Shore Thing

A lot of small business owners treat their pricing like it’s a moral statement about their own worth, which turns a straightforward business decision into an emotional one every single time it needs revisiting. Let’s take the emotion out of it for a minute. Your rates aren’t a referendum on how much you deserve. They’re a number that needs to cover your actual costs, your actual time, your actual expertise, and leave enough left over for the business to be sustainable — inclu

There’s a specific kind of business advice that circulates endlessly in small business Facebook groups, and some of it is genuinely useful. A lot of it is confidently wrong, delivered by someone who did one thing once and is now certain it’s universal law. I don’t say this to be dismissive of community advice generally — some of it is great, and peer support matters. I say it because “someone in a group told me” is, alarmingly often, the actual foundation of a decision that s

I hear a version of this constantly: “Everyone else seems so much further along than me.” Said by business owners who are eight months in, comparing themselves to accounts and colleagues who’ve been doing this for six or eight years. That comparison isn’t just unkind to yourself. It’s mathematically off. What you’re actually seeing. When you look at someone else’s business — their polished website, their fully booked calendar, their confident social media presence — you’re al

Nobody talks about this part, so I’m going to. When small business owners avoid their books — and most of them do, at some point — it’s rarely because they’re lazy or irresponsible. It’s because looking at the numbers feels like a verdict. And if you’re not sure the verdict is going to be good, it’s easier to just not look. I get it. I run my own business. I know what it feels like to be afraid of your own bank account. But here’s what I’ve learned from working with a lot of