The comparison trap is a sneaky beast, isn’t it? It whispers doubts in your ear while you scroll through seemingly “perfect” businesses online, making you question your own path. In this candid episode, Tonya Kubo and Gwen Bortner dive headfirst into this all-too-common pitfall for entrepreneurs, especially women. We’re pulling back the curtain on those curated social media feeds to reveal the messy, authentic realities behind the scenes. Gwen shares her insightful perspectives on why women might be particularly susceptible to comparison and offers practical, down-to-earth strategies to define success on your terms. Forget the one-size-fits-all formulas; we’re all about finding your unique “right answer” and building a business that celebrates your strengths, your vision, and your authentic self. Tune in to break free from the trap and step into your power!
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The Comparison Trap: Redefine Business Success, Ignite Your Vision
Gendered Comparison Trap: Social Media Illusion
If scrolling through social media leaves you feeling like every other business owner has cracked the code on success and left you out in the cold, good news. This show is for you. We are going to tackle one of the most toxic traps for entrepreneurs, which is comparison. Fun fact, or maybe not-so-fun fact, comparing your business to others or yourself to other business owners is nothing less than destructive.
We are going to unpack the reality behind those perfect-looking businesses. Gwen and I see under the hood of a lot of businesses every single day. We’re going to tell you the reality behind those perfect-looking businesses, and we are going to give you practical strategies to define success on your own terms.
Gwen, I want to jump in immediately. I’m going to state a potentially unpopular opinion and say that I feel like, in many cases, this tends to be a gendered issue where women tend to be much more vulnerable to the destructive effects of comparison in business than I see with male entrepreneurs. Fight me on it. Am I right or am I wrong?
Both genders do a lot of comparison, but where I think women immediately beat themselves up, men see it as a challenge, like the gauntlet has been thrown. Instead of saying, “I’m not nearly as good,” I’ve heard them say statements like, “He’s not nearly as smart as I am. It’s stupid that he’s doing well.” Women are like, “I must not be nearly as smart as they are.”
What I hear is statements like, “Maybe when I’m a real business owner or I’m a grownup business owner, I’ll feel this way.” I never hear men use those terms. They never take that as a sign that they lack. They take it as a sign of, “Anybody can do this. Why not me?”
It’s exactly the same thought, but projected on the opposite person. Where women project the negativity on themselves and the positivity on the other person, men, on the whole, and these are giant generalizations and not universal, project the negativity on the other person and the positivity on themselves.
Debunking The Myth of The Right Business Way
When I’m thinking of comparison, one place where it starts for me is that there is this belief that there is a right way to build a business, which means there is a wrong way to build a business.
Comparing your business to others or yourself to other business owners is nothing less than destructive. Share on XI am so anti those kinds of statements because I am always about how there are dozens of right answers. There is a better answer for you than some of the other right answers. When I’m working with folks, that’s always my goal, which is to help figure out what is our best right answer for you and your situation, as opposed to the right answer. I don’t think there is the right answer. There are lots of right answers out there. Trying to figure out what the best right answer for you is is the only thing I care about.
If that’s true, if there are multiple right answers, then why is it that we seem to be surrounded by several people painting a picture of what seems to be a very similar right answer? I’ll use some examples. On social media, and it varies by industry, lifestyle influencers all have a pretty distinctive look that is the same. We see a lot of white, maybe cozy, minimalistic houses. We see a certain number of children who never seem to have dirty faces. We see a very common routine.
In the generalized business, we see a lot of emphasis on “productive morning routines”. It’s like, “You’ve got to get up at this time of the morning and do all of these things before you check email, before you do this, and before you do that.” If there’s no right way, and there are a lot of ways, then why is it that we seem to be presented with a right way?
I wish I had the answer to that, quite honestly. I know part of the reason is someone, for some reason, gets a megaphone and says, “This is what worked for me. Look at all of this success.” Everyone’s like, “I am starry-eyed. I want that same thing, and the way to get it must be by their process or their piece.” It’s interesting that we’re having this discussion because I was re-listening to Write a Must-Read by AJ Harper. I know you’ve read this book as well.
I’ve listened to it more than once. I’m about to start an early-stage process of writing a book, so I’m re-listening to her amazing book. I came to be aware of AJ as someone who worked with Mike Malowitz on his books, but then got to know AJ in person and through a whole lot of other places. I know that she has helped a ton of people write their own books, not as someone who’s functioning in a ghost writer or a writer partnership way, but as an instructor.
Her early career was as a ghost writer. People would publish books that they had not written at all. AJ had written these books. I was listening before I pulled up to the post. She was talking about sitting at a conference, listening to someone from the stage talk about how they were able to create this bestseller. They don’t talk at all about hiring a ghost writer, even though AJ knows they were because she was.
She was their ghost writer. She’s like, “I did that.”
Both genders compare themselves to others, but women tend to beat themselves up about it. Men, on the other hand, see it as a challenge to be better. Share on XShe’s great. There’s no clue who this person is. She makes it completely anonymous. They talk about how they were on the New York Times Bestseller List, but they conveniently left out that they paid $100,000 to gain the system to be on the New York Times Bestseller List. They’re selling, “You can be a New York Times Bestseller List author, too,” to a bunch of people who are like, “They did it, so I must be able to do it too.” That’s the issue.
Her example, which is a real-life, real-person-knew-this example, is the problem. We talk about the end result, like, “Look at what I did for so-and-so,” but we leave out a whole bunch of details because they may not be as fun, they’re maybe not as sexy, they may not be attainable for everybody. We’re going to leave that out so everyone believes that they can do it. We’re selling hope as opposed to the actual reality of what’s there. That’s the problem.
People see that and they’re like, “I’m going to do it.” One other person does it, and they say, “I did it, too.” Someone else is like, “If those two people did it, then that must be the way.” If someone comes up beside them and says, “I did it, too, but I did it completely this other way,” either people are like, “Shut up. Don’t tell them that,” or people are like, “That must not be the way because these two people said it’s this way. That can’t possibly be right.”
It’s the conversation we’ve had before. We were listening to Peterson talk about innovation versus information. Innovation seems cool, but no one pays for innovation. It’s too out there, and I don’t know how to apply it to my life. When someone says something contrary to what is considered best practices, which I always point out is common practice, then we’re like, “That can’t possibly be right because no one else is saying it.”
What you’re saying brings up a couple of points. I’m seeing this all over the headlines. There are a lot of creator industry or influencer industry reports coming out where a lot of creators are talking about a frustration that they have. They are rewarded for producing content that gets attention, and that content that gets attention is not necessarily good content. They don’t feel like they’re being rewarded for putting out value. They’re being rewarded for putting out stuff that gets clicks and watches. They’re frustrated with that.
Yet, so many of us on the other side are watching John Smith, who is a creator, and going, “His stuff is getting 5,000 to 6,000 views. That’s what I have to do if I want to get attention on my bookkeeping business,” not realizing that John Smith is selling attention. That’s how he’s getting paid. It’s all those watches, not whatever he is talking about in his video. Not only are you comparing yourself to somebody with a different business model, but you’re comparing yourself to somebody with an entirely different goal.
Also, potentially someone at an entirely different space and time in their business. You opened your bookkeeping business. John Smith’s been doing this for ten years.
There’s that piece.
That’s not what John Smith was doing ten years ago.
There’s also the piece of that myth of overnight success. Even if you heard about John Smith and everybody is telling you John Smith blew up overnight and came out of the blue doesn’t mean that John Smith has not been creating content out there for 10 or 14 years.
Unmasking The Truth About Overnight Success
My favorite story about overnight success came out of the mouth of Debbie Macomber. This is when I was in the knitting industry. Years ago, she had written a book that was a knitting-based book that went through the roof. Everyone was like, “She’s an overnight success.” She was at a convention doing a keynote thing where I was. She talked about how her overnight success had taken her eighteen years and that she had written 12 or 14 books before this book hit.
Part of the reason she popped into my head is that I was at the airport, and I saw there was a new Debbie Macomber book out. It was in the airport bookstore, which means it’s at a different level when it’s getting that level of publicity, distribution, and all of those things. That’s because she became an overnight success and was able to maintain it over time. She’s at a different level, but it wasn’t her first book.
We could talk about how that is so true, almost always, when it comes to these big New York Times bestselling authors as with so many things. Back when I was managing social media for a university and they were always wanting me to make them viral, a lot of the example videos were videos that were 3 to 5 years old. They had gotten viral, but they were created so long ago.
Part of the problem is that we all logically, in our brains, know that what we see is a public perception and is the tip of the iceberg. We know in our heads that there’s so much below the surface that we’re not aware of, and yet we hold ourselves to the standard that is the tip of the iceberg. How do we break free of that? Honestly, you’re one of the very few people I see day-to-day in business who doesn’t seem to fall into the comparison trap so often. How do we avoid it? Give me your secrets. I’m writing them down.
There are lots of right answers out there. So, trying to figure out the best right answer for you is the only thing that really matters. Share on XContext Matters: Your Unique Business Journey
The first thing is to realize that context matters. Context has so many details in it that you can’t possibly know unless you are intimately friends or relationship-involved with whoever this other person is. You and I could probably do some comparisons because we are pretty good friends. We understand where each other lives. We probably could do some comparison, but we also don’t do any comparison because we understand what all of those details are. It doesn’t even probably occur to you to compare yourself to me because you understand how very different our lives are, our time in business, and all of the things.
It becomes easy not to compare because there’s no comparison. It’s like comparing apples and bacon. They’re both food, but beyond that, it gets hard to start drawing a lot of comparisons. Since I talk about it so much with my clients, I stay very aware that no matter how much somebody else’s business looks like my business, feels like my business, and says the same things like my business.
I still get caught saying, “People are going to them, but they’d be happier with me than they are with them,” but it’s more from a point of curiosity as opposed to, “Because they’re doing that, I’m failing.” I’m not failing. I may not be succeeding at the level I want to succeed, but it’s not if I did everything they did that I would be successful. Part of it is I’ve got to be me. Me being me is part of where success is always going to lie.
When we start doing the comparison, then all of a sudden, I’m going to try and be Susie Q. I’m always going to fail at being Susie Q because I’m not Susie Q. Realizing that I have a better chance at being successful at being Gwen and not trying to be Tonya allows me to stay focused on, “What can I learn from Tonya that may apply to me?” but not say, “If I emulate Tonya, I will be as successful as Tonya.”
I want to gloss over this because it feels so known. That makes perfect sense. Yet, I also know for a fact that everything you say is true. I see people all the time beating themselves up over this time and time again. I was having a conversation with somebody who had a client who wanted to completely switch gears on their marketing plan because they saw Glennon Doyle do something different.
My friend is like, “You are right. Glennon Doyle is doing that. It’s like this and that. You are 100% true, but Glennon Doyle already has her market fit, and you don’t. Glennon Doyle has been doing this for many years, and you started your business a year ago.” I don’t even know what Glennon Doyle is doing, but what she is doing makes sense for her, but does not make sense for somebody who is fresh into business. We wrapped up our quarterly tune-up, so this is fresh in my mind. Something that I have seen you do time and time again, and you do this for yourself, but you also encourage others to do this, is celebrating your own milestones, comparing yourself against yourself.
That’s the only one that matters.
You have a better chance at being successful by being yourself and not trying to be someone else. Share on XThat’s true. If all that matters is my performance against my performance, how can I stay focused on that or on my strengths and my vision for the future when I’m surrounded by so much stuff that tells me that there’s a different right way, or that I should be aspiring to some other measurement of success?
Stop paying attention to all that other stuff. Don’t spend as much time scrolling on social media. Not that you shouldn’t spend some time on social media because that keeps us aware of what’s going on, and not necessarily even doom-scrolling. It’s scrolling on social media and seeing, “They’re doing this.” Most of us do not need more ideas. That is not the thing that the entrepreneurial brain needs. We do not need more ideas.
Your Data Is Key, Not Their Information
What we need is fewer ideas executed so that we have our data, not someone else’s data, that says, “This is working for me, my target audience, my product or my service offering, my stage of business, and all of the things that are about me or not. If not, then I can choose to do something else.” Trying to understand what everybody is doing is always going to be a losing proposition, but being focused on, “What can I do? What is the data I can gather on that?” One of the things our friend Nick Peterson says is, “Your data is more valid than my information any day of the week.”
Say more. I’ve heard Nick say that, so I know what you mean, but our reader hasn’t.
Tonya leads my marketing. When Tonya says, “We need to put your newsletter out every week,” my instinct has been, “I’ve tried that. It doesn’t move the needle at all.” She’s like, “It’s going to make a difference.” It’s like, “Fine. We will do it, and we will collect the data. I’ll show you my data, and then you’ll realize that we only need to put our newsletter out once a month,” which is what we’re doing.
This is the exact conversation Tonya and I have. She was like, “We need to be consistent about the newsletter with good information and all of the things,” and we did it. I said, “How long do we need to do it for you to have real data?” She said, “At least six months.” I was like, “We’ll do it for six months.” We did it for a year, and it did not move the needle at all. We did not get any additional subscribers, to speak of.
Plus or minus ten.
Most of us are less motivated by money than we think. We believe we're motivated by money, but it's more about what we think money will provide, like time freedom and flexibility. Share on XNothing that would’ve been what would be an appropriate marketing result for the effort that was going in. We didn’t get any more responses to our offers. There was nothing that happened. Although Tonya’s data said it would, my data, because I had done it before, but not with Tonya, said it wouldn’t. My data was more valid than hers because she was looking at data from lots of clients. For some of her clients, it makes a huge difference.
Full disclosure, in every single one of my clients, it makes a difference. This is the only business where it hasn’t made a difference. We’re doing some different things with marketing. I shared that data with a couple of other people. Both of them were like, “We’ve got to go back.” I was like, “I dare you to find a hole in my data collection process. I dare you to find a place where I did the math wrong. This is what we have.”
Both of them were like, “That’s curious.” I’m like, “It’s curious. We have buttoned that up. We’re not going down that path again. The data is solid. We know what we know. We’ve got to figure out something else.” That is an excellent point. Number one is that in order to measure yourself against yourself, you’ve got to be tracking.
You have to be tracking in some way. In this case, you were tracking it in very analytical ways. For a lot of our clients, when we’re doing this, we’re not even tracking in any super analytical way. Most of them are using their weekly course of action. They’re going back and looking and saying, “At the beginning of the quarter, I was planning on doing this. In the middle of the quarter, I got here. At the end of the quarter, I’m here. Look how awesome that is.”
It’s not some big analytical spreadsheet and keeping lots of numbers and doing lots of comparisons. In some cases, it is. I have a very detailed spreadsheet that I keep track of that shows what my average length of engagement is with my clients over time. I also track it by quarter so that I can see what the trend is, whether it goes up or it goes down. I know that that data is useful in a lot of places.
Even if it’s true for me, it doesn’t mean it would be true for you, even though it is a very similar business model, because there are all sorts of details that go into it. The context matters. That’s why when we get too wound up in saying, “This is the thing,” it’s it. We don’t need to learn new things. We need to try them out, collect the data, make decisions, and move on.
What I was going to say is that it’s important to be tracking the data. A lot of times, we get so caught up in, “Everybody else is doing so much better than me,” that we hide from our data. We intentionally don’t collect it because we don’t want evidence of how bad we are and how far we have to go. Collecting that data is the only way to figure out if. Where you sit compared to everybody else and where you sit compared to where you were 1 year ago or 2 years ago back around tax season is often the first time a lot of business owners truly know if they did better last year than the year before.
There's a lot of life ahead of you. Things could go wrong, but most of us don't live assuming we'll die tomorrow. Yet, we treat our goals like we do. Focus on what's important now. Share on XThat always panics me because you should be looking at those numbers.
Let’s go to that. Let’s talk about how to align your business goals with what you’re doing. Get out of that comparison trap. Stop comparing your success to other people’s success and start comparing your success to your goals. What metrics should you be tracking? I know, because I work with you, that there are metrics that are beyond revenue that are meaningful to track in any given business.
The challenge is that sometimes, SMART goals are dumb. SMART is Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. We look for things that can easily fit into that criteria, even though it may not be motivational. Revenue is one of those things that fits into that criteria. It’s very specific and measurable. We can take action on it. We can set realistic goals, and we can stay time-bound by the end of the year. It fits all of those criteria.
The problem is that most of us are less motivated by money than it sounds. We think we’re motivated by money, but most of us are motivated by what we believe the money is going to provide us, which is often time freedom, flexibility, and additional perks in our world. Maybe it’s travel. Maybe it’s sending the kids to college. “I want to send the kids to college,” need money, but the money isn’t what’s motivating you. Sending the kids to college is what’s motivating you.
The next thing that happens is we say, “We need to have a seven-figure business.” You need to take out of your business X amount of dollars, which may or may not require a seven-figure business. It may require an 8-figure business or a 6-figure business. There are all sorts of factors that play in there. Figuring out that piece of how much I take out of my business is a way harder equation and more difficult.
Since it’s so much more difficult, we say seven-figure business because that’s a way easier number to track. The thing that’s motivating us is, “I need to be able to take $200,000 a year out of my business.” That’s what’s motivating us because we’re like, “That’s what I need to be able to pay the bills, to send the kids to school, and to do all the things.” I made up that number. Who knows what the number is? That’s a very different motivation.
One of the things that we talk about is what is truly motivating? What does success truly mean to you? You have to know. Even someone who’s running a business that looks exactly like yours, what success means to you could be completely different. We have a couple of folks that we work with who fundamentally have identical businesses from the outside. Their motivations and goals are 100% different from one another because of the stage of life and family situation. The list goes on and on.
They know each other well enough. They don’t even begin to think of themselves as competitors. They share information all the time. They do all of this. In the outside world, those people would say, “These two people are direct competitors.” In most ways, they are, but they don’t see themselves that way. They aren’t doing the comparison thing. They’re happy to share information because they understand that they’re at different spaces and places in their business. There’s a whole lot of context around the choices that they’re making and what’s motivating them and their business.
That’s a good point. That’s the other thing we don’t see. We see people’s results when we’re scrolling social media, but we don’t see what drives them to achieve those results.
Someone who’s single, no spouse, and all the rest of it may have a ton more time to put into their business than someone who looks the same, same age, same background, and same experience, but also has a spouse, 4 kids, 2 pets, and an aging parent that’s got Alzheimer’s. That’s a completely different set of contexts, although the business may look exactly the same.
If you are the person with all of those other things, it’s like, “Why can’t I do what Jennifer does?” You can’t do what Jennifer does because Jennifer doesn’t have a spouse, isn’t dealing with aging parents, and doesn’t have 4 kids and 2 pets. That takes some amount of your time, energy, and mental space. No matter what else you put around it, it’s going to take some amount of time, energy, and mental space.
Align Goals With Your Authentic Life Vision
We’ve talked about how you’ve got to align your business goals with what’s going on in your life. Your values and general life circumstances are one of those things. It’s not that you can’t have it all, but you may not be able to have it all at the same time in the same way as these people you look up to. We’ve talked about understanding which metrics are meaningful for you. In many cases, it’s more than how many dollars come in the door. Do you have any advice when it comes to figuring out or visualizing your version of success? What is your advice to the reader? What is it that they can do practically that helps them get in touch with what they want versus what the message is surrounding them for what they should want?
The first thing is to know that it is much harder than it sounds. Most people are like, “It’s blah.” It’s like, “I bet that’s not true.” We default to our family values, our cultural values, our societal values, who we hang out with, our social media, and all of that, which probably does play into your unique final answer, but it probably isn’t your unique final answer.
It is trying to peel all of that off before you say, “What do I want? Be prepared for what matters for me now, not what I want in six years.” I had this conversation accidentally with a friend of mine a number of months ago, where I made up an example that had her crying because it was her life. She envisioned having a successful business, a big house, and all of the things so that she could provide all the things that she wanted to provide for her kids, her time freedom, and all of those things.
Celebrate your own milestones, comparing yourself only to yourself. That's the only one that matters. Share on XWhat she did was she used all of her kids’ lives to build the thing, which meant she wasn’t at the kids’ baseball game. She was working late and wasn’t home for dinner. When she was home, she was still opening up her laptop and not paying any attention to them, and all of these things. She has no relationship with her children. Her children are still angry at her for this, even though they are not little kids anymore. These are big kids. What she did was she sacrificed the thing that she wanted to be able to be there for her kids during the time that was the only time that she could be there for her kids.
What’s important now? Something like, “I’m going to build a multimillion-dollar business,” maybe doesn’t need to happen during the next ten years while your kids are in grade school, going up through high school. Maybe that doesn’t need to happen now. It doesn’t mean it can’t happen as soon as you send their happy little bodies out of the house.
We get caught in, “We’ve got to do it now. If we don’t do it now, it’s not ever going to happen.” There’s a lot of life ahead of you, most likely. Something could go terribly astray, but most of us aren’t living our lives assuming that tomorrow we’re going to die. We treat our goals like tomorrow we’re going to die. Let’s think about what’s important for where we are with all of the things that are going on.
One of the questions that I always ask in 5-3-1 is to say, “What do you know most likely will be true in X number of years?” Things that I’m talking about are how old will your spouse be? How old will your kids be? Where will you likely be living? How old will your parents be? Will they be needing you more? Part of it is to get in the space of, “What’s probably going to be true?” Let’s plan around reality instead of some make-believe perfection that none of us ever have.
Going back to what you said a moment ago, that’s the hard part. What we want is a downloadable worksheet with a couple of journal prompts that we can fill out in 5 to 10 minutes, and at the end of 10 minutes, we’ve cracked the code. That’s going back to the intro to this episode. It’s not that simple because life simply is not that simple.
As you always say, people can be problematic. It’s the nature of being a people. We are all humans. Back to different motivations, different circumstances. There’s way more that’s different about us compared to somebody else than there is the same. Not that there isn’t unity there with our similarities, but it’s different.
I’ll call it a trap. I’ve been trying to avoid calling it a trap because I feel like that’s so overplayed. The comparison trap is why it steals energy, creativity, and confidence. All of those things that you need to build a successful business are stolen from you when you spend so much time looking at what everybody else is doing and letting that make you feel like you’re less than.
Successful businesses, no matter what they look like on social media, are not carbon copies of one another. They are expressions of their founders' unique vision, strengths, and values. Share on XYou mentioned the 5-3-1. I feel like it’s important as we close to say the 5-3-1 is a service that all of our clients get. If you go to EverydayEffectiveness.com and click on the tab, you can explore all those services. The 5-3-1 would be included. We’ll go back to the episode that we did where we put me in the hot seat with it. It is a great way to get in touch with the things you want that you didn’t know you wanted. I’m not going to lie there.
Ultimately, as we close, I want to say that when you stop measuring yourself against others and start defining success on your own terms, you feel better, but that’s not what this is about. You perform better as well. Successful businesses, no matter what they look like on social, are not carbon copies of one another. They are some type of expression of the founder’s unique vision, unique strengths, and unique values, even if they’re not putting those on public display. Your path to success doesn’t need to look like anybody else’s in order to be valid or fulfilling.
Find Success In Your Own Unique Path
Your path to success will more likely happen when it doesn’t look like anybody else’s. You find greater success and more fulfillment when it doesn’t look like somebody else’s. It doesn’t mean it’s not similar because there can be places where it’s similar, but when it doesn’t try to look like anybody else’s, and it looks like Tonya’s path or Gwen’s path. When people walk it in any way, shape, or form, they say, “That seems totally Gwen. That seems totally Tonya. That makes perfect sense, how all of those pieces come together.” Our previous series was Simplify to Amplify. One of the easiest things to drop to simplify your life is comparison.
That’s a good one.
Drop it. Not that you don’t pay attention to what other people are doing, because sometimes there are good ideas, things that are of interest, and whatnot. It’s for the sake of curiosity, learning, and insight, not for, “If I do that, then I’m going to have their fill in the blank.” It rarely works that way.
You said it at the beginning. It’s not easy. It’s one of those things that’s simple, but not easy. You benefit from outside help. If you don’t have that outside help or you don’t have that perspective, I would encourage you to check out our services over at EverydayEffectiveness.com. If you’re not ready to go into true accountability where it’s eyeball to eyeball, and you’re digging through this, then From Insight to Impact is a way to dip your toe into the water. That’s our weekly accountability subscription, which, every Friday, gives you one question to reflect on. It’s not a big journaling page. It’s one question.
When you respond with your reflection, you get a real-life human response tailored to your specific situation. That is a way to move the needle incrementally week after week. Since it’s just between you and Gwen, there’s no need for comparison. You’re not confronted with what everybody else is doing and how everybody else answered the question. It’s you versus you from week to week. You’ll find information on that at EverydayEffectiveness.com/impact. In the meantime, until we see each other again, keep in mind that defining success on your own terms is 100% valid no matter what anybody else tells you. We’ll see you next time.
Mentioned in This Episode
- 531 Strategy For Goal Setting: Achieve Your Dreams, Bigger Than Imagined
- Services – Everyday Effectiveness
- From Insight to Impact
- Write a Must-Read
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.
