Hi friend,

I hope your 2022 is off to a great start. Hard to believe January is already nearly over! I promise to appear in your inbox more often than just once a month moving forward :)

First off, I was just featured in Business Insider if you want to give it a read!

Second, I really wanted to spend some time (less than 5 minutes, I promise!) writing to you about exploring other avenues within your current work. As we’re entering another “new year, new me” era (although Omicron made everything feel very much the same), it’s around this time of year that we may start to get a little antsy with our businesses and wonder what else is out there, what else we could be doing. Perhaps we want to expand our service offering, finally hire that assistant, or completely pivot to a new area.

If you’re not already writing down your ideas, start there. You don’t need to act on any of them right now, but it’s helpful to keep them in front of you or add them to a document so you can reference them later, maybe deciding now is not the time to act on them. When you’re ready to act, you can refer back to this list and begin making a plan.

Let’s address something first. Change is scary. Maybe what you’re doing right now is working just fine, so you’re hesitant to act. Your ideas and plans come with varying levels of risk. “Maybe I’ll change the font on my website” is less risky than, say, hiring five new software engineers to explore building a new product offering. I strongly encourage you to acknowledge any fear you have around whatever change you make but allow yourself the opportunity to both dream and act.

Take my own story for example. Govalo never would’ve started if I didn’t decide to start looking into building Shopify apps for merchants at The Taproom. Learning a new skill and training our team on how to build apps takes time, energy, and money. There was a time when we attempted getting into app development back in early 2020 and it failed miserably. So I wrote down that note and saved it for a later day, which came back again in early 2021. Allowing for some creative wiggle room in our service offering and resources led to exploring building a gift card solution for a merchant, which turned into building an app now available in the Shopify App Store. An entire separate business was launched thanks to that exploration!

If you’re concerned that you’ll waste time going down a non-lucrative path or one that can even harm your business in some way, welcome to the club. Entrepreneurship is a series of ups and downs, a unique path paved by the individual decisions we make along the way. You will inevitably make some wrong turns, make some bad decisions. Give yourself permission to screw up, then give yourself the grace to acknowledge and move on when you do.

Happy dreaming,

Kelly