The magic of community

Celebrating 1000, seeking magic and gifts for you 🎉

Aug 31, 2023

💌 Next month paid subscribers will get a peek behind the scenes of my business when I’ll check in with my 2023 business and financial goals, including all the numbers. Paid subscribers will also get access to the mini-mastermind next month and the accountability club (more on both below). I’d love to have you onboard ✨Upgrade your subscription to paid to receive the posts.

Community is a key value in my business: it is one of the reasons why I no longer market my business on social media and why I moved my newsletter to Substack.

In this post, I’m celebrating the magic of community, inviting you to identify the magic in your own business and given you discounts to a paid subscription and more.

I’m also celebrating a newsletter milestone by giving you 15% off if you become a paid subscriber, and with a choice of gifts for current paid subscribers. Scroll down for more.

💌 Enjoying these newsletters? I’d love it if you’d become a paid subscriber for just €5 a month by clicking the button below. You’ll not only be supporting the work I do to change how we talk, think and feel about small business, but also receive powerful bonuses like guides, behind-the-scenes posts, Ask the community-threads and discussion threads to support you in growing a slow, gentle and profitable business. If you’d benefit from the paid resources but are unable to afford them right now, do let me know and I’d be happy to set you up for free.

New to Substack and want to become a paid subscriber? Click the button and you’ll be prompted to enter your email address and then directed to the payment page (more info here).

How I’m building community at Female Owned

Last year, my friend Jen gave me a copy of The Art of Gathering. I started reading it immediately and then got so many ideas that I had to put it down. I went back to it earlier this summer and was inspired all over again. While I still haven’t finished the book, it crystallized many of my ideas around community in general, and specifically the community that I’m building here, with you, at Female Owned.

I have a big dream: I want to see more slow, gentle and profitable businesses in the world.

My aim with Female Owned has always been to change how we think, feel and talk about small business and freelancing.

I’m done with the hustle and feel—know—that framing small business and freelancing as hustling, hard work, working all hours and having no boundaries is harmful and unnecessary.

I’m done with a model of business where we need to squeeze our lives, our humanness, into whatever time and space our business leaves us with. I’m done celebrating productivity hacks and busy. Done feeling like I need to earn rest.

Yet reading The Art of Gathering helped me see that I want more than just change how we think, feel and talk about small business.

I want to empower you to create whatever a slow, gentle and profitable business looks like to you, by surrounding you with people who feel the same. I want you to feel relief and inspiration when you open this newsletter, when you read the comments by people just like you.

I have a big dream: I want to see more slow, gentle and profitable businesses in the world. I want to see people like you, like me, create businesses that are not led by pressure, scarcity and hustle, but that are shaped by our needs and desires. I want us to be humans first and business owners second. I want us to work at whatever pace we need and make the money we want doing so.

Community has always been a part of Female Owned and of my larger business: as I write here, community is one of the main ways I market my business (without social media!). I love seeing the conversations happening in the comments sections of these newsletters: this is a big reason why I moved my newsletter to Substack. Even if you never commented before, I want you to feel like you’re part of a larger group of people also craving a different way of doing business and making it happen.

In September, I’m adding two new features to Female Owned to strengthen this sense of community. First, though, a caveat: Female Owned is not a Facebook group and never will be. It’s not another space to be always checking in on, or a space where you feel FOMO. But it is here for you to empower and inspire you no matter how much you choose to participate.

Coming in September for paid subscribers:

Mini-mastermind: once every two months, the monthly discussion thread will take the form of a mini-mastermind in written form. I’ll be inviting you to submit your questions on everything business-related and will answer them in a paid subscriber-only post, inviting all paid subscribers to respond as well with suggestions and advice. I love the dynamic of masterminds and want to replicate it here, for you, on a small scale to support and inspire you even more.
Female Owned Accountability Club: at the beginning of every month I’ll publish a post in which I invite you to celebrate what’s going well in your business and share what you want and need to do in the coming month. From experience, I know that even something as simple as voicing your plans in a thread like this adds a sense of accountability. I—and the community of paid subscribers—will be there to cheer you on. The first of these posts will go out to all subscribers in September, to give you a taste, but from October onwards the Accountability Club will be only for paid subscribers.

Both of these new features will (from October onwards) be available to paid subscribers only.

I appreciate the sense of intimacy and safety that a paywall provides, and want both the mini-mastermind and the accountability club to be spaces in which you can share as much or as little as you want to, without the entire internet reading along. I’m personally very much excited about these features and the community and connection they can foster—and I’m eager to add more value to the paid subscription as well, encouraging more of you to upgrade to paid if you can.

Embracing and celebrating the magic of community

Since earlier this summer, over 1000 of you are part of this community. I’ve written before about not wanting to pay too much attention to the numbers. Yet that there are now over 1000 people who choose to have this newsletter in their inbox gives me deep joy. It feels magical to me. It inspires me and makes me want to write and create more of what makes you want to be subscribed to Female Owned.

In early summer, the word “magic” kept popping up around me. I described my business, the clients I’m working with, the growth of this newsletter, the response to my Substack course for small business owners as magical to friends. Getting to spend my time doing this work feels magical to me. It feels easeful and joyful in a way I’ve not experienced with anything else.

Around the same time I watched the final season of Workin’ Moms, one of my favourite shows. In the final episode, the main character’s father advises her on life, and especially work. He tells her to “go to the magic”, that “This ride isn’t worth much unless you can trust yourself to know where the magic is”. “Never,” he says, “settle for anything less than magic”.

Probably because I’d been using the word magical so much myself these words resonated with me. The way my business has grown over the past eight months feels like nothing short of magic to me. This is it and I’m going to bask in it and use that feeling of magic as something of a guiding light going forward.

🎉 All of this magic has me in a celebratory mood. If you enjoy reading these newsletters, I’d love for you to become a paid subscriber. For the next 4 weeks, I’ll be offering a discount of 15% on new paid subscriptions. For the first year, your monthly subscription would be €4.25 rather than €5, an annual subscription €42.50 rather than €50.

Get 15% off for 1 year

Already a paid subscriber? Thank you so much for supporting my work. ❤️ Of course I want to celebrate with you as well. As a current paid subscriber, I’d love to offer you one of the following:

a free copy of my social media for small business owners guide to help you be more intentional and mindful if you want to use social media in your business (regular price €25) or
a free copy of business boundaries that feel good to help you set and affirm boundaries for your business (and your life) (regular price €25) or
10% off a one-hour mentoring call with me.

This offer is valid until the end of September 2023.

Take a moment to think or journal about these questions:

What, if anything, currently feels magical in your business? What about it feels magical?
What new things, if any, would add more magic to how you feel in your business? What do you want to make room for?

I’d love to know what feels magical in your business right now, or where you want to add more magic. Is there anything that would feel magical but you haven’t started on because it seems too big or scary? I’d love to cheer you on. Leave a comment below to join to conversation.

If you’re new to Substack: you can comment by clicking the button below—you’ll be prompted to set up an account which requires very little personal info and takes only one minute of your time.