The Observer's Notebook

  The Work Behind My Work Why I Do What I Do There’s usually a moment before someone finds me. Nothing has collapsed. From the outside, things even look successful. The business exists. The experience is there. Revenue has happened before. And yet something feels heavier than it should. Decisions take longer. Marketing requires more effort than it used to. Momentum exists, but clarity doesn’t. Most of the founders I work with arrive here quietly. Not because they failed. Because they evolved faster than the strategy they built their success on. I understand that moment intimately, because I’ve lived it more than once. I Didn’t Start in Strategy. I Started in Survival. I became a mother young. Before stability. Before certainty. Before having the luxury of figuring life out slowly. I learned early how to build while carrying responsibility. While finishing school. While working. While navigating environments that required resilience long before I understood the word. Later, I built ...

  The Difference Between a Business Problem and an Orientation Problem Some problems look tactical. They aren’t. By the time founders reach me, they’ve already done what responsible operators do. They adjusted the offer. Reworked pricing. Rebuilt the funnel. Hired support. Tried the strategy everyone said should work. Nothing is obviously broken. And yet nothing fully holds. That’s usually when the conversation changes. Not because the business suddenly became complicated, but because the problem was misidentified from the start. What a Business Problem Actually Is A true business problem has a location. Conversion is low because the page isn’t carrying its weight. Revenue dipped because pipeline maintenance slipped. Positioning stopped resonating because the market moved and the message didn’t move with it. These problems are real. They respond to intervention. You find the break, you repair the break, forward motion resumes. Experienced founders are usually capable of solving the...