We stood there in shock on the sidewalk, paralyzed by the betrayal.
Z and I had gone out for a weeknight evening date after some time out of town, and there were only two things on our minds: burgers and margaritas.
Specifically, burgers and margaritas from one of our favorite local spots, Burger Mexicano.
It was a charming little place — never busy, with always slightly-dusty decor best described as “eclectic” which included, for reasons I have not yet ascertained, several stuffed stag heads.
The owners and staff were friendly and warm, and with their mix of spice, cheeses, and fresh guac, their restaurant was also home to some of the best dang burgers in the whole city. (The margaritas too — fresh lime juice only, with not a drop of sour mix in sight.)
Cue Record Scratch…
But today, we stood before Burger Mexicano… only to realize to our dismay:
It was no longer Burger Mexicano.
Oh no, ladies, sirs, and gentlethems — where our cozy haunt of Burger Mexicano once stood, it now stood no longer.
They had since rebranded, and were under new ownership.
And now, somehow without consulting us first, our beloved burger joint had turned into a gastropub called “Lincoln Tavern”.
Gone were the dusty stag heads and colorful chachkis, replaced by navy blue wall paint, brass industrial light fixtures and Edison bulbs, freshly gleaming black leather booths, and a menu that included items like oysters, candied brussell sprouts, and strip steak.
And we didn’t even get to say goodbye.
Tonight’s Special: Seasoned with the Salt of Our Tears
“Damn.” Z muttered, staring up at the glistening new sign.
“Damn.” I echoed in agreement.
In my head, that Alanis Morisette song began to play: “In the aaaarms offfff the angelll….”
We went inside to eat anyway, and while the food was good (albeit a bit more pricey), my roast quail was peppered by my grief, and as-yet-unanswered craving for my beloved guac burger.
The patrons around us, however, seemed absolutely delighted. The neighborhood had been devoid of any slightly-more-upscale dining at the time, and we could fully understand the spot in the market they were trying to fill. We were sure they’d thrive.
It wasn’t what we were looking for, however. So while we wished Lincoln Tavern a very happy opening and all the best of luck, we had a feeling we wouldn’t be returning.
And this, my friends, is just what happens when things change in your business — and you start to make moves that serve YOU and the future you want, instead of just your past/current customers.
It’s important to be clear on the kind of business you want to run, and make updates according to what you want to do, who you want to serve, what you want to sell, and how you want to work.
However, especially when you’re hopping aboard the “I want to build a business that works for my life and doesn’t burn me out” train, there are going to be some consequences, as well as wonderful results, from those actions.
It May Not Be Equal, but There’s Always a Reaction
Which means, much like the case of Burger Mexicano → Lincoln Tavern? The shift can be jarring if it’s not done carefully.
Which, as you might expect, is what today’s lovely episode of #HAMYAW is all about.
Set new boundaries around your availability, and when people can contact you?
Sometimes that’s gonna knock you off the roster for clients who hired you because your old model fit the flow of their business.
Raising your prices to offer only high ticket?
Hell yeah! And you’re also likely to price yourself out of some existing contracts, and will likely need to bust a move or two to start bringing clients in who can pay your higher rates.
Want to switch to passive income so your business doesn’t require you all the time?
Absolutely — but if your audience is too small, and you’ve never sold products before, it’s probably gonna take a solid chunk of time to create a pipeline of buyers and funnels to match that will fully allow you to step back. And even then, maintenance is required!
There’s a vague sense out there that when you DECIDE to make these kinds of necessary changes in your business, the results just flow in from there, and things quickly become easier for you and everyone around you, consequences be damned.
But of course, that’s not the whole story.
Set Boundaries Without Getting Sued for Whiplash
And sometimes, when you DO make these moves, your former clients can wind up feeling like Zach and myself standing dumbstruck in front of our beloved, now-defunct Burger Mexicano.
So we wanted to dig into some of our honest experiences around changes like these — both as the contractors creating them, and the clients noticing the shifts.
And most importantly? We want to remind you:
Business building is MESSY.
And beautiful.
And an exercise in constantly having the courage to set, fulfill, and then mindfully shift expectations over and over again.
And that’s a hard thing, and a good thing, all at once.
So get on over there and catch the episode — and we’ll see you in a few.
One foot in front of the other, H
PS.
Big changes are coming to HAMYAW soon! Keep your eyes peeled. Updates on the way. <3
Episode Transcript
Look at us so professional.
I know, backgrounds and everything. We’re so profesh.
Oh my god. The show is going downhill. We’ve sold out.
(upbeat music)
Welcome back marketing nerds of the world. It’s time for another episode of HAMYAW. And yes, I am back, in my office and no longer in my bedroom. And today we wanna talk about the intersection between business and the life of your dreams. Oh yes! It is such a promise across the industry that you can have this business that makes eleventy-billion dollars and you can work for two hours a day and no clients can ever reach you. And then you’re going to have so much passive income. It is a blast.
However, as is normal in our industry, these giant promises, when rubber meets the road, tend to look a little bit different in practice, a tiny bit. The consequences of each of the kind of pillars of the most popular tools that you can use to create a business that gives you the life that you want.
And I wanna underline here that Margo and I are very much in favor of not killing yourself working and not constantly hustling. We’ve talked about balance and our versions of it a lot on this show, but we also wanted to talk about the consequences of implementing some of the key pillars that are supposed to create this business that helps you live a life you love.
And those three things are boundaries, super strong boundaries, where, you know, you’re limited in how people can reach you or what days you work. High ticket, charging a butt load of money for a service that you may not have been charging a butt load of money for previously. And then, creating the sacred cow, passive income.
So, we want to talk about kind of these three pillars. I guess we’ll start with boundaries, Margo? And then, we just want to talk about kind of what these things look like in practice, because they’re all things that both of us have implemented in our business, tested and tried and also been on the receiving end of. So, we kind of want to talk about what the experience is like, because as always with what we talk about on HAMYAW, the truth is just somewhere in the middle about what really works and how it all fits together.
But before I say another word, Margo, are you running a business that lets you live a life you love? (laughs)
I’m fully fulfilled. I have no sugar. I woke up at 4:00 AM.
Sugar-free, dairy-free, gluten-free. I drink my lemon water and do my yoga at 4:00 AM.
I’ve had my Matcha tea. No one yelled at me, no one peed on me. I was so chill. I said all the right affirmations. My child just went to school on her own. She walked. She drove the car.
(laughs) She made her breakfast.
She made her bed.
Go little lassie, clean. Yeah.
She potty trained herself. That’s what it sounds like y’all. It’s literally what it sounds like. So, let’s break down my favorite topic in the whole world, boundaries.
Yeah.
So, let’s start with this.
Yep.
Boundaries might be the most important lesson anyone needs to learn in life. I remember that my head exploded when I first learned that you are not responsible for the feelings of others, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be held accountable. There’s a whole episode we can do there. There’s a lot to be said – I recommend Justine Sones. She is phenomenal.
Yes, the queen!
She’s the boundary queen.
We gotta bring her on.
Friend of the show. Also real life friend. She’s basically your Canadian Brené Brown. Go check her out, she can teach you about boundaries. Here’s where I wanna take this conversation though. We have gotten a little confused between boundaries and neglect, irresponsibility, and ghosting.
Yeah
(Whispers) These are not the same.
(laughs)
Sorry. I’m a ghost. Apparently.
Yeah
These are not the same. So, when you set a boundary in a personal relationship, there are consequences. There are risks. There is disappointment. There is inconveniencing. There is a whole slew of things you have to psychologically prepare yourself for. When you set a boundary in a business relationship, there are also consequences.
However, when there are contracts, when there are fulfillment responsibilities, when there are deadlines and when there are communication precedents, which is like, “I have shown you that I, up until this point communicated in this way. And then all of a sudden, I’m switching”. You’re not only going to experience a backlash. You might actually be committing fraud. Because when you have – I’m serious –
Spicy take, yeah.
If you have a commitment and someone is paying you for that, and then you suddenly stop, that is something that you can be sued for. So, I think we have to be really, really careful like, boundaries have to be set up front and they also have to be realistic. So, if you are in, for example, a service-based business…I’ve had this conversation with someone who’s like, “I really want to be a VA, but I only want to work three hours a week”. I’m like, “You…”
You don’t wanna be a VA.
Don’t be a VA.
I got news friend. Be something else. But don’t be a VA.
You can be a VA with boundaries, but you also have to assess the market and live in reality. As my therapist always says, “We can hold the vision and live in the real world”. So you hold the vision of those boundaries, and then you understand “What are the constraints of my industry?”
Like as a virtual assistant, “I’m assistant, okay, what fields am I an assistant for?” Because if you’re a VA for a biologist who works in a lab, then you’re going to literally be constrained to having to be physically present, probably, versus a VA for someone in the startup world, where your hours are going to be different and your tech skills are going to be required differently.
So, like we just have to assess how we wanna implement those boundaries by one, knowing who we are and what matters to us and what we need – I know that I’m pretty strict about what I need – when it’s appropriate to violate those boundaries and what category we’re in. What field are we existing in? And can these co-exist? Or, do you just need to tap out entirely? Which by the way, is possible.
I tapped out of consulting y’all. There’s a reason I took a huge financial hit because I was like, I can’t actually have healthy boundaries in this industry. It’s actually a bad industry for my disposition. My friend, Mark, Mark Aaron, who you should check out, he fucking thrives in consulting, all the things that I couldn’t establish boundaries around because of his disposition, he could. He was fine with it. It was not an issue.
So, like knowing who you are and having that product founder fit for like where you need to be is also a big part of this. Sorry, I’ll get off my high horse.
No, get on, get on that horse ride it into the sunset my queen. What I do want to underline here is that boundaries in your business are good. Should you be taking calls on Saturday? Should you be available anytime of the day or night?
Probably not, but what’s really important, one, is you have to set crystal clear expectations with your clients about what the boundaries are. And if you change those halfway through, you have to get accustomed to the fact that some people are going to be like, “What?”
Two, I think what’s also so important is that you have to make sure that the boundaries you’re setting are, as you say Margo, logical for the job that you are doing. And I think that you just need to think about with your boundaries, what makes sense also for the type of client that you’re working with.
I’m very respectful of boundaries. I appreciate my team setting those boundaries, but I recall this one situation years ago where I was on a team as a copywriter, I was on retainer on this team. And the designer who was on retainer was like, first of all, kind of hard to reach generally, but very good at her job, so, it was fine.
And then she reaches out to the client and was like, “Okay, so, I’m now only available Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, from 11 to 2:00 PM EST. And that’s it”. And my client was like, “What? Like we, we do launches. This business is moving quickly. Like we hired you on retainer because we need someone to be able to do quick turnaround. That was the expectation”.
And I think it’s really easy also if you’re in that spot to be like, “Oh that damn client, she just wanted too much and blah blah blah she didn’t respect my boun-“. Like, no, it’s not a boundary. It’s a total, it’s circumventing of expectations and the parameters that were set.
And I think that this is something that we just have to keep in mind for boundaries. Like if you want to set a certain boundary, if you want to only work a certain amount of days a week, it can take time to get there. And that’s part of the consequence. That’s the consequence of all of these things.
You have to accept that it’s not overnight because you need to give your clients time to adjust. You need to make sure that you, if they’re not adjusting well, you find clients for whom that is okay. And I’m sure that they’re out there. It’s just a matter of getting in front of them and seeing what’s gonna fit, like how your desires kind of fit into the current market.
And I think that there’s, again, this push-pull of people are like, “Oh, overwork bad!” because, capitalism. And it’s like, yeah, but also like this is the existing economic system that we work within. Like sometimes things move faster in the business world. That’s part of running a business.
It’s one of those things where we have to, you know, figure out what the line is between honoring ourselves and honoring a commitment and also the expectations that are the type of work that we want to do or the type of clients that we want to work with demand.
And there’s a, there’s a happy medium there, but I think it’s just this like, “I only work when I want and my clients need to be okay with that”. Even if it’s like mid-project.
Its entitlement.
Yeah. It’s the thing we’re rallying against y’all. This is my frustration. Because like I said, I think boundaries might be the most important lesson we all have to learn in life.
Yeah
I don’t want to discount that, but I do think there’s an attribution error happening where some people are afraid to say, “I don’t want to do this and I need to tap out completely”.
Yeah
And instead are using boundaries a way to hide. And that’s not a real boundary. That’s neglect. That’s irresponsibility that is –
Ghosting.
You not doing your job. That’s ghosting. And it’s mean it’s wrong. It’s entitled. It is not a kind way to be in the world. And so I don’t want people to misunderstand what we’re saying here, because Hillary and I are not trying to validate a bad system. Right. We have inherited a system that has problems, that is real. And in our efforts to change them, we still have to exist in the system as we create a new one, but like abdicating from work entirely doesn’t make any sense. You still have to work.
Yeah, yeah and you can’t run a successful business if you don’t work.
And you can’t be this rigid. Like one of my boundaries example, I don’t make meetings before noon.
Same.
That is my writing time. Any, ask any developer, anyone who needs like, uninterrupted time, that writing time. That’s my thinking time. That’s my, I get to do what I want with it. It is basically a meeting.
Yeah.
Occasionally, Probably once or twice a week, I have to break this, you know, and I’m, I’m pretty religious about this, but it happens. And do I go and seek it? Do I have to wave my penis at the person who emailed me deigning to ask for a 9:00 AM call? No either just say, I can’t do that time. Or I say, “You know what? I can do 11:00 that day.”
Yeah.
I don’t need to virtue signal. I don’t need to write them the riot act about my boundaries and how offended I am. Set the boundary move on with your life. Like, I just, all right we should go to number two.
Yeah, I know, I’m with you. And just to, just to kind of wrap that up I had a final thought. I also wanna piggyback on what Margo brought out and just give an idea of some of the boundaries that work in my business. It’s similar. Like I don’t do external calls Monday and Friday. I have calls with clients three days a week.
If you need to change something and you don’t tell me, you go to my support at email and my assistant Leo will take care of you. But also similar to your point, Margo, sometimes there’s times where I need to have a call on a Monday or Friday, or I need to have a call a little later in the evening and all of this stuff. So it gets to a point where it’s like, okay, there’s boundaries, but there’s a little bit of wiggle room, you know, because that’s just how business tends to work.
That’s life.
That’s life. Think about the rigidity. And I think about shifting boundaries can sometimes be such a change for a client that you may not be a fit for a team anymore, and that’s okay. And I do want to reiterate that –
That’s okay.
It’s almost, it’s like changing a business model. You know, like if you’re working with clients on retainer and you’re like, “I’m only doing VIP days now” and they’re like, “Not gonna work”. Like, that’s fine.
That’s fine.
You know, it’s not, it’s not something to be offended about. It’s just a different styles and different needs. So I just want to reflect that because we don’t wanna make people feel guilty for being like, “Oops, lost clients to boundaries”, totally normal, but you have to think about it because every shift there are consequences.
Moving on in real quick. And we don’t want to have to spend a lot of time here, but I want to talk about this idea of like, in order to have a business that fulfills you, that you have to do high ticket. And I think I’m, I’m a big believer in high-ticket. I think charging a lot, as much as you, as much as makes sense for the service that you offer is kick-ass and essential.
But I also think that people don’t realize they kind of need to build up to that in some ways. I’ve actually seen a high ticket program kind of change its tune a little bit to where it was, like, “You could get clients on tap and charge a lot of money”, to, “You will build up to clients on tap and charging a lot of money here”.
And I fully support it. Like, yes, change the message, set correct expectations, but a similar consequence there is, and I see this a lot with my clients who want to charge more. Like I, it’s very rare that I have somebody to be like,
“Okay, today $3,000 and tomorrow it will be 10”. Like I’m a big believer in ladder pricing.
And because you have to get comfortable because if you are making that jump from like lower ticket to higher ticket, you need to remember, you’re the one who has to be on those sales calls. You’re the one who has to say that number.
You know, you’re the one who has to make people believe that it’s worth that.
And your market’s watching.
And your market’s watching yeah.
If it was $250 yesterday and now 10 grand. They’re like what just happened?
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it can be confusing and that’s again with the build.
Like it’s not a bad thing that people can’t work with you because you’re charging a certain amount of money now, but it’s also, I think it’s easy to slide into that zone, similar to boundaries where it’s like, “Meh, clients just want me to be on all the time”. And like “Meh clients don’t want to pay me the money”. Like you’re, you need a new market for high-ticket. Like that has to be a build.
Often, if you’re not charging high-ticket now you need to find a way to get in front of those really great people who understand and see, connect with the value of the work, and can pay for it. And that’s trickier. And I think there’s a lot of frustration where people are like, “Wow, no one’s buying this”.
You know, “Why is that? Does the industry just suck? Am I marketing it wrong?” And no, the stuff just takes time to build and you have to figure out your way kind of through the woods.
Yeah. I’ll piggyback on that. I’m on the reverse end of Hilary, where I started high ticket and now I am in more like mainstream numbers and I much prefer, I feel free.
You also have the volume for that now too, yeah.
Right, but that also took time. Like part of the reason I couldn’t do it, was I didn’t have the volume. I didn’t have the numbers. So I couldn’t afford, you know, $250 items. And when we talk big ticket, like I was doing $50,000 to $100,000 consulting packages.
Yep
But it killed me. Right?
Yeah.
Right like these all are interconnected because I did all the things right. I was doing it right. And my boundaries for me, were, “I can’t be in client services”, right?
That was my boundary. It was something I was really good at and so then I moved into the service-based business space. Then I moved into products and products are where I’m shining.
Yeah.
And so like, you gotta know yourself. I love products. I like having customers, not clients. That’s a me thing.
Yeah.
Me giving you advice about how you should run your business, like know yourself, right.
Yeah.
There are many ways to get to that, like freedom that we’re looking for and that fulfillment or whatever. But like you need to know your model. You also need to know your clientele.
Peter Wind is also an example. Friend of the show, who we’d had on before, where he learned that for products, his market wouldn’t go premium because he was dealing with dudes in fashion. And like, they were just regular guys. And if he wanted to do high ticket, it had to be one-on-one.
And he learned like, there’s only what the market will bear. And there are certain markets where it will bear a lot. And then there’s certain markets where it doesn’t matter how good your positioning is. No one’s going to pay you, you know, $700,000 for an appraisal, you know, it’s just not happening.
So anyway.
Yeah, Yep. And we’ve actually piggybacked so, so much piggybacking on this episode, which moves right into the last item of these, the three horsemen of the business freedom apocalypse, the passive income.
This is the third pillar, right? And as we know, as we said, many, many times in the show, there’s nothing passive about passive income. So, keep that in mind.
But I think that there’s just this vision where again, just to, to sort of bring this full circle where you have this business where you can make a ton of money without doing much because you have these aggressive boundaries where no one can reach you, you charge a fuck ton of money and you have these passive income products.
Can these make a great business model? Absolutely yes. But it takes so much time. And that’s why we talk about business as an ecosystem more than it is, like, I, I prefer to talk about them as ecosystems, as opposed to like funnels in terms of these strategies.
Because like you have to find your way of doing it according to the type of business you want to run, how available you want to be, and also the market that you serve. And one thing that I hear a lot is just like, well I want to do a course and just run that for passive income. And it’s like, “Oh how big is your audience?” “Not huge.”
Don’t ask that Hilary. You can make money from a small audience. Don’t shame us!
If you sell high ticket, if you have a high ticket. I have a small, our audiences are kinda the same size.
The consequences too for this passive income thing as well is you have to spend time creating this product.
You gotta figure out how to sell it. You gotta figure out how to price it properly. You gotta keep working on your funnels for it. And also like in my experience too, especially right now, and this may be something, this may be projection.
This may be something that I’m just observing, is it’s actually pretty hard to sell, it can be difficult to sell static products, especially beyond the 497 mark because people want that personal attention now. And there’ve been a lot of crappy courses out there.
So, consequences for the passive income thing. That is very much, like that’s going to take more time than you think. And if you are feeling like you’re working too much already like seeking a passive income product is not the way to create less work.
I have so much to say about that. Let’s start here.
I never understood the premise of not wanting to work. This is not a thing I understand.
So, if you were above 65 and you have dinner with me, get ready for some questions because literally every time I’m like, but why do you wanna retire? Why is that a goal?
Like I have so many questions, like even Jay Z went back to work. What is enjoyable about this idea?
And people like, well, you just, I’m like, you’re bored. You’re bored. I still, I never understood that the idea of ending work and I never understood the idea of like, not working hard for something you want. Those two just as a concept, never made sense to me.
So, if y’all understood this, please explain, and maybe Hilary, you can explain it too.
Like I never understood the appeal because everything good in life comes as a result of something you’ve worked really hard for. And like, maybe because I don’t live in the bubble where things came easy, I didn’t see hard work as something I wanted to escape from.
I am proud to show someone a piece that I revised a hundred times. And like, this is the result of something. I worked really hard on it, like that that didn’t feel like from a shame place.
So, I just always felt like the posture in general of this promise was built on an assumption that I wanna be lazy.
Or I don’t know that you have a different goal. And I think if the goal is to make a lot of money, then, which is what is inherent in passive income, right?
Making a lot of money, travel the world, don’t do anything. Why didn’t you just go work in a hedge fund? I have so many friends that did that. They made a lot of money. They could actually quit and like, they would be fine. They have their golden parachute.
So, I’m so curious about people who are like, I want to make it easy. It reminds me of the lottery, the way people, “I’m just gonna buy scratchers”.
Easy money.
I’m like easy money is not a thing. So maybe it’s a cultural norm that I just didn’t have growing up. But like, it was confused.
I didn’t understand the seductiveness of it. It just seems so obviously like a trap or like you fall, you listening to this guy? Come on y’all.
I know it’s honestly, it’s part of my upbringing too. Like I was raised WASP, strong WASP work ethic. You know, my dad worked seven days a week for as long as I can remember. He’s now retired and has lost a ton of weight and is living his best life. And I’m like, you go, dad.
But he actually, before he retired, he was a physician and we talked about it and I was like, he was nearing a sixties at the time, and I was like, “When are you going to retire?” And he was like, “Ah, I don’t know if I will because then I’d just volunteer at the hospital and then I’m working for free”.
And I was like, ah, and then he retired and did not, well, he actually does volunteer at a, at a clinic for undocumented immigrants because my dad’s baller.
But I think that the conversation in the workspace and the, in the industry, and we’ve talked about this before, as an overcorrection of anti-hustler culture, where everyone was like, Gary V was like, work until you shit yourself.
And everyone was like, yeah, that’s the way. And then everyone was like, wait a second. I’m really tired of, you know, shitting myself and I… as one does. And I think that there was like, well, this doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. And that is correct.
You know, with the tools that we’ve mentioned, you can take some of the pressure off yourself. You can make sure that you’re not working 24/7. But what the overcorrection is basically like, you deserve to make as much money as possible, working as little as possible and like, sure. But also…
No.
No you don’t, no.
But it’s created this expectation that there is a version of that, that you can get to that is easy and fast. And it’s just not.
There’s consequences for every shift in business, including these three. So, it’s just really important as you think about what kind of business I want, to think about it not from a place of I’m entitled to this, which I don’t think a lot of people are like, well, I want this because I want it.
You know, I don’t think that’s the case, but I think coming from this place of like, why do I want to make these changes? What kind of business do I want to have? And based on the market that I serve and the work I want to do, what’s gonna fit together best, you know. And it’s not sexy, and it’s not six steps to six figures in six seconds, but it’s the truth.
Amen, amen, no. I mean like same, same page.com.
I guess I theoretically struggle with, we have this American dream prototype of you reap what you sow, but if you’re not reaping, how do you sow, like, I just don’t understand. So, like I just, I never understood it. I’m like if the whole point is you get out of it what you put in, but then you’re like, but I don’t want to put anything in, I’m like what? What?
Yeah.
This doesn’t make any sense.
So, like, I understand wanting to shift where you spend your time. And I also think we talked about this beforehand, when we were discussing the show like this is a sequencing problem too. And really like the way Ramit Sethi said it really well when someone was like cutting him down to size for having this viewpoint, that someone was like, you gotta be 40 when you’re 40, you gotta be 50 when you’re 50, you cannot keep rushing.
And I’m guilty of this.
So maybe I can relate in this way where like I wanted to be further ahead than I am. And I think that is what pushes us to wanting that passive income.
Cause I did want to be at a point, like I remember when I was starting speaking or even with consulting where I was like, I really want to be at a point where I can turn down clients because everyone’s like, choose your clients, turn down clients, say no. And I’m like I financially can’t do that.
And I think that like, this is sequencing. It’s not that you can’t, it’s that like at this particular circumstance, in this point in life in this development of your business, you cannot at this stage, but you’ll reach a stage where then you can set some boundaries, and then you can implement some measures.
Then you can make some shifts to the business model and then you can go, oh, you know what? I really really suck at this skill. I should be here, and so the boundary isn’t from a place of scarcity so much as, if you want this business to grow, like for example, me, it makes the most sense to put me in a promotion role and not have me executing because I will fuck that shit up.
I will fuck it all up.
Like, if you’re just like, “Margo, go talk on podcasts”. And I was like, I will go. I will sell. I will talk.
But like, you want me to do anything else? And I’m like, she will pull down that ship.
And so the boundary gets set, not from a place of like, I’m better than this. Oh yeah. I get my hands dirty in execution all the goddamn time.
But I’m not doing it on principle because, or on by, by demand from the people I’ve worked with cause they’re like “Margo don’t, do not touch the UX”. And I’m like, but-but I got this tweak. And they’re like. “Don’t touch it. Do not touch it. Let us do our job.”
Rolled up newspaper. Yeah, yup a hundred percent. And I think that’s, that’s part of it, too. Like, you can honor what you’re bad at as well, which is huge.
That’s, love that boundary. Love that.
Love that boundary. Anyway. All right y’all, we have lots of, lots of thoughts on this topic and we want to hear from you. So tell us where you’ve, over-corrected, tell us where you drank the Kool-Aid. Tell us if anything has shifted as a result of seeing us scream at each other on this YouTube channel. Not at each other at the world.
At the world and at websites.
Y’all we just want to be having and encouraging you to have honest conversations about this stuff and not being so tribalist and black and white. Like we exist in the middle. Not everything is all or nothing, so we don’t need to over correct.
We can bring it back to the middle. You can still be your anticapitalist self while existing within capitalism and making it work. Like we can reach our way of creating that new system, creating those boundaries, honoring those boundaries, doing your own work, figuring out a way to get a business that works with your life.
But by God, we need some self-awareness. We need some intellectual honesty.
Yes, we do.
Here people. Please. I’m begging.
I believe in y’all.
No more straw man shit okay? None of this ad hominem crap. All that to say, bring it to me in the comments. As always, I am Margo Aaron.
And I’m Hillary Weiss.
And if you liked this episode, please like it below, hit subscribe, and share it with your friends. We will see you in two weeks.
Farewell y’all, we’ll see you soon.
Photo by Juliet Clare Warren
