A series on “not-advice.”

I spent my summers as a kid in Popcorn, Indiana (a real place, I know), where my grandmother had a sewing room with a magnet that said “She who dies with the most fabric wins.” She was a master creator, making me matching outfits with my Samantha American Girl doll and my brother, knitting quilts for all of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and inventing twists on potholders and potluck carriers and pot scrubbers.

One summer, she took me to Joann Fabric to pick out a pattern for a set of dresses she was making for our cousins. We sorted through bolts of fabric, laid out patterns, measured and remeasured patterns crisscrossing these huge tables. She taught me how to pinch in the pattern at the darts in the back to match my slim cousin’s waistline, how to let out the fabric for my pregnant cousin’s belly, how to adopt a pattern to be for a shirt instead of a dress. I watched her masterfully manipulate this single pattern ‘for people around 5’7”’ into the contours of each of our extremely different bodies. She took the component parts of a singular solution to extend it beyond its original intention.

My grandmother was a master at taking a framework and then fitting it to the present problem at hand. She taught me a million things, like how to knit, and the right amount of stale for Oreos so they’re perfect in a glass of milk, and I’m still practicing her ability to fit the right solution to the right problem at the right time. Part of practicing that art of creation for me is to see connectivity between attempts to fix issues I’ve faced growing businesses. As an executive at an exited startup and now COO of a software agency I co-founded, I often face similar problems again and again, some of my own doing, some that are shared with me by other founders. The solutions often echo one another, even if they don’t overlap entirely.

I am kicking off a project where I’ll be sharing the frameworks I have used to solve growing pains as the COO of two 7 figure businesses. My goal in sharing these learnings is that they can become patterns that you can nip, tuck, and apply to your own growing pains. There is no guidebook when you start a business, but I’d love to hand you a pattern.

My fixes worked for me and if you happened to have the exact same circumstances as me, the advice would probably be pretty applicable to you too. But, if you don’t live in a city, have a young child, have a “f**k off” fund, have a large team to support you, haven’t started/failed/succeed at multiple businesses, aren’t white or able bodied, my advice won’t copy + paste perfectly into your life. What works for you will be a product of your exact circumstances, many of which I won’t have good insight for. But, hopefully some of the patterns I’ve used can be useful, if laid over your circumstances and shifted to fit your needs.

I’ll break down my fixes into component parts, display those as a pattern you can see the foundation of, and give you an example of how they can be applied in other situations. I’ll try to showcase applicability to someone different from myself, so you can watch broader applicability in practice.

Like my grandmother, you can take my store-bought pattern, nip and tuck the darts to fit your own body, and create a custom build to match your life circumstances and your capacity.

I’ll be posting every week for the next couple months. I don’t want this to be a one-way street, so if you’re a founder who is looking for a community like this, I’d love to hear from you. Please send me a message if that’s you.

A series on “not-advice.”

I spent my summers as a kid in Popcorn, Indiana (a real place, I know), where my grandmother had a sewing room with a magnet that said “She who dies with the most fabric wins.” She was a master creator, making me matching outfits with my Samantha American Girl doll and my brother, knitting quilts for all of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and inventing twists on potholders and potluck carriers and pot scrubbers.

One summer, she took me to Joann Fabric to pick out a pattern for a set of dresses she was making for our cousins. We sorted through bolts of fabric, laid out patterns, measured and remeasured patterns crisscrossing these huge tables. She taught me how to pinch in the pattern at the darts in the back to match my slim cousin’s waistline, how to let out the fabric for my pregnant cousin’s belly, how to adopt a pattern to be for a shirt instead of a dress. I watched her masterfully manipulate this single pattern ‘for people around 5’7”’ into the contours of each of our extremely different bodies. She took the component parts of a singular solution to extend it beyond its original intention.

My grandmother was a master at taking a framework and then fitting it to the present problem at hand. She taught me a million things, like how to knit, and the right amount of stale for Oreos so they’re perfect in a glass of milk, and I’m still practicing her ability to fit the right solution to the right problem at the right time. Part of practicing that art of creation for me is to see connectivity between attempts to fix issues I’ve faced growing businesses. As an executive at an exited startup and now COO of a software agency I co-founded, I often face similar problems again and again, some of my own doing, some that are shared with me by other founders. The solutions often echo one another, even if they don’t overlap entirely.

I am kicking off a project where I’ll be sharing the frameworks I have used to solve growing pains as the COO of two 7 figure businesses. My goal in sharing these learnings is that they can become patterns that you can nip, tuck, and apply to your own growing pains. There is no guidebook when you start a business, but I’d love to hand you a pattern.

My fixes worked for me and if you happened to have the exact same circumstances as me, the advice would probably be pretty applicable to you too. But, if you don’t live in a city, have a young child, have a “f**k off” fund, have a large team to support you, haven’t started/failed/succeed at multiple businesses, aren’t white or able bodied, my advice won’t copy + paste perfectly into your life. What works for you will be a product of your exact circumstances, many of which I won’t have good insight for. But, hopefully some of the patterns I’ve used can be useful, if laid over your circumstances and shifted to fit your needs.

I’ll break down my fixes into component parts, display those as a pattern you can see the foundation of, and give you an example of how they can be applied in other situations. I’ll try to showcase applicability to someone different from myself, so you can watch broader applicability in practice.

Like my grandmother, you can take my store-bought pattern, nip and tuck the darts to fit your own body, and create a custom build to match your life circumstances and your capacity.

I’ll be posting every week for the next couple months. I don’t want this to be a one-way street, so if you’re a founder who is looking for a community like this, I’d love to hear from you. Please send me a message if that’s you.