Issue 021 |We Have Been Starting With the Business Too Soon

October Theme: Before You Build the Business

For most of my childhood, I knew exactly what I was going to be when I grew up.

I was going to be a doctor.

More specifically, a pediatrician.

And this wasn't one of those childhood dreams that changed every six months.

I was serious.

When I was in my early teens, I lost two cousins who were both very young, around seven or eight years old, and somewhere inside those losses I made a decision.

I wanted to understand childhood disease.

I wanted to help children.

I wanted to make sense of what had happened.

So I did what I have always done when something matters enough to me.

I started learning everything I could.

By junior high and high school, summer wasn't really summer.

If there was a class I could take that moved me closer to medicine, I took it.

By the time I graduated, I had already trained as a home health aide, a medical biller and a medical assistant.

When I entered college as a chemistry major on the pre-med track, I also became certified as an EMT.

And I wasn't only thinking about becoming a doctor.

I already knew I wanted my own practice one day.

So I wanted to understand the whole thing.

Not just the medicine.

The operations.

The administration.

How the business worked.

How everything fit together.

I was building toward the answer I had already chosen.

Pediatrician.

And for a long time, I never questioned it.

Then Life Started Asking Me Different Questions

While I was in college, I met Victor.

We married.

We had a child.

And somewhere in that season, what I thought I knew so clearly began to change.

Not because I stopped caring about children.

Not because what happened to my cousins mattered any less.

But I began to understand something I could not have understood when I was younger.

I didn't really want to be a doctor as much as I thought I did.

I wanted to solve the problem that had made me believe becoming a doctor was the answer.

That's different.

Looking back, I think that was one of my earliest experiences of realizing something I now see everywhere.

The thing you choose to do and the thing you are actually trying to accomplish are not always the same.

I had chosen the answer.

I just hadn't lived enough life yet to fully understand the question.

Motherhood Changed the Question Again

Becoming a mother changed the way I thought about my future.

I wanted to learn how to do that well too.

How to be a mother.

How to be a wife.

How to build a life with my husband.

Nobody hands you a manual for those things.

And I knew I didn't want to rush through that season because I was afraid another opportunity might not come.

My opportunity to do great work would still be there.

My opportunity to make money would still be there.

My children's childhood would not.

So there were seasons when I stepped away from working because I wanted to be there.

I wanted my children to know me.

I wanted to know them.

I wanted to learn what they needed from me.

I wanted to be present for the life Victor and I were building.

I didn't have language for any of that then.

I certainly wasn't saying, The Visionary Comes First.

I was simply making decisions about what mattered.

But when I look back now, I can see that something had already started in me.

I was learning that the structure surrounding my work could not be allowed to consume the life the work was supposed to support.

Eventually, I Became What I Call Unemployable

Over the years, I worked different jobs.

And usually, if I stayed somewhere long enough, someone wanted to promote me into supervision or management.

I was good at the work.

But the more responsibility I was given, the more access the job wanted to my life.

More time.

More availability.

More of me.

And I kept running into the same tension.

I wanted to be there for my children.

For my husband.

For church.

For community.

For myself.

Eventually, I started joking that I had become unemployable.

Not because I couldn't work.

Quite the opposite.

I could work very well.

I just knew I didn't want someone else's structure deciding how much of my life I was allowed to keep.

So I started building things around what I knew how to do.

My interests.

My abilities.

The things people trusted me to help with.

The things I could create.

I wasn't sitting down with a list of business models deciding which one I wanted.

I didn't even have language for most of that.

I was simply trying to answer a much more ordinary question:

What can I build around what I already know how to do?

And I think a lot of people I serve are standing somewhere near that question right now.

You Know There Is Something There

You may not be thinking about starting a membership.

You may not be trying to launch a course.

You may not know what consulting, advisory or leveraged delivery means yet.

You just know there is something in you.

You are good at what you do.

Maybe very good.

You sing.

You teach.

You speak.

You create.

You lead.

You solve things.

You see things other people miss.

People trust you.

People ask you for help.

You may have spent years developing something that has become so natural to you that you don't even recognize how valuable it is anymore.

And if you are multi-gifted, it may be even harder to see.

Because there isn't one neat thing to point to.

There are pieces everywhere.

Things you're good at.

Things you've learned.

Things you've survived.

Things you've built.

Things people know you for.

Things you haven't even figured out how to name yet.

And the question becomes:

What is behind all of this?

That is a very different question from:

What should I sell?

Especially When the Gift Feels Sacred

For some of you, there is another layer.

Your gift is connected to faith.

Ministry.

Worship.

Service.

Calling.

You may have been taught, directly or indirectly, that if something is done unto the Lord, money should stay as far away from it as possible.

I understand that.

And I want to be careful here.

I am not telling you to put a price tag on everything sacred.

I don't believe everything we carry should become a business.

But I also don't believe the person carrying the gift has to remain financially unsupported simply because the gift itself is sacred.

Those are not the same thing.

A worship leader doesn't necessarily have to “sell worship.”

A pastor doesn't have to charge people to preach.

A creative doesn't have to reduce the thing they love to another transaction.

There may be something around the gift that has value.

Years of experience.

A process.

A method.

A way of teaching.

A way of developing others.

A problem you know how to solve.

A body of knowledge you have accumulated.

Judgment that took years to develop.

A way of seeing things that other people simply do not have yet.

Sometimes the gift isn't the business.

Sometimes the business is built around what the gift has developed in you.

That is an entirely different conversation.

And I Think We Have Been Starting With the Business Too Soon

This is the part I keep coming back to.

Business advice often begins with:

What are you going to sell?

Who is going to buy it?

What kind of business should you start?

Eventually, those questions matter.

But I am becoming increasingly convinced that, for many people, we are asking them too early.

Especially the gifted.

Especially the multi-talented.

Especially the person who has spent years serving and creating and leading but has never been taught how to see the value underneath any of it.

Because when you start with the business, you tend to grab the most obvious expression.

The singer thinks the only way to earn is to sing.

The speaker thinks the only way to earn is to speak.

The creative keeps taking another project.

The expert keeps selling another hour.

And maybe that is part of the answer.

But I want to know what is underneath it first.

What are you really trying to make possible?

What has all of this experience developed in you?

What do people consistently receive from you beyond the obvious gift?

What kind of life does whatever we build need to support?

What should always require you?

What eventually should not?

Those questions begin to reveal something the business question cannot answer by itself.

I've Started Calling This Earlier Work Vision Architecture™

This is some of the work I have started calling Vision Architecture™.

Because before I architect the business, I need to understand more about the person carrying it.

The vision.

The value already present.

Not because I think you need another complicated framework before you can start.

But because I don't want to hand you a business model and tell you to squeeze your life into it.

I want to understand what is actually there first.

Then we can make better decisions about what belongs around it.

Because possibility is not prescription.

Just because you could build something doesn't mean you should.

And just because you have never seen anyone build a business around what you carry doesn't mean there is nothing there.

Sometimes you just haven't been taught how to see it yet.

I Look at That Little Girl Differently Now

I don't regret the years I spent preparing to become a doctor.

They were not wasted.

I learned discipline.

I learned how to study.

I learned how systems work.

I learned that operations matter.

I learned to look beyond the obvious problem and ask what might be causing it.

And the thing underneath that childhood decision never really left me.

I still want to understand why something isn't working.

I still want to see what other people may be missing.

I still want to help solve the problem.

The expression changed.

The underlying contribution did not.

Becoming a pediatrician was one possible answer.

It just wasn't the whole vision.

And maybe that's what I want you to consider as we begin this month's conversation:

Before You Build the Business.

You may already know what you're gifted to do.

You may already know what you love.

You may even know that the way you're currently working cannot be the way you work forever.

But you may not yet know what all of it is supposed to become.

That doesn't mean there is nothing there.

It may simply mean we need to look underneath what you've been carrying before we decide what to build around it.

The Architect's Question

What is underneath the thing you are already very good at?

Don't rush to package it.

Don't turn it into an offer yet.

Just notice.

There may be more there than you have been taught to see.

Take this one into the conversation below.

I want to hear what you are beginning to recognize.

Grace and peace,

— Angela