"Shoot! I wish I would have known about that sooner." "Wait, what?! How did I not know about this?" "Where did you hear about that? I didn't even know that event happened!" Sound familiar? I swear these phrases are on repeat around town. An event comes and goes, a business opens or closes, something big happens and half the people who live here find out about it weeks later (if at all). It is a running joke that you literally have to bash people over the head with information or they won't...
9 days ago • 3 min read
Nobody wants to admit they're using AI. I've been in enough rooms lately to know that's true. And while they may not want to own up to it, people are using it. Daily. And then quietly closing the tab before anyone notices, like they got caught doing something embarrassing. There's this unspoken assumption that if you're using AI, you're somehow being inauthentic (and god forbid we aren't authentic 24/7). Or that you're not really creative. Or that the work isn't really yours. And I just......
16 days ago • 6 min read
I genuinely do not understand people (and by people I mean women because it always tends to be us ladies) who won't own their age. The "oh ha ha, not a day over 25!" thing. What?! I can't do it. I won't do it. I am 44 years old and I earned every single one of those days. I'm proud of where I am and all the shit I went through to make it to this jolly old age. And 25? No thank you. Those years were exhausting. Everything was unsettled. You're right at the beginning of your career and...
23 days ago • 2 min read
You know when something happens and your immediate thought is "whoa - you are definitely not my kind of people." That just happened to me with my business coach. And all because of one piece of advice she gave me. First, a little background...six months ago I hired a business coach to help me take an objective, non-personal view of where we are and where I want to go. And I have been genuinely impressed with the progress. Since October, we've audited my time, restructured our services, built...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
The mother f****g deer ate my tulips. I knew it was possible. Tulips are not deer resistant, and I KNOW that. But last year they left them completely alone, so I got cocky. They grew beautifully last year, perfect pink double tulips that are some of my favorite I have ever grown. And then this week I walked outside to a crime scene. The aftermath of the crime What SHOULD be growing I am gutted. There is no other word for it. If you garden at all, you know that a big part of it is optimism....
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
My son got his end-of-quarter second grade report card last week. He's doing great (I mean, of course he is- he is perfect in his mother's eyes) and the numbers look good, though I'll be honest, I'm still not entirely sure what the numbers mean. A three is grade level? A two is on track? I'm nodding along and trusting the process. At some point, I will be happy to move to actual letter grades so I understand them! What I do know about report cards is that I was absolutely O.B.S.E.S.S.E.D....
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
I failed. Probably shouldn't lead with the whole point, but why hide it? My Trial Reels Experiment was a complete and utter failure. As you may recall I was pumped. I had a whole plan to get clean, objective data. I was going to figure out once and for all if Trial Reels were actually worth the hype and I was going to do it in a perfectly scientific way so I could crack the best formula for small businesses to use to grow. It started well. I will give myself that. For about 20 days I was...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
There's a woman who owns a ranch. Multiple times a week, she films her morning routine, which, if you know anything about farm life, does not change much from day to day. The stars of the show are her big fluffy Great Pyrenees livestock guard dogs, you know, the ones that look like polar bears (and, delightfully, she calls them that). Every morning: the dogs wake up after a night on watch. They snore, they yawn, they stretch, they lumber over for head scratches, then bounce around the yard....
2 months ago • 2 min read
I hit a wall exactly 12 months ago (March can do that to you). In the span of one week, I was solicited by more than 20 influencers who wanted to come to McCall. TWENTY. And every single pitch was basically the same song and dance: coordinate everything for us, give us the free trip, oh and also pay us a $3,000 content fee for a blog post, one Reel, and five Stories. Which, fine. That's how the industry works. I get it. But here's what was making me absolutely insane: it all looked the same....
2 months ago • 3 min read