Dear Fellow Business Owner, I was sitting across from another business professional recently, having one of those conversations that reminds me why I love what I do. Different experiences. Different perspectives. Probably different ways of approaching the same problem. And yet, there's always something to learn when two people are willing to sit down and have a conversation. It got me thinking about something I've believed for a long time. I've never understood why someone do

Dear Fellow Business Owner, Before I ever open a spreadsheet, before I look at a single number, I ask three questions. In over a decade of sitting across from business owners, these are the three that tell me more than a full financial statement ever could. You don't need to be sitting across from me to use them. Pull up a notebook, or just sit with these for ten minutes. Answer them honestly, not the way you'd answer if someone else were listening. 1. If your business stayed

Dear Fellow Business Owner, People walk into Serenity Sips and tell me how busy it is. How full the tables are, how good it feels in there, how it's clearly "killing it." I'm grateful every time, because every person who walks through that door chose us on purpose, out of every place they could have gone. The truth is, we are almost two years into operations, just over two since we formed, and Serenity still doesn't pay its own bills. Not because something is wrong. Because t

There was a season not long ago when almost no one knew what I had done professionally before. Not because it wasn’t real. Not because it hadn’t mattered. But because something happened to me physically that quietly convinced me I might not be able to show up in that capacity anymore. So I stepped back. Far enough back that the work I had spent more than 25 years building became something only my family and a handful of people close to me even knew existed. I wasn’t hiding, e

Dear Fellow Business Owner, I was sitting in a room recently with a group of women business owners. Different industries, different stages, different challenges. But when the conversation turned to finances something shifted. And then one woman said I get a report from my bookkeeper every month and honestly I don't fully understand what I am looking at. The heads nodded. There is a version of business ownership that says you should understand everything, do everything, and if