Putting Your Mission Back in the Driver’s Seat

Rebranding your business is a risk, especially if what you’re doing is still making money.

How can you be sure it’s time to shake up the status quo and shift your focus?

Tara Gentile can attest to the fact that there is no easy framework for making that decision. But a good place to start is by asking the question, “What is the company that I really want to build?”

Tara has spent the last year getting back to her original mission, getting clear and focused on the legacy she wants to leave behind, and rebooting her business to emphasize the community aspect of her small business network and give members access to the collective intelligence of the group.

Today, Tara shares how losing out on a promotion during maternity leave inspired her start her own business. She explains how her business has evolved over time and offers insight around retiring products, hiring employees and putting on live events. I ask Tara about her writing practice, and she speaks to the call-response approach she employs to facilitate conversation among the CoCommercial community. Listen in and learn about how the flexibility of entrepreneurship enables Tara’s atypical co-parenting situation and what her daughter is teaching her about herself. 

The Startup Pregnant Podcast Episode #037

Some quotes from the episode

  • “I got really angry first, and then I got really resourceful. I said, ‘I know there are thousands of other women out there who work from home, who do their own thing, who freelance, who have small businesses. I’ve got to figure out what they know that I don’t know.’”
  • “We’re going to equip you with what you need to grow yourself and to grow your business, and we’re going to do it for way less than other people do because we’re really built on the collective intelligence of our community.”
  • “I get to hang out online talking to smart people about interesting things, and it’s pretty much a dream come true.”
  • “Our mission has been—from day one until now lifting up the members of the new economy, the people who are building businesses in the new world of work, creating independent careers for themselves.”
  • “We see CoCommercial as a way for us to really be leaders in that new economy and for us to advocate on behalf of people who are freelancers, who are small business owners, who are microbusiness owners, who don’t have the same social safety nets that employees have.”
  • “I retired those products … because I realized that they weren’t helping me build what I really wanted to build.”
  • “I tend to think about writing in my business as largely call and response, so I imagine … the audience as a whole putting out a call, and my job is to respond to that. That’s how I write best.”
  • “It’s so much easier to create things that people want, or even better, create things that people need.”
  • “One big problem I see with small business owners is they think because they’re so used to doing everything themselves that they have to find all the answers themselves too, and they don’t ask for help from the applications that they use.”
  • “The business has been a way to not only create flexibility that I need as a mother, but I think for me, most importantly, it’s given me the opportunity to give [my daughter] experiences that I wouldn’t have dreamed of … being able to give to her.”
  • “[Entrepreneurship] is all a giant experiment. There is no right way—there is only the thing that works.”

LEARN MORE ABOUT TARA GENTILE

Tara is the founder of CoCommercial, a social network for microbusiness owners that brings together coaches, consultants, educators, designers and makers who are passionate about taking control of their livelihoods in the New Economy. Tara’s work has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes and Inc., among many others. She is a sought-after speaker on the topics of money, marketing and entrepreneurship, a bestselling CreativeLive instructor, and the author of several books on doing business today. Tara is also the host of Power. Profit. Pursuit., one of the top 24 women-hosted podcasts for business owners.


RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

THE STARTUP PREGNANT PODCAST & HOST
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