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Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway

#ConfessionTime

Y’all I’ve been scared.

Illustration credit: Pon Cervantes

Oddly enough, I’m not afraid to admit to that fear. But it’s been big and it’s been real — a real block to me making progress in many areas of my life.

Today, I want to focus on the professional side though. You see, for a long time I’ve been wanting to do something that coalesces my passion for creating, a love of teaching and learning, my expertise in digital marketing, and my desire to help women level the playing field.

For years — at least seven of them — I’ve felt like a piece of my business, Sprk’d, was missing. Sure, we’ve been great at helping businesses grow. But the why was always lacking.

I thought charity might be enough

I thought, what if we picked our 5 favorite charities and asked our clients to choose one so that at the end of the year we’d donate a percentage of their retainer toward that charity, in their name. That seemed nice enough but still felt empty and uninspired.

Last Fall, through a solid re-evaluation of my life, I decided that it was time to stand for something and finally dig in to find our why. With eyes and ears perked, I’d been noticing patterns more and more and kept coming across studies showing how little women-owned businesses receive funding, how there are more CEOs named John than there are women CEOs of any name. Finally, I came across a statistic that infuriated me just as much as it sadly — didn’t surprise me…

Out of all the businesses in the U.S., less than 2% are women-owned and hit $1 million or more in revenue.

THIS.

This is something I can help change. This is something I WILL help change!

With this in mind, since last Fall, the team and I at Sprk’d have been creating ways we can use our superpowers for good. New services were needed. Ones tailored for an audience different from those we’ve traditionally served (and will still continue to serve, by the way).

Growth MapThere’s a 6-week online course launching April 30th to walk businesses through the strategy framework we’ve implemented for clients for the past seven years, so they have an action plan to grow their business.

 

We’ve also started The Sprk’d Collective: a community for women business owners to ask each other questions, support one another, and learn from each other.

 

If you already have a marketing strategy and you simply need more hands to help you implement the plan, in January we launched BOLT — our content on demand writing service.

Marketing alone is not enough

Look. I’m not about to pretend that I have all the answers. I know it takes a multi-disciplinary approach to build a successful business. So since marketing on it’s own certainly won’t be enough to help women-owned businesses break that $1 million revenue mark, we’re gathering our most trusted partners outside of marketing to provide their expertise.

We also know plenty of other organizations focused on related efforts so we’ll soon team up where we can to connect The Sprk’d Collective to the broader business ecosystem and to provide networking solutions we alone cannot.


But back to fear.

I’ve been keeping myself so busy creating all of these new solutions all while being deeply afraid to tell anyone about them. Healthy, reasonable questioning turned into second-guessing, which turned into fourth and fifth-guessing, leading to imposter syndrome.

  • How are we going to help 1,000 women with marketing?
  • What would current male clients think? Will they become supporters?
  • 1,000 women isn’t nearly enough; why not 100,000?
  • What makes you think you can do this?

The questions went on and on. The fear built.

But I’m done with fear— at least for now. This mission is too important to me. It’s bigger than me. It’s bigger than my fear.

After all — I really don’t have much else to lose.

Only one question remains…

What if we’re successful?

You can help by joining The Collective, sharing these efforts with women-owned businesses, and keeping tabs on what’s about to come next. More soon!


Sign up for the 6-week guided coaching program to make sense out of your marketing and map out your path to business growth.

 


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