In this special episode of The Business You Really Want, Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo reflect on listener feedback and dive into real-life success stories. With insights from reviews, they discuss the challenges female entrepreneurs face, the pressures of traditional success metrics, and how to take action based on your unique definition of success. Whether you’re just starting your business or navigating the complexities of growth, this episode is packed with practical advice on aligning goals with your values and protecting your time.
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From Insight to Action – Real-Life Success Stories
We are doing something really special. I’m so excited, Gwen. I don’t know if you’ve been counting, but we are at episode twelve and we’re actually at the part of our podcasting journey, you and me, that we can actually have like a breadth, a library of resources to point people to. We have feedback because we have audience now. Guess what? It’s not just our husbands. The reason i know it’s not just our husbands because we have reviews and our husband’s names are not attached to the reviews.
I know it’s not my husband because my husband doesn’t use Apple, so definitely, no, it’s not him. What I wanted to do, Gwen, is I want to dive into the reviews that are amazing audience has left for us because it’s such a great snapshot, I think, into what the current, like right now ,we’re recording 2024, female entrepreneur, small business owner, whatever label you like to use. It’s such a great snapshot into what they’re facing and what they’re looking for. When I read through the reviews, and I don’t think you read them as closely as I do.
I’m sure that is the case.
It’s like there’s these themes, like one big theme that I’m seeing is limited time and how you manage that. What defines success? What I want to do is, first of all, I want to read some of the reviews because I think if you’re going to take the time to leave a review on Apple, which by the way, I tried to do on a different show, and it’s not easy. Right now, if you have left us an Apple review, thank you. Thank you for overcoming the frustration that might have entailed for you. It was frustrating for me. Thank you for the words that you used. We all have a lot of reviews and I won’t read all of them. We’ve got one here. This is from a person, and actually, sorry, Apple is not telling me who you are right now, but that’s okay.
“When I heard about the podcast, I couldn’t wait to listen. I have burnt my business to the ground a few times and I found the first episode so refreshing.” Gwen, if you’ll remember that is the episode where we talked about like why we’re here. This reviewer says, “Thanks to Gwen.” That’s you, Gwen. You should read these. They say a lot of nice things about you. “Thanks to Gwen for being brave enough to speak the truth and give helpful action steps.” That’s review one.
I’m sure there’s a much more efficient way to go through these. We had another reviewer, and this one I can actually see their name. This is from Alicia. Alicia’s a brand-new business owner. What she said is she feels like Tanya and Gwen are teaching her things before she has the chance to make mistakes. What excites her is the ability to implement what she learns so that she can start her business off right from the get-go.
That makes me so happy.
I was going to say, I knew that that would be your favorite review, Gwen. Why don’t you share a little bit about why that might be your favorite review?
We get so caught up in what “everybody” is saying, or best practices or any of those things that aren’t necessarily true, so we end up going down a path that may or may not actually make really good sense for us. If it does, fab, but a lot of times, there’s some aspect that it doesn’t. What I’m really hoping that we’re communicating to everybody is question everything. I can’t remember when it was, but there was a post or something that we did where it said, even us. Don’t take us. Question us, too, because although I like to be right and I try to be right as much as possible, and I also try to be as open to all of the variance as possible, I’m not always right.
It’s not what she said, but what I heard her say was, “You’re making me be aware that I should question everything. I don’t have to do it the way “everyone” has said I have to do it.” I think the more of us that start down that path, the quicker success is going to come for us, the more satisfied we will be with the success we achieve. Ultimately, that is always my goal.
I know for me, if I could go back in time and avoid some big mistakes, there’s not much I wouldn’t give in order to have that opportunity. The idea that this show can help other people do that is absolutely huge. All right, so now we’re going to read Julia’s review. Julia’s is one of my favorites too, because what she pointed out, and I promise I’m not going to say everyone’s my favorite, but a lot of them are my favorite. She talked about how what she appreciated was helping people focus on success based on what you want versus what it should look like.
For Julia, this has motivated her to do some work inside herself to really think about what her definition of success is. Of course, another favorite is anytime you leave a review that says, “I don’t listen to podcasts, but I listen to this one,” you immediately become the podcaster’s favorite person. I’m just going to tell you that you’re the A++ listener. This is from a solopreneur who is feeling that crunch of feeling like they have to do all the things because they’re a solopreneur and then feeling like they’re not making any headway because they have to do all the things.
Anytime you leave a review that says, 'I don't listen to podcasts, but I listened to this one,' you immediately become the podcaster's favorite person. Share on XI will just read one more so then we can get into the fun stuff. From Kathy, who’s actually been in business on her own for ten years and is excited about learning new stuff. She’s excited about learning from the show, and I love that. Here’s what I pulled out. Gwen, I want you to share what you heard in what I said, but what I have pulled out is that there is pressure that female entrepreneurs experience or at least feel when it comes to traditional success measures or traditional success metrics. When I look at the reviews, I see a lot about feeling crunched for time, not enough hours in the day, that kind of stuff. Also, this desire to learn what to look out for before you’re actually there. What are your thoughts?
I heard lots of the same things. I think I’ll say one of the most critical things that we talk about, but is also the least often said is success is not a simple definition. I think so often, we’re taught to believe that it is a simple definition. It’s this formula, this plus this equals this. That’s what success formula looks like. It’s like, “No.” It’s way more complex than that. I appreciate the reviewer who said is doing a lot of internal work because it’s easy to say and it sounds simple, but it’s actually really hard work to figure out that piece.
I think the time element is just an ongoing thing. I’m old. From an old perspective, it just keeps getting worse because we get more and more conditioned for things to be so fast. I was at an event and was talking with someone and we were laughing about being old enough to remember when FedEx first came out, like, “Why on earth would you need something that fast?”
Now I’m like, “Seriously, it’s been stuck at the Tracy depot for like a week,” which is our nearby depot that everything gets stuck at for a long time.
At the time, it was like mail pretty much got to you within 3 to 5 business days and that was fine. I do think we are more and more time pressured because everything feels like it has to move faster. I’m not sure that in fact it does but we are being so conditioned for that speed aspect.
That is a really good point. I think as much as I love the internet, as much as I love social media, it really has fed that monster. I remember when email was something you could only conveniently check once or twice a day. Now it’s on my phone, which it still boggles. I still feel very old when I think of I pretty much have a phone that is stronger than the computer I learned about when I was in school.
For me, that goes without saying.
Our target audience are women in business, so I wouldn’t expect to hear from a bunch of men, whether it’s on reviews or emailing us.
Even though we’re married to awesome men who might someday actually leave us a review, you never know.
My husband is incredibly honest. He’s like, “I am Tanya’s husband, so obviously, I am biased,” because that’s how he would leave reviews. I’m sure Arlo’s reading.
He would do the same thing.
Why Is It So Hard To Define Success?
Why is it, do you think, that women struggle with external pressure to meet success metrics so much? I feel like our reviews are a snapshot of the business world. It’s not only these people feel this way.
There are a couple things. One, I have become even more aware because of our conversations. It’s just the pressure of being a woman. I have opted out of a lot of the woman responsibilities. I chose not to have children. I have never had to deal with all of the elements that go along with that. It doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate it, because I absolutely do. I possibly appreciate it more than women that do have children, quite honestly, because I do not take it for granted at all. I know that that creates a lot more openness in my world for it. I am married but I’ve also been times where I wasn’t married. All of those things add on.
I’m also a daughter, which means I’ve got parents to deal with. There are just some really interesting differences in all of society. It doesn’t matter what your cultural expectation is. There are all sorts of things that just keeps piling on. Society expectations of women in general, 98% of the time, are different than they are for men. Those expectations take up more of our just existence, regardless of what any of these other choices are. Married, not married, children, no children, whether your parents are still around or not and all of those things. I think the other issue is truly a systemic patriarchal issue that the success metrics were defined initially and have just been around for so long out of the patriarchal society.
Societal expectations of women are generally different than they are for men 98% of the time. Share on XI’m not just like down with a patriarchy and there’s nothing positive about it because that’s not true. It has swung too far in one direction, but I also believe if we completely swing to the opposite direction, we’re just going to have a whole different set of problems. Trying to find the balance between the two for me is the trick. There are things about the patriarchal society that are positive, but they don’t just translate across on everything in all ways, in all places.
I think goal setting is one of them because it’s been around the way a man thinks and what his responsibilities are and all of those things. Therefore, I think a lot of the typical definitions of success are very male-oriented. Not that they don’t work for some women, because they absolutely, positively do, but thinking that they’re going to work for the majority of women is probably a misstep.
I’m thinking of also what we assume takes people’s time because I think that’s part of it as well. We have these traditional success metrics. The traditional success metrics, oftentimes, as you pointed out, are built out by people who had somebody else to run their household. What we’ve done is we’ve created this situation. I know when I was in grad school, we did a lot of glass ceiling research and part of it was about trying to figure out why this particular field was 80% female dominated, but only 10% of the positions of power were held by women. What research found, it’s because women left the industry. Not really leave the industry, but they would go into consulting once they hit middle management because the executive level didn’t seem accessible to them.
It all has to do with the invisible labor that they shoulder. What would happen is they would go into agency work and find that they struggled because they were still trying to be the mom who’s the room mom and volunteers in the classroom once a week and cooks all the meals from scratch. I’m not saying this. I’m exaggerating here a little bit, dear reader. I get it. Make all the meals from scratch, do all the laundry, keep the house clean. By the way, now I’m going to run a small business and I expect that I’m not successful until I make $250,000 a year.
It reminds me of that saying you can have it all, but you can’t have it all at the same time. I think that is, to me, a big force. It’s also why we need shows like ours that point out that there’s different levels of success. Something that you’ve said that I’d love for you to expand on, because you’ve said this in the past. Different measures of success at different periods of time.
There are different levels and measures of success at different periods of time. Share on XSuccess Is Not A Simple Definition
That’s something I’m surprised and not surprised how often I’m talking to my clients about that. “I know this is what you defined as success, but it was what you defined as success a year or two ago. Let’s talk about all the things in your world that have changed since then.” When I’m talking about all the things in your world that have changed since then, almost none of them are actually directly related to the business. The kids are no longer in elementary school, they’re in junior high, and one of them is on a travel soccer team. It’s those kinds of things. “Two years ago, mom and dad were both doing really well, but dad has since passed away and mom’s not adjusting.” I’m making up random examples, but all of these things actually have huge impact on what success needs to look like for you.
It could be as simple as two years ago you were single and really happy and now, you’re dating somebody. All of these things add in. One of the things that my experience, and I think part of it is because they have their resources to do this, is men typically have been able to compartmentalize work from personal easier. There could be something in the brain. I’m not really sure about that. It’s not my area of expertise. I do think there’s also often they have other resources that help them to better be able to compartmentalize.
However, a lot of the goals that we set and the things that we’re talking about, we are assuming that level of compartmentalization, and it was and is one of the things that I am much better at than almost every other woman I know. It did allow me to do things differently because I could really compartmentalize. It causes a whole lot of problems at other places. I’m not saying it’s necessarily an answer.
We have to pause there because I just love your ability to say like, “This is something I do really well, but by the way, there are consequences in other areas for the fact that I can do it really well over here.” Thank you for that. We need more transparency like that.
It’s not like that’s the answer. It’s just an answer. It’s a version of an answer. I do think that that makes a difference. Women have been taught that they should be compartmentalizing these two things where until you have a really large organization, it becomes very difficult to truly compartmentalize. The things do overlap and because they overlap, you’d really need to treat them as a full unit together, not as two separate things. Even if their business does get larger, often it’s not a skillset that they have. Let’s stop pretending like we’re going to treat it like two separate things. Let’s treat it as your life instead of your personal life and your work life. Let’s just treat it as your life.
The other theme that I think comes out in the reviews we’ve gotten is the feeling that there’s not enough hours in the day. I’m curious from your perspective, having been advising business owners for 40 years, why do you think solopreneurs and small business owners always feel short on time?
Part of it is because they have somewhere in their life, and I don’t know where it could have come from. Because there are a lot of potential sources.
We are not therapists.
I’m not saying I’m surprised. It’s like it could have come from 1,000 places. They have bought into that, “If I’m not busy, I’m not productive. If I’m not productive, I’m not valuable.” Early on, it’s a lot of hard work and so we just keep thinking, “If I’m not working that hard, then I’m not working as hard as I should.” We start shoulding ourselves. That’s never good. I think we fill up every free space that we have. Sometimes with good stuff. I‘m not saying it’s all bad, but not always.
This is when I talk with my clients a lot about. If you don’t actually have margin and leave margin, then there is no space for anything else to land without pushing something off. I was actually talking about this specifically to a client and what she said is, “Yeah, my margins have actually been at the edge of the paper a little bit further. When it goes out on the printer, it says, ‘Are you sure you want this?’ it’s not actually all going to print because the printer actually can’t print to the very edge of the paper, so the thing comes out and there’s a few letters missing on either side.”
If you don't leave margin, there is no space for anything else to land without pushing something off. Share on XI said, “Yeah, we want to get at least back to the standard margins that are like one inch on the slides and an inch on the top and the bottom so that if you need to add something, you can actually write a note in there on the margin and be able to read it.” That analogy really applies to our life and our time. If we really are filling it up as full as it can possibly be, when something unexpected happens, good or bad, and we always assume it’s bad, but what if you have this great opportunity? You can’t do it because there was no margin for it to be done that. We always assume it’s because something disastrous happens and now we can and because normally those we still deal with. That means something else drops off. You’re also forgetting all of the fabulous things that you might be having to say no to that if you had a margin you could say yes to.
I’m just thinking of I’ve gotten speaking engagement invitations before where I’m just like, “There’s no way. I’m too backed up.” Even though the event maybe isn’t a month, it’s like there is no way that I could push everything forward that I need to push forward in order to make that happen. That not allowing for any margin is probably one of our biggest disservices. This is something that you have said and I think it’s important to bring this out now.
Just for the benefit of our readers, Gwen doesn’t work Fridays. Gwen works a four-day work week. In case you’re wondering, that’s because I work a full work week and then some because we’re working on me still. Gwen works a four-day work week and you are very protective of your Fridays. I have heard you tell clients before, really encouraging them to tighten their working time and saying, “I doubt you are more productive in 6 days than you would be in 5.” Once you’re down to five, “I doubt you would be more productive in 5 than you would be in 4.” Tell me how that maths out for you.
There is a point that you need an X amount of hours. Most of us have spent some time in some sort of a corporate-ish job. When I say corporate-ish, it could be being a waitress but working for somebody else.
Working For somebody else. They’re paying you for your time. They call the shots.
You’re a W-2 employee of some sort or another, almost to everybody. There are always a few exceptions. They were, as people say, truly unemployable. This is just never going to happen. Most of us have done it at least a little bit of that. That gets into our head that we’re supposed to fill that time with work. What happens is when there isn’t good work, we fill it with less good work and then sometimes we fill it with even less, less good work. There’s a point that you can keep pushing that envelope until you get to a point where it’s like, “No, I’m actually not able to get everything done that I really want to get done.” I also know from lots of experience in lots of different ways and places that if you work 40 hours a week and we’re absolutely only working 40 hours a week, you’re not going to have 40 productive hours.
That is not the way it works. Usually, at best, you can do about 80%. That’s the guideline that I’ve seen. Somewhere between 80% and 90% is about the very best that you can do. Most of us are generally functioning closer to a 60% level when we work for ourselves because we distract ourselves doing all sorts of other things and we fill in our time with all sorts of other things. An example that I’m dealing with right now, I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on Fridays for the last several months, but it’s because I need to go to physical therapy twice a week for a couple of hours during what would be my normal work hours. I’m trading some of my Friday time off time for some personal stuff that’s temporary.
It’s not long term. I’m not going to have to do it forever. Know that I don’t get to count that as work time because it’s not work time. I’m not working. I’m often listening to a business book or whatnot, but I wouldn’t have set aside time to do that otherwise. This is not work time. Understanding that sometimes we’re trading one for another and, quite honestly, I was about three weeks in and I was really frustrated because I kept feeling like I needed to get some work done on Fridays. It occurred to me, it was like, “No, I’m losing four hours of my work week every week right now. Okay, that makes sense then.”
I know as this winds down, it will be much easier for me to be able to go back to my Fridays, being completely off. It doesn’t mean that they’re always completely off. Sometimes, I will work because it would be like working overtime. Some weeks, you just need to work some more hours. That’s okay. Most of my clients, when they have, for any reason, had to constrict their hours, find that they can still get all of their work done.
My goal always is constrict it a little bit and see if you can still get all the work done. Constrict it a little bit more and a little bit more. I use my bookkeeping as the easy example. I say it all the time. I’m the weirdo. I love doing my bookkeeping. I love playing with the numbers. I can make my bookkeeping take four hours each time I sit down to do it. I also know that I can get it done at this point in about 75 minutes. I can’t get it done much less than that. There’s busier weeks and not busier weeks. I can get it down to 60 on some weeks, but that’s really what it has to be. It’s not like I can get it down to fifteen. It’s not going to happen, but it’s playing with that. I can easily expand it to four hours. I think we do that with a lot of things, particularly the things that we like doing.
I think things that you like doing and also things that, I’m going to call them creative in nature, there’s no prescribed time limit for it. There’s no universal standard. That bookkeeping takes 75 minutes. Therefore, you get in a room and somebody asks the question, I don’t know what room you’d have to be in before somebody asks the question, “How long do you spend on your bookkeeping?” Let’s just pretend you’re in a room and somebody asks the question. One person says, “It takes me about an hour and a half.” Somebody else says, “It takes me four hours.” Nobody questions them. Nobody says, “You must be bed at bookkeeping because it takes you four hours.” The assumption is just like, “That must be complex and this other person’s bookkeeping must be simple.” It’s easy to let those things stretch.
I think back to when I was working for university as a public information officer, part of what I had to do is I had to write stories about the research that came out of my focus area. I had a partner who was at it for a lot longer than I was. She’d been there a couple of years. When I started, she said, “Here’s my recommendation. You designate two meeting days a month or a week. Of your 5 days to work, 2 are meeting days and 1 needs to be an admin day. One you leave open.” She always said, “Mondays leave open. You’ll get pulled into a staff meeting or whatever else and then Fridays are your writing days. Not very many people are working. People will not be able to answer the phone. Just write on Fridays.”
What I found though is, best case scenario, I could write two stories on a Friday. Sometimes, I could get a third in. It was really hard for me to do more than two stories a week because I was coming from a newspaper background where I had to file a story every single day. When I had all day to write, it felt like it was luxurious. How am I going to fill the hours? I couldn’t figure out why is it so hard to write these stories? These are not hard stories. These are like single source stories.
It’s just because if that was all I had to do that day, there was no reason to be on purpose. I was much better just going, “I have to file a story three days a week.” The stories were easier to write. I didn’t have writer’s block. It was so much better for me. I just remember thinking how interesting it was at the time. What works for her doesn’t work for me. I am so much more productive if I have that deadline pressure where she just was not. She was the opposite. She just wasn’t the same.
That really is the trick, is figuring out what is going to work for you. I’m going to reemphasize it because I think it’s so important. If you create margin, you have to not fill it up. You have to get comfortable with the space. My experience in working with my clients is when I give them space. They’re okay with it for about half a second. We design it. They’ve got space. Usually, in less than 30 days, they’ve done something new to fill it back up.
How To Avoid Feeling Overwhelmed
It was like, “No, we need to keep the space so when it’s needed for other things.” Not the new things, but the existing thing that goes whoop, because every once in a while, it goes whoop. It doesn’t knock everything else off the plate or stress you out or put you into overwhelm or any of the rest of the things. Not being, I’ll say, on the hairy edge of overwhelm all the time becomes actually uncomfortable.
I have ten questions that I’m not going to ask. Those will be questions for another episode. That’s an unintended teaser. I want to put a pin in that for just a second. We’ve talked about the external pressure that women, in particular, feel as entrepreneurs to meet traditional success metrics. Defining success by what others say success is versus actually looking within and deciding what success is for them and feeling completely valid, fair, reasonable, and accomplished for those individual success metrics.
We’ve talked about the timepiece. We’ve spent a lot of time actually talking about time. The question was, why do entrepreneurs always fall short on time? Where you landed is, I’ll just sum it up and say we try to pack too many things. We try to pack more than 24 hours of stuff work and personal into a 24-hour period.
We don’t feel like we’re adding any value when we’re spending time thinking and strategizing and those working on the business tasks. What you were just saying is even when we hire a professional to help us free up time, we just turn around and we fill it with other things. We’re about out of time. What I’d like to do is I want to give our readers just a few practical tips on what are the actions they can take to have a better business life? I want to start, Gwen, with that piece. If I’m going to free up time, how do I not feel it with other stuff? How do I protect the time as I free it up?
Learning To Delegate
The first is being okay being bored, not doing something productive. Just truly being in a vegetative state. I’m not even saying meditating, because meditating in and of itself is another activity because now I need to meditate 30 minutes every day. It’s truly saying, “It’s okay if I just like get up and walk around the block,” not because I need to walk around the block because it’s healthy for me and all of those things, but, “Yeah, I’m just going to go outside and spend a little time outside and sit in my garden for no reason.”
Having actual white space, like true white, unscripted time.
Start with little tiny amounts because if I tell you to do that for a day, you will lose your fricking mind. If I tell you to try and find five minutes to do nothing, you can probably do that because that’s not quite so scary. At some point, it’s 10 minutes and then it’s 15 and then it’s a half an hour and then it’s an hour and then it’s a half a day. That’s where you work into it. As you get into bigger chunks, then it’s about having hobbies and things like, “If I don’t do my hobby, it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t get done.” I’m filling up the margins, but I’m really filling it up truly with stuff that absolutely doesn’t matter. If I don’t work on my quilt or my knitting or my whatever for two weeks, life does not end right at all.
I like that. That’s really good because I think that’s the other thing. It’s like, “I freed up time, but now what?” Nobody ever talks about that as far as I’ve ever seen. I’ve had people say, “Get a hobby.” It’s like, that feels like more work and I don’t want to do that. I like that idea of starting even in five-minute increments and if you’re going to fill it, fill it with things that don’t matter. Do not fill it with a meeting. I’m going to not fill it with laundry. I’ll let you decide if you want to fill it with laundry. It’s just not my goal.
That probably needs to be done so that probably doesn’t count.
That’s the deciding factor then. It’s whether it needs to be done or doesn’t need to be done. If it doesn’t need to be done, then you can put that into your white space. If it does need to be done, that has to fit within, we’ll call it “work time.” Alright, Gwen, any other thoughts you want to share?
Define Success On Your Own Terms
I do think realizing that defining success for yourself is hard is really important because if you start sharing it out in broad strokes, you are going to find a lot of people are going to argue with you that that’s not actually success. The truth is for them, it probably isn’t but we’re not defining it for them. We’re defining it for us. The third thing I would say is this is the place where having somebody who can give you true accountability can be really helpful if you’re really serious about doing this.
I hold you loosely accountable because you haven’t actually told me to hold you accountable, so I’m not, but I hold you loosely accountable about how much you work. I bring it up from time to time. I reflect it back to you. You have not made that request of me, so I don’t actually do it other than I want to make sure you don’t get burned out because I do. That does matter to me. I want you to continue to be able to work for me.
You haven’t asked me to do that, so I don’t truly hold you accountable for that. If you did, that would be something that we would talk about and reflect on on a regular basis. True accountability requires someone who cares about it, who really cares about you and your success, who is on the outside, though, not on the inside. Usually this can’t be a spouse because they’ve also got their own agenda that usually runs really parallel with yours. That can be not as useful.
You need someone who’s objective. It’s best if they can be nonjudgmental about it. That really is where true accountability comes from. Nonjudgmental. It also means that they have to be able to be insightful enough to give you actual insights to help you get past whatever it is that you’re struggling with. That’s not everybody.
Define insightful for me because I feel like the context in which you just use it is different than how I hear it defined.
For me, insightful means that they can actually provide an insight that you wouldn’t have been able to come up with by yourself, probably.
It’s actually new information, new perspective. I’ve never thought about it that way. I didn’t see that.
New information, new perspective and/or an idea or tactic or process to say, “Have you thought about trying this?”
The reason is I oftentimes hear insightful or insight confused with wisdom. I knew that’s not what you were saying. I think that’s a really good way to frame it. What we’re doing in this episode is mirroring back to you, if you’re reading, whether you’re actually reading the right show. If you see yourself in any of the reviews that I read off, then you’ve come to the right place. You’re reading the right show. We are recording this for you. If you are reading, you’re like, “Yeah, me too,” leave us a review. Add your name to the list. We’ll read off the reviews every now and then. We won’t make a huge habit of it. We know that that’s not necessarily the most exciting thing always.
However, I think it’s so important as entrepreneurs to recognize that we’re not alone. So much of our time is spent solo, unless you’re doing some big extroverted thing like Gwen does. Gwen’s very extroverted. I am not. This is how we can develop community even if it’s not back and forth. Gwen, I want to say thank you for breaking this all down and entertaining my questions because you didn’t really know what we were going to talk about.
Reader, I want to thank you for reading. Of course, you’re always welcome to reach out to us. You can email me at Tonya@EverydayEffectiveness.com. Leave us a review wherever you’re seeing this. We would just love to add you and your questions to upcoming episodes. Until next time, we will see you soon.
Mentioned in this Episode
The Everyday Effectiveness team practices true accountability internally and in partnership with their clients. The Weekly Course Of Action is a hands-on accountability program that makes sure you stay focused on what matters most to run a sustainable, scalable business that supports your goals and lifestyle.
If you enjoyed this episode, please:
Also, be sure to check out Episode 13, where we explore how to balance growth and sustainability in your business without burning out.
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
