The Observer's Notebook

  The Decisions You're Avoiding Are the Business There is a thing on your task list right now that is not actually a task. You have moved it to next week three times. Maybe four. It has been sitting there, technically active, definitely not getting done. You have made eye contact with it every Sunday during your weekly review and looked away. It is not a task. It is a decision. And you don't want to make it because making it costs something. Maybe money. Maybe a relationship. Maybe the version of yourself who didn't yet know what the right call was, because once you make the decision, that version is gone. So you keep moving it. And meanwhile, the business is being built around the absence of that decision. The absence is doing more shaping in your business than your strategy is. This post is about that. I am going to walk you through how to spot a decision masquerading as a task, why you are avoiding it, what it is silently costing you, why you usually cannot make these de...

  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...