Divine Society

On January 19th, 2024, I had an anniversary. I successfully arrived at my 5th anniversary of being in business under the dba CreativeAF Consulting, my LLC is only 3 years old in May.

It has been a journey; I really don’t even know where to begin with this story so I will wait on rehashing the entire thing (I have PTSD) BUT I will share the top 5 things I have learned as a business owner. As an aside I will add that none of this has been pretty, even if I have looked it on Instagram.

Here’s the list:

1. No matter what your plan was it’s going to change. I sat in my garage with this grand plan popping up in my head like a mathematician preparing to solve an equation. I wrote things down and started out with so much excitement, I am doing very few of those things now. Please prepare for pivoting.
2. People will think you’re crazy. Learn to love it. I have changed my logo, my name, my direction, my brand message, my colors and everything else so many times that I KNOW without a doubt that my family and friends think I’m crazy. I had to learn that it really doesn’t matter what they think because I’m doing something none of them has done before. Creating your own income is absolutely something done by people who are slightly insane. It turns out that it’s just fine because my clients think my crazy is genius and they pay me for it.
3. You will lose friends, family, and even clients. One of the hardest things I had to come to terms with was losing some people along the way. Especially when you feel so connected to them and like they really want what is best for you. It’s not that they don’t necessarily but in my experience the transitions you go through (which I will touch next) really affect the relationships. You have to be able to love them and leave them where they are, you are not allowed to stay the same for their comfort or to remain aligned with them.
4. You will be unrecognizable to yourself after a while. The tears I shed when I had to start setting boundaries in my relationships with myself, clients, and friends were HEAVY. I had been so wounded in my past when speaking up for myself that I always had a tendency to just agree to whatever was put on the table. When you’re the boss you can’t operate like that and run your business. As you begin to scale your business, you’ll realize that the standard operating procedures you didn’t have before are necessary and you’ll have to make sure that you get your sh*t together, and fast.
5. You can’t give up; quitting is not an option. Not everyone left a high paying corporate job to wobble through the underground railroad that is entrepreneurship without a proper guide like I did. It has been nothing short of gut wrenching, disgusting, ugly, and painful on some days but I remembered why I started. That’s why all of the gurus say things like “remember your why”, it sounds like a corny statement being made by someone trying to sell you a book but nothing has been more important on the journey. As you change, as you lose people, as the plan shifts, you have to remember why you started and what the end goal was or you will quit.

The only thing I would change about the journey is nothing, primarily because I’m one of those people who has to learn by doing. I could have read a book that would have told me not to step in sh*t and I would have stepped in it anyway. I learned so much that I would never trade for coaching sessions or masterminds.

Here’s to the next 5 years!