by helping you define success for yourself. That way, when you develop your strategic plans, you’ll have way more clarity, energy, and momentum for moving forward with them.

I know this might sound like more work than following one of those “systems,” but it actually requires way less effort, because you’ll be trusting yourself rather than trying to squeeze yourself into someone else’s cookie-cutter formula.

Put another way: until you’re clear on the business you want to build, and what gets you motivated to move forward on your strategic plans, all the magic formulas in the world won’t move you forward.

Other years… don’t look as shiny.

And yet, that doesn’t mean your business hasn’t grown in important ways. And I don’t just mean “I learned an important life lesson” ways. I mean real business growth — just maybe not the kind that shows up in your financial statements, except perhaps in the explanatory footnotes.

If you’re having a year like this — a year that isn’t likely to wow the number-crunchers in your midst — then this post is for you.

I want to celebrate the kinds of growth your business does beyond the balance sheet.

1. Increased clarity.

You figured out what you’re actually best at. You fired some bad clients, cut a product line that wasn’t your best work, stopped trying to land customers that just weren’t that into you. You faced the truth and made some tough calls.

Now you’re positioned to make the most of your marketing and sales efforts, and more likely to turn a consistent profit. This is important growth, even if it temporarily appears as shrinkage.

2. Expanded offerings.

You dedicated time and energy to crafting and piloting a new offering. While it required an investment of resources, you’re wrapping up the beta phase and ready to launch.

This kind of growth increases your potential customer base, and can have positive results for your sales funnel as well as your profit margin. Good for you for investing in customer research and product-market fit; it’s critical to your long-term success.

3. Developing your team.

You took some courses, hired a coach, mentored your people. You invested in building skills, expertise, and leadership capacity on your team.

Again, this is likely to show up primarily as a cost to your business in the short term, but longer term it will benefit you in the form of greater effectiveness, and more skills you can leverage for your customers.

4. Healthier workplace.

You’ve been working your tail off for years, but this year you slowed down. You took some time off, started being more consistent about your work hours, trusted the business to survive without you for a few days/weeks/months while you rested/got well/parented/cared for a loved one/got sober/traveled/took a sabbatical.

This is good for your business. Your business needs to be able to function without you. It’s an important maturation milestone. And it’s so, so, so, so good for you.

5. Refining your systems and processes.

Perhaps the least sexy thing on this list, to most people, but I’m into this stuff. Maybe you finally got around to documenting your onboarding process for new hires or new clients. Or you figured out a better way to invoice customers. Maybe you found efficiencies, or a better way to make your products, or just a way sleeker email marketing platform that has made your life sooooo much easier. Perhaps you took the time to connect all the various software you use, reducing error margins and making better use of the data you capture.

This is important growth. And it will pay off in the form of higher profits, more customer referrals, or straight-up happiness for you — all important growth metrics.

What have I missed? How has your business grown that might not be apparent (yet) to your bookkeeper? I’m all ears.

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.
— Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table

My first business was a boutique web design and development agency. A couple of years into building a consistently and increasingly profitable agency, my co-founder and I learned that our kind of company had a name: it was a “lifestyle business.”

We heard the term for the first time at a party where a local entrepreneur with big ambitions (and vanishingly little evidence that his product was likely to succeed) loudly declared to everyone within earshot, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying!”

Now, we had deliberately built a business that defied that imperative; we didn’t believe business success depended on scaling up. Instead, we were focused on maintaining a consistent profit margin, continuing to do meaningful work for great clients, maintaining a healthy and happy work environment, and having lives outside of work.

So one of us — I can’t recall who, at this point — shot back that growth alone might not be the most useful metric, so long as the business was profitable and sustaining itself. And in reply, he sneered:

“Yeah, I mean, if all you want is a lifestyle business, then I guess you can afford to think about growth that way.”

The tone was so snide and dismissive that I immediately grasped the meaning behind the term, even though I’d not heard it before.

A lifestyle business is just about maintaining your lifestyle — not changing the world.

A lifestyle business is just a hobby dressed up like a real enterprise.

A lifestyle business doesn’t scale because its owners don’t know how to scale a business.

At that moment, I realized three things:

1. That dude was an idiot.
2. I hate the phrase “lifestyle business.”
3. But… I love the way so-called lifestyle businesses piss off guys like him.

……………

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need — the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.
 — Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power” (emphasis mine)

Lifestyle businesses upset people who are building, y’know, real businesses, for a bunch of reasons. When you build yourself a successful lifestyle business, you’re asserting some radical notions that blow pretty strongly on the capitalist house of cards these bros keep building:

• You’re demonstrating that you don’t actually have to work all the time in order to have a sense of purpose.
• You’re living proof that one can prioritize care and nurturance (of self, others, world) alongside paid work.
• Your business stands in opposition to the economic philosophy of unlimited, rapid growth as a healthy standard.
• You stand for enough-ness and simplicity.
• You assert that accruing power for its own sake is a losing game.

You might not be doing all of those things, but I contend that many of us who build lifestyle businesses do so because we agree with Audre Lorde that there are human needs beyond profit, and there is life beyond duty.

The older I get, the more radical I think that is.

Just look at this totally not-scalable handmade soap. I mean, the carbon footprint is probably incredibly low (minimal, reusable/recyclable packaging, likely sold locally), but where’s the hockey-stick growth, man? Photo by Kristina Balić on Unsplash

……………

Finding a definition for “lifestyle business” is tricky.** For starters, it’s easily confused with a “lifestyle brand,” which is another thing entirely. (Think: brands that are trying to sell you something that promises access to an aspirational lifestyle.) But it’s also slippery because it exists largely as a counterpoint to no-holds-barred, growth-for-growth’s-sake capitalism.

The key distinction between a lifestyle business and other businesses is that a lifestyle business exists for some purpose beyond maximizing profits.

That purpose could be anything from the owners’ autonomy, to providing good jobs to its employees, to supporting authors and literature (like your local bookseller), reducing waste (like this gem of a shop), to <ahref=”https://drawingchange.com/”>helping groups of people solve big problems more skillfully. Lifestyle businesses are profitable, and growth-oriented in a different way: profit is the fuel for the overall purpose, not the entire point.

The flip side — the dominant business culture that promotes rapid growth and massive scale — has fostered an environment where many businesses are assessed by it measures. Awards celebrate the fastest–growing companies; media coverage skews towards IPOs and stock markets (and CEOs who make so much money they can’t imagine anything else to do with it than fund space travel); and the whole venture capital world is built to cultivate more businesses that fit this mold.

That leaves the rest of us — the so-called lifestyle business owners — without much recognition, without a shared language about how we approach business, and frequently with a nagging sense that we’re somehow not “real” entrepreneurs, whether that’s because our peers are jibing at us over drinks, or simply because we don’t see as many examples of entrepreneurs who prioritize things beyond quarterly reports, pitch decks, and balance sheets.

I want to change that. I want to hear the stories of small business owners who bring their values to work, who think about contribution, justice and impact as they’re developing their business plans.

I would argue that craft is itself, a substantial contribution to humanity. As is the sheer sensual joy of working with our hands. Photo by SwapnIl Dwivedi on Unsplash

Looking back at my own entrepreneurial experience, it’s clear to me that there’s genuinely revolutionary potential in doing business the way my co-founder and I did. We built a sustainable, consistently profitable company, eventually supporting nine full-time staff, while prioritizing reasonable work weeks, working with world-changing clients, and building capacity internally and externally.

In redefining the standard definitions of business growth to promote the kinds of growth we found most meaningful, we put our stake in the ground about what we believed business was good for.

Not just profit. Not just scale. Not just feeding the consumption beast.

As it turns out, many other entrepreneurs feel the same way. But it goes way beyond lifestyle considerations. It’s about what we value. It’s about what we want to see grow. And it’s about creating spaces in the world where livelihood and life are in closer alignment.

That probably doesn’t sound all that radical. I mean, ours was a for-profit enterprise, using a pretty standard fee-for-service business model, with a conventional ownership model in a capitalist system.

We didn’t fit, quite, into any of the “progressive business” categories. We were too small for corporate social responsibility, too profit-oriented to be a social enterprise, and the whole “social innovation” bandwagon hadn’t really left the station yet.

But we were committed to doing business a little differently. And for us and our employees, that made a world of difference. For instance:

• If someone had to work overtime, they took the equivalent time off as soon as humanly possible.
• When one of our employees adopted a puppy, they worked from home for a while so they could potty-train her.
• When people had kids, we topped up their parental leave benefits as much as we could afford to. (This was in Canada, where full-time employees are usually entitled to about 50% of their salary through government assistance, during their parental leave.)

We prioritized care. We prioritized making room for our whole selves. We prioritized having lives outside of work. We prioritized longevity over quick bucks.

What’s radical about that is that it is not the status quo.

It ought to be, but it’s not.

We celebrate big businesses when they institute policies that make their workplaces a little more humane, but when small businesses do it?

Lifestyle business.

You are still a real entrepreneur if you make time to garden, make art, nurture relationships, rest, care for your body and soul, volunteer for community causes, and/or generally live at a human pace and scale. Photo by Lewis Wilson on Unsplash

……………

Part of me wants to reclaim the damned phrase, because that’s what we do when a phrase is used to sneer at us.

But I just hate the word “lifestyle” so much. In part I hate it because it’s inextricably linked with that section of the newspaper that used to be called the women’s pages (because of course men don’t care about fashion, cooking, or their fellow humans), and the least substantial and most dominant-culture-reinforcing dreck on Instagram.

It reeks of superficiality, and the businesses we are building are anything but superficial. We are building for sustainability, for life-as-it-actually-is (because we know the Ideal Worker doesn’t really exist), and for respect and mutuality.

These values fly in the face of the extraction economy that is literally and figuratively killing us.

Do we want to keep building businesses that extract more value than they create? Or do we want to figure out a better kind of commerce?

……………

If you’re interested in the questions I’ve raised here, stay tuned: there’s lots more to come. I’ve been reading and mulling and talking to other entrepreneurs about how we can shift — and are shifting — the economy into a more humane, and less damaging, mode.

I know there are people out there thinking more radically than I am about capitalism, and how to totally upend it. I’m a pragmatist, and while I think there may well be a better world coming, I do my best work around what we can do in the meantime. So I’m collecting ideas and stories about what small businesses can do to rethink status quo capitalism. And I’ll be sharing them here, and via my newsletter, which you can sign up for below.