My Crappy Meeting with a Fancy Business Consultant
The table in the back room of the studio with a lamp on. The table has a notebook, some papers, pens, and a cup of tea.
Last week I hired a business consultant. It was not a good time.
I’m not sure why I did it. I suppose I’ve always wondered what all this would look like if I had an MBA. Maybe it was a way to answer that question. Maybe I wanted to have someone look at our whole business the way a doctor might look over an ex-ray and to tell me what was broken.
I prepped for weeks, gathering materials, making little towers of numbers, answering questions. At night I dreamed about the meeting in surreal scenes where of course I suddenly wasn’t wearing pants, or my teeth fell out.
I told her in advance — the only thing I don’t want to talk about is running online classes. They haven’t felt right. I don’t want this work to live on the internet. She said that was no problem, she understood.
Then the day came.
We sat down.
I took a hopeful breath.
And I got a big, long lecture about how the only way to grow my business is by running online classes.
Guys, she went on and on. Even when I said that I’d done it for years and it didn’t feel right. Even when I said that I didn’t believe that the internet can hold the tender intensity of this work. She kept talking over me, explaining how much “reach” this would give us, how much “better” my numbers would be, how I’m missing out.
Of course, I left feeling broken.
What if she’s right? Am I following my heart and refusing to grow? Why am I scared? Why am I rejecting a tool that everyone else is embracing?
Then I remembered a conversation I had with Len, the warm and hard-working man who runs the food hub, The Depanneur. We were eating Tiramisu in his shop, which was full of candles and conversation for a networking dinner. He said, “You can’t scale this place, no way. But that’s not a flaw, it’s a feature. There are things that shouldn’t scale.”
Remembering those words led me down a path, back to my truth. Journalling over the next week, I kept remembering the things I needed. I’m going to write those things down here so that I don’t forget them again.
Business is a way that we build the world we want to live in. Every action, every offering has to directly build that world.
Growth doesn’t always mean bigger. Growth can be inward and downward, a deepening, a nuancing. Growth can be backward. Growth can be invisible.
I’m not in this to scale it, I’m in this to be in this.
I know more about Firefly than I think.
This isn’t broken.
For now, I’m happy to be back making the things I want to make, and growing at our own pace, right-sized and full of love.
Thank you for being in that with us.
In it with you,
