When you first start a business, and for many years after, you’re in the weeds. And often, you’re trying to get yourself out for far longer than you had planned. When I first started Bump Club and Beyond, this was me. I was doing everything myself. As an events based company, this included a lot of very operational and logistical tasks.

Things like setting up chairs before events, hauling boxes, and stuffing gift bags. I managed every logistical detail of every event (two of them a month to start), on my own. I was also newly pregnant, so the physical stuff got too hard very fast, AND I was working full time in my corporate job.

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At this point, Bump Club and Beyond wasn’t even a real business yet, at least not in a way that would impress anyone on paper. And I was doing everything from the event organization to the marketing, to the set up, clean up, AND I was the face of the company. Why? Because there was no one else to do it.

My mom, my best friend, my husband and others all helped me when they could, but it wasn’t a permanent solution.

In the spring after I had my daughter, about a year into me owning the company, a young grad student who recently finished her degree reached out. She was looking for work experience. She told me she’d do anything, she loved what I was doing and was eager to get her hands dirty. I knew right away what I needed help with: the physical and logistical parts of running our events. These were not only physically taxing on me as a new mom, but they were the tasks that were eating all of my time. I needed to focus on building the business, not setting up chairs at our events.

To start, I hired her hourly. At the time it was all I could afford. She turned out to be a really hard worker, and someone I grew to adore and trust completely. She was an incredibly asset and someone I knew I wanted in my business for the long run. She also told me that she wanted to be there for the long haul. And honestly, those are the best hires: the people who reach out to you and WANT to be there.

So I worked hard to bring in enough sponsorship revenue to bring her on full time. I was able to do this about a year and a half into Bump Club, and when I did, I paid her a salary before I ever paid myself.

But that one decision, to pay someone else first, changed everything about my business. Not only did it free up my hours, it freed up my attention. What I’m referring to is my attention on things like setting up chairs. Finally, I was able to focus on the tasks that could actually grow the business. The minute I brought her on and stopped getting in the weeds on every event, I was able to start focusing on sponsorships and revenue instead. And this is where the business and the tangible revenue actually started to move and grow

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Here’s the actual lesson.

As a small business owner, you have to remember that even if you want to, you don’t have to hand off everything at once. Honestly, you probably can’t afford to. But if I were to ask 100 small business owners, I’d guarantee that every one of them is still doing at least one task themselves that’s costing them more in lost focus than it would cost to hand it off.

Often times it’s a task that you would’t even expect to be eating your time. It’s often not the hardest thing on your plate. But it’s the thing that eats your hours in small chunks at a time. It’s those recurring logistics, the administrative tasks, the things that you’ve always done because you’ve just always done it.

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This week’s Quick Win.

Pick one recurring task you are still doing entirely yourself, something that happens weekly or even daily, and take one real step toward handing it off.

Late last year I took the social media management/scheduling of my podcast content and handed it off to an hourly social media manager. She is someone I trust, and while this is something I can do, she takes care of it for me, a few hours a week and I know it will get done. I also don’t have to worry about the podcast promo. She simply does it.

For you, this may mean writing down the steps to do something exactly how you do it so that someone else can take the reigns. This may mean asking someone you know if they would want to take on a task for a few hours a week. It may mean really looking for a part time hire to help you out. One of the things I tell small business owners all the time is that you don’t need 6-figures to make a hire. You can hire someone to do something specific on an hourly or project basis, and that can make all the difference in your business.

You don’t need a full org chart. You need one task, off your plate, this week.

When you’re starting to unload tasks its imperative to ask yourself this question: Is this thing something only I can do? Or is it mine by default because I’ve been doing it?

Letting go little by little is what will eventually help you to really grow your business.

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Why I’m bringing this up today.

Today’s Dear FoundHer episode is with Rachel Berliner, founder of Amy’s Kitchen, yes, that Amy’s Kitchen. The one that’s in the frozen food aisle of almost every single grocer across North America. Rachel has spent decades gradually letting go of pieces of her business: quality control, package design, even answering consumer letters herself. But at the same time, she never let go of the one thing that actually mattered most, the food itself. Obviously this is a different scale than where most of us start, but the exact same instinct. Know what only you can do, and hand off everything else, on purpose, over time.

Go listen to her episode, out today.

This month on Dear FoundHer, we’ve been going Behind the Curtain, looking at what actually goes into building a real business, mine and the founders I’ve talked to all month. I know today is September 1, but we’re wrapping up summer and we’ll be officially getting into next month’s theme next week. Do you want a little sneak peak?

In September we’re going to talk about Publicity and Media: How to get eyes on your business. It’s going to be a great month filled with A LOT of gems that you can apply right away for immediate impact.

Until next week…enjoy what’s left of unofficial summer and have a great long weekend with your loved ones. I have something REALLY special happening this weekend…I can’t wait to tell you all about it next week!

Lindsay Pinchuk, Host + Founder, Dear FoundHer…

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A few months after I had left Bump Club and Beyond I was at an event and someone introduced me as “the Founder of Bump Club and Beyond.” They weren’t wrong. I am and always will be the Founder of my first company, even though it doesn’t exist anymore. I didn’t correct them, this was in fact who I was, but in that moment, it didn’t feel like it.

When you build a company from nothing for over a decade, and then leave, there are a lot of pieces you can’t prepare yourself for. There are many things that no one tells you about making an exit. The day you sign the paperwork, the acquiring company has already in a way, let you go. But for you, especially if you’re working within the new entity, you don’t let go nearly as fast.

And when you actually do walk away, the space between you leaving and what you’re doing next often presents you with a question that isn’t so easy to answer: who are you now? Especially, who are you when everyone still calls you by a title tied to a company you no longer run.

It was that initial stretch of a few months that taught me more about my identity than the two and a half years working for the acquiring company ever did.

I can pinpoint the exact moment that truly opened my eyes. I wrapped up three projects in the few months after my exit and in a matter of a couple of weeks I went from three consulting clients to zero. I paused for a minute and took a step back in order to figure out why.

I was still being introduced by a company’s name I couldn’t legally do the kind of work associated with it. Here’s what actually pulled me out of it, plus I’m sharing with you four concrete lessons I’d tell anyone trying to figure out who they are during a moment of transition. It doesn’t matter if you’ve sold a business and walked away, left a job, or starting something new. Everyone can find something from these experiences.

That story is below.

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If there’s one thing my dad always taught me to do in business it' was this: Get it in writing. It sounds simple, doesn’t it?

And trust me, I try. I always try. But sometimes it’s hard, and there have definitely been times in my career as an entrepreneur when I have forgotten this rule. Or, there have been times when I got off a call thinking we had an agreement, but later found out that the other person saw the arrangement differently than me. I can remember a few times specifically when what I thought had been agreed on couldn’t have been further from what the other party assumed was how we were moving forward.

These weren’t malicious situations necessarily, but when it’s your word against sometimes else’s, its hard to always come out on top when it’s not in writing.

So a few years ago, I stopped leaving my calls to memory.

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Here’s what I do now after every call.

When I have a call that involves any kind of decision, commitment, terms or agreement, I immediately follow up with an email the same day. I keep it short, usually it just reiterates what was discussed, putting whatever terms or agreement was made into writing. This way, we both have the chance to correct one another when moving forward if there was some kind of misalignment.

And now, I also use a notetaker on every single video call that I take. It’s always on and at the end of the call I have a full transcription of what was said, who said what and what the agreed upon next steps are. I don’t recall a time I’ve had to look, but knowing it’s there and that I’m not leaving the discussion to memory is a lifesaver.

Why this matters more than it sounds like it should.

As a small business owner, you’re constantly making verbal agreements: with clients, vendors, potential partners, freelancers and contractors. All it takes is one conversation going sideways to understand why this habit is protection for you as a business owner, it’s not paranoia.

Documenting things consistently also protects you from yourself. As a small business owner, I’m having multiple conversations every single day. It’s easy to forget the details. I’ve gone back to my own confirmation emails more than once to check what I actually agreed to, because I genuinely didn’t always remember. This isn’t about assuming bad faith in other people. It’s about not needing to rely on anyone’s memory, including your own.

Here are two of the simplest things you can start doing this week to protect yourself coming out of conversations:

• After your next important call, send a two line follow-up email confirming what was discussed and agreed to. Start to make it a habit. Build it into your process.

• If you take calls over video, turn on a transcription tool. Zoom has one that runs in the background, but I also have one called Read AI that has been great for my mentorship calls as well. Let it run in the background on everything so that you have record of what’s being discussed.

Neither of these costs you real time or real money. Both of them mean you’re never again stuck with nothing but your word against someone else’s.

Why I’m bringing this up today.

Today’s Dear FoundHer… podcast episode is with Michele Henry, founder of Face Founderie. Michele knew she wanted to expand, and she knew she wanted to franchise, so she documented protocols and processes. We both made the decision to document meticulously in business, perhaps we had different reasons for doing so, but we’ve landed in the same place: these important parts of your business need to exist somewhere besides someone’s memory.

Go listen to her episode, out today.

This month on Dear FoundHer..., we’ve been taking you Behind the Curtain, looking at what running a real business actually looks like. I always say that if I can save ONE WOMAN time or hassle through my own experiences, then I am doing my job. This is why I’ve shared so much of my own story this month, in addition to the stories of the amazing women I’ve had on the podcast.

Make sure if you haven’t already, subscribe for more on Thursday.

Lindsay Pinchuk, Host + Founder, Dear FoundHer…

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I started my first business with $500.

Not $500 in seed funding. $500, total. This was the amount of money I gave to myself to build a basic website. It was 2010, social media didn’t exist, and I needed a website to share the mission of my company and our upcoming events. This $500 budget was the entire operating budget for what would eventually become Bump Club and Beyond.

When I launched, I didn’t have a business plan. I didn’t even realize I had a business. I simply started hosting events for expectant moms. I truly was building the plane as I was flying it. Obviously, because of this, I didn’t have investors. At the time I also didn’t have a single friend who was a female founder. I had no one to call when things went sideways or when I wanted to ask someone, “Is this normal?”

When the IRS showed up on my doorstep because my accountant was filing wrong, I cried. I of course talked to my husband about it, but I didn’t have any peers to call.

I’ll tell you what I didn’t do with that $500. I didn’t spend it on ads. I didn’t spend it on PR.

It’s not like I chose not to do these things because I knew anything about cash flow. I simply didn’t have money to spent, so I didn’t spend it. And instead, I built the business through partnerships, community and events. It took years before I ever ran a paid ad, over five of them. And when I did, the reason it worked was because the business had something real underneath it. I want you to know that holds true for Dear FoundHer… as well. I am in my fifth year and I started running small ad campaigns last year.

The reason these campaigns work is because I had already extablished a reputation. I had a community who showed up and a story people connected with and believed in. Ads amplify what’s already working. They don’t create it.

I bring this up now because of a conversation I had this week on the podcast with Elina Wang, founder of ESW Beauty. She started her company with a $25,000 bank loan. She didn’t have any investors or a venture round. Six years later, ESW Beauty is doing eight figures a year, is sold in thousands of doors across the country, and as of today, has never raised a dollar of outside capital.

Our businesses couldn’t look more different. She sells physical product into national retail. I built a community business on events and partnerships. But when I asked her how she actually pulled off bootstrapping to eight figures, her answer landed on the exact same instinct that built mine, just dressed up in different tools.

Bootstrapping isn’t about refusing help. It’s about sequencing.

Most people think bootstrapping means grit, or stubbornness, or just refusing to take anyone’s money on principle. That’s not what it is, in her business or in mine. It’s a decision about when you spend, and on what, made on purpose instead of by accident.

The difference between me and Elina is that when I became an entrepreneur, I had no idea that I even could raise money. But I didn’t have to. I invested back into the business and built in a way that kept me out of debt.

Elina told me she chose not to invest heavily in D2C advertising in her early years, on purpose, because she’d watched how fast that spend adds up. Ads, influencers, all of it compounds quickly, and it’s the easiest way to burn through cash you don’t actually have yet. That’s the same math I was doing with my $500, just without her language for it. Neither of us was refusing to spend money. We were both refusing to spend it before it had anything to attach to.

That’s the piece almost nobody tells you honestly, and it’s the piece I actually want to unpack with you today, using her business and mine as two different proofs of the same idea.

This is where most business content stops.

Most people will tell you to “be disciplined with cash” and call it a strategy. What they won’t hand you are the actual mechanics. The specific tools Elina used to solve her cash flow problem without giving up equity or taking on debt. The exact one to two year planning habit she credits with keeping her afloat. The inventory mistake that almost every product founder makes at least once. And the hiring timing question that took me a decade and a sold business to actually learn.

Below the paywall, you’ll get all of it, explained in plain language, plus a sequencing framework you can run against your own business this week. Our premium edition is $9 a month, or $87 a year, and if it helps you avoid spending money on the wrong thing at the wrong time even once, it will have paid for itself many times over.

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Some of you already know that early on in my first business, the IRS showed up on my doorstep. I want to talk more about that today, with good reason. There were so many lessons that came from this one event.

I walked out of my house to go to services for the holidays and a man was standing there. They didn’t send a letter, or call me on the phone. An actual person was standing on my doorstep, because my accountant had filed something wrong (actually he didn’t file what he said he was filing) early on with my first business. I was in the middle of building something out of nothing with five hundred dollars and a barely functional website, and I remember the sheer panic as I was standing in my doorway. Nobody warns you this is even possible.

After a minor freak out and a semi-panic attack, I got through it. Honestly, I always got through it, this was not the first or last time I had a freak out of this sort. But I promised myself that the next time I built something, I wasn’t going to learn my finances by fire.

When I sold my company, exited and started again, I decided that I wanted to do something differently. Before I even incorporated this business, I made sure to find a good, solid bookkeeper. I’m proud to say, I’ve been with the same company the same bookkeeper for nearly five years.

This was not just the first hire I made for this 2.0 of mine, it was the only hire at first. I didn’t hire a VA or someone to help with content. I hired someone to keep my finances straight from day one. I hired a bookkeeper, and that was the only outside help I had for the first couple of years.

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Why is this important?

When you own and run a business, you wear so many different hats. You’re the marketer, the salesperson, the photographer, the customer service department, the content creator, and usually you’re the person answering emails at all hours. Often, you’re also the finance department too. Many women I talk to keep track of their finances in a spreadsheet (keep reading to find out why that is a big no-no.). And while you may do everything, you can’t do everything well all the time. For me, tracking finances is not a strong suit of mine. I understand a P&L, I can read the balance sheet and know what it means. I know the basics. But it’s not where I excel.

And I know this. I learned this early on with my first company. It took me years to find the right person to help me there. So this time, I knew I had to start off on the right foot, and with a good solid bookkeeper by my side.

For me, a bookkeeper does the thing I don’t know how to do, so I can spend my time on the things that only I can do.

Whenever I’m with a client and they are looking to offload something in their business, this is the first place I suggest. Why? Because despite thinking it’s a huge expense, many business owners are surprised that it’s actually quite affordable. A lot of women I talk to assume a bookkeeper is a luxury for businesses making real money, something you graduate into once you’re “established.” This couldn’t be further from the truth. The earlier you bring someone in, the less there is to have to fix later, and the cheaper it is to keep clean books than to fix messy ones. Trust me, I learned this the hard way. It cost me what seemed like a small fortune after the IRS showed up.

You can find a good bookkeeper for a few hundred dollars a month, sometimes less if your business is simple when you start. Compare that to what it costs you in stress, in hours you’ll never get back, in the risk of an IRS letter, or worse, a knock on your door.

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How I manage my books…

I used Quickbooks the first time around and my bookkeeper set me up on the cloud version this time around as well. I can see exactly where my money is going, exactly what I’m making, and what I owe, without opening a spreadsheet I built myself and hoping I did the math right. Like I said before, you want to use accounting software, don’t keep your expenses in a spreadsheet. I promise, you won’t regret this business expense.

Plus, I meet with my bookkeeper once a month to go over everything and at the end of our call, I know exactly where I stand for that month and what the outlook is for the next few.

A few things I’d tell any small business owner about getting your financial house in order:

• Hire a bookkeeper before you think you need one, hire then when you’re starting out. If you’re incorporating, that’s your moment. Don’t wait until tax season is on fire. Have someone start with you, get you set up and functioning properly.

• Use accounting software from day one, even if your business is simple. QuickBooks is what works for me. The specific tool matters less than having one, and using it consistently. Ask other business owners, or ask the bookkeeper if you hire one. They can make a suggestion of what will work best for you.

• Talk to an accountant separately from your bookkeeper. A bookkeeper manages the day to day. An accountant helps you think about the bigger picture, your entity structure, your taxes, your long term planning. You’ll eventually want both.

• Don’t wait for the mistake to find the help. I did it the hard way once. I’m not doing it again, and neither should you.

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Why did I bring this up today?

Well, today’s Dear FoundHer… podcsat episode is with Elina Wang, the founder of ESW Beauty, who bootstrapped her company to eight figures without ever raising outside money. This is such an amazing story, when you listen you’ll hear her talk about the tools she used to manage cash flow as she scaled, things like factoring and PO financing, real financial infrastructure that most people never talk about publicly.

This Thursday, we’re going to go deeper into that right here in The FoundHer Files, because I think there’s a real framework in her story about growing a business without handing pieces of it away. But I wanted to start the week here, with the more foundational version of that same lesson. Before you think about how to fund growth, get someone in your corner who actually understands your numbers. Everything else gets easier from there.

As you’ve seen, this month on Dear FoundHer…, we’re going Behind the Curtain, looking at what building a real business actually looks like. We’re really getting into it, no filters or polish. Financial infrastructure isn’t a sexy topic, but it’s one of the most important ones, and it’s exactly the kind of thing nobody shows you until you’ve already made the mistake.

I hope that you found this helpful and that you’ll join me here for a deeper dive on this topic on Thursday. Until then, have a great week.

Lindsay Pinchuk, Host + Founder of Dear FoundHer…

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TODAY ON THE PODCAST…

Elina Wang, co-founder and CEO of ESW Beauty, joins me on Dear FoundHer… to share the story of how she bootstrapped her beauty brand to eight figures, without taking any outside investment. She breaks down how she built her skincare company that’s sold in more than 19,000 stores nationwide. And a big piece of our converation is about cash flow, POs, factoring and the finance systems that helped her to make this happen.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE + FOLLOW OUR PODCAST HERE to never miss an episode again!

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Just over five weeks ago, I dropped my youngest daughter off at overnight camp (if you recall from part 1, I dropped her at camp because we don’t have a bus anymore.) But we do have a bus home and a week ago today I went to pick her up.

The camp my kids go to is the camp I worked at, not Camp Sea-gull from my days as a camper, that camp unfortunately closed. But there’s a piece of me at my kids’ camp as well. I spent four summers there working as staff and it’s where I met my husband.

This was my youngest daughter’s sixth summer at camp. This was the summer she lived in the village where I was staff almost thirty years ago. Her older sister spent her ninth summer with our camp this year, away on a different program camp offers. Which means that as summer comes to an end, I’ve now picked up two girls who left as one version of themselves, but who came home as another.

I’ve spent time over the last three weeks writing about the lessons I myself learned at camp. I’ve talked about independence on the bus ride up as a kid, and learning to sit with your nerves while waiting to see what was on the other side. I talked about confidence and how on a canoe trip I had no business signing up for, I learned that the willingness to try something new before you feel ready is usually the whole point. And I talked about connection. I shared that during my first summer at camp, I knew one girl in my bunk going in, but that I learned that often those experiences are where you build your most meaningful relationships.

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And the irony of that final lesson? The night before pick up last week, I ran into one of those very friends from that first summer when I knew no one. And we spent so much time reminiscing. It doesn’t matter how many years go by, camp will always be the ultimate connector.

And there’s a fifth lesson I haven’t written about yet. It’s the one I think about most leading into pick up and when I watch the bus roll in. It’s the lesson of contentment. The ability to just be. With yourself, with the people around you, with nothing to perform for and nothing to prove. This was one of the greatest gifts that camp gave me and one I try to go back to as much as possible, even though it is so hard in today’s world.

It’s been almost forty years since I was a camper at camp. But this lesson transcends time. This lesson is one of the only similar pieces of camp in 1990 and camp in 2026. And it all stems from one fact: Camp is and always has been a screen free zone.

For four weeks, my daughter didn’t have access to a single screen. There’s been no group chat to check, no feed to scroll and no notification pulling her attention somewhere else while she’s sitting with her friends. This session she has three Israeli campers in her cabin, girls whose lives look nothing like hers back home, and my hope is that she’s spent the last few weeks getting to know them in a way that only happens when there’s nothing else competing for your attention.

She also went on her first real camping trip this summer. No matter how many years went by going on trips, they always intimidated me before heading out. I hope she came back from it a little braver than when she left, and I hope she learned what I learned on my own version of that trip: that stepping outside your comfort zone is not just survivable, it’s usually where the best memories are made.

The laundry thankfully is done, but we’re still unpacking stories from the summer. It’s only been a week and they come in spurts. But I love hearing them. What I love is the excitement she feels when telling me about the simplest of moments. She and her sister spent a month (her sister five weeks) being fully present in a way that is really hard for any of us to find these days.

For me, this why summer camp is so important. It’s not about the specific activities that make camp camp. It’s about being fully present with zero distractions. It’s about not having access to screens. The kids learn how to connect, converse and be in each other’s presence without a device to intervene. The figure out how to solve problems, advocate for themselves, and how to support each other. It’s no different from how we grew up 24/7, but the only time they really get this reprieve in today’s world is at camp.

One of my favorite parts about camp is hearing from both of my girls how they sit around and play cards. Because I know during this time they are truly socializing with their friends. I remember the days playing SPIT or Euchre for HOURS. Those were some of the best memories of my childhood.

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If camp gave my daughters nothing else this summer, it gave them four weeks of contentment that most of us are still trying to figure out how to build into our adult lives, one boundary and one deleted app at a time.

I think about the ride to camp. I wrote about this a few weeks ago and how it bothers me to no end that my daughters don’t have a bus to camp. I feel like they’re missing out on a pivotal part of the camp experience. Regardless, the ride up no matter how you get there is filled with nerves. But on the way home, they do get to take a bus, and this ride couldn’t be more different. There’s no nervousness left by the time that bus pulls in. Just a busload of kids who found out they could do more than they thought they could, who made friends they didn’t choose and needed anyway, who spent a month being fully present in their own lives. And a parking lot full of parents, including me, sad for them that it’s all over, and waiting to see the version of their kid that they’re welcoming home.

That was the day I picked her up. It’s been a week since we’ve been home now, and there are two specific things that have stuck with me: The tears, and the photos.

On the last night, her whole cabin cried. I won’t even show you the pictures I got because they honestly are too sad. You can feel the tears in every ounce of your being. These are the kind of tears where you can’t catch your breath, and you can’t stop hugging everyone, who also can’t catch their breath. I’ve watched my daughter cry over plenty of things in thirteen years. I have never watched her cry like that. And while my heart breaks seeing it, it fills my heart to know that we’ve given her something that she loves so much that saying goodbye for the next ten months is that hard.

And then there are the photos.

The genuine happiness in these photos is like none I have ever seen. My kids are happy at home, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a lightness about them that only comes out in the pictures from camp. There are zero worries on their faces, in a way I genuinely cannot remember seeing anywhere else. I don’t see it on vacation, and I don’t see it on any ordinary Tuesday at home. When the bus rolls in, camp is handing us back kids that are the very best version of themselves. And it’s not an accident or a coincidence. Different from when I came home from camp forty years ago, this is what happens when you take away the phone, the audience, and just let a kid be a kid for a month or two straight.

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Now that she’s home, my hope is simple. I want her to bottle up that feeling. I want her to carry it with her through the school year…through the ordinary Mondays, and the harder days, until she gets back to her home away from home ten months from now to do it all over again.

I think about this constantly as a business owner too. It’s easy to build a company that never lets you exhale, where there is always another launch, another deadline, another notification pulling your attention out of the room you are actually standing in. Twenty-six years into building brands, I can tell you the version of me that does her best work is never the most frantic version. It’s the version who has actually let herself be still long enough to hear her own thinking.

All month long at Dear FoundHer… we’re sharing the behind the curtain moments about building a business. Many of you have heard me share that the idea for this entire platform came to me when I was on vacation. I was taking a break, clearing my head in the mountains of Colorado. It was the first real vacation I had in over a decade.

That was when the idea for this platform came to me. Not when I was sitting in front of my computer screen or scrolling on my phone.

So I try to build small versions of that same screen-free time into my own business now. An hour with my phone somewhere else. I take a walk in silence. I go to a workout class. This is a real boundary around when I stop working instead of just when I run out of energy. It’s not natural for me, and it’s not something I do perfectly. But I know exactly what that feeling looks like on my daughter’s face after four weeks of it, and I want more of it in my own life too, not just hers.

Camp was the greatest gift my parents ever gave me. I hope that one day my daughters will say the same.

This has been a four part series, and I’m so glad you read all of it with me. If you have your own camp story, or you’re standing in a parking lot of your own today, waiting for a bus to arrive home, I’d love to hear about it.

Lindsay

P.S. If this series is the first thing of mine you’ve read, welcome. I write about building businesses and building a life worth wanting, every Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe below to stick around.

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Leaving my first company was one of the most stressful times of my life. It was a nine month fight to exit with dignity. And when it was all over, there was a lot of emotion to pack up and figure out. Yes, there was a blow up with lawyers at the end, and that is what I think you’d assume happened. But there was another part of it too.

That’s what I want to talk to you about today, because it’s the part you don’t often hear about. Honestly, harder to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it. But I want to share what happens after the fight is over and you’re sitting alone with the paper you signed to end it.

For two years after I left the company I built and sold, I couldn’t talk about any of this. I had a non-disclosure agreement standing between me and sharing my own story. And buried in that same contract was a single clause, that after looking at it more closely, was written by people who definitely didn’t understand what they’d bought when they took over my company. Unfortunately, this clause quietly cost me two years of work in the one industry I knew better than almost anyone.

Today I’m sharing what that clause actually said, and why it was wrong. I’m telling you about the brands: personal care, maternity, gear companies in a gray area of their own, that came knocking and that I had to turn away. I’m also talking about the loophole I found, the strange TV carve-out that let me say things on camera I wasn’t allowed to say to the companies themselves.

And here’s the real irony: most of these companies weren’t my competitors at all. More than a few of them, I would have referred straight to my own company, back when I still had a company to refer them to.

That story is below. So is exactly what to check in your own contract before you ever sign one. I knew what my contract said, it was explained to me during the sale process, but I didn’t fully think about it’s implications on my future state when I was negotiating my sale. In the moment, you don’t think about the “what happens if things go wrong moments.” I didn’t think about it enough, and it cost me two years of work I was fully qualified to do.

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If you listened to Part 1 of The Exit this week, you already know the story about what happened. I had three companies approach me in the summer of 2018 to potentially acquire my first company, Bump Club and Beyond. I said no to two of them fast. The third one, I said yes to.

I want to use the space here today to tell you about the one question I didn’t ask before I signed the deal. It was the biggest mistake I made and the one that may be the most useful to you whether you’re selling or just building. It applies to all major business decisions.

The company who bought mine, and their representatives making the deal, told me everything I wanted to hear. They promised me I could run the business as usual, but they’d be giving me “rocket fuel” to scale it. This was to come in the form of resources. They also told me that my community would still be the top priority (they failed to tell me that everything would become a P&L sheet.)

I believed every word of it, because I wanted to believe it. And there was no one else in on the negotiation with me to tell me otherwise.

Here is what I didn’t do, and what I would do if I could go back to 2018 and give myself one piece of advice. Honestly, I’m going to say it and you’re going to think: “How dumb is she? That is so obvious.” And maybe you’re right. But I was so far in and I just wanted to sell it and be done.

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Before you sign anything that changes who controls your business, find a founder that buyer has already acquired. Not a reference the buyer hands you, because that reference has been chosen for a reason. Find someone through your own network, through LinkedIn, through a mutual connection, and ask them one direct question. “Did the buyer do what they told you they would do?”

I didn’t do this. I had no idea, at the time, that it was even a step other founders took. I was too trusting and I admit that. They did their due diligence. I failed in that department to do mine. I trusted it all because they were saying all the right things and moving with the kind of urgency that made it feel real.

It took less than a year for me to understand what I could have learned had I made that simple call. tAfter I sold and I was in the fold of the new company, two acquired founders inside called me to tell me they had similar experiences.

The team that flew me around the country to make introductions to internal contacts who were supposed to grow my business, didn’t actually understand my business. I needed resources in email marketing, social media ads, and content creation. They were introducing me to teams at their retail agencies for Kroger.

Six months in, my team still didn’t have company computers. The woman who had led the acquisition, the one who actually understood what she was buying, left the company within months, replaced by someone with no experience in my industry. My biggest revenue relationship, the one that impacted my earn out, got taken from my team and given to someone internally. Despite my protests.

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A single phone call to a founder who had already been through a deal with this company would have told me all of this was coming. It was only after the deal was signed that I found this out first hand. Buyers do not usually change their patterns from deal to deal. If they broke promises to the last founder they acquired, they will very likely break them to you too.

I want you to look at this advice beyond the scope of how it looks when you’re selling a business. Most of you reading this aren’t currently fielding acquisition offers, and that’s fine. The lesson though, applies to almost any big decision where someone else is asking you to trust them with something you built. This could be an investor or a partner, or a landlord if you are looking for a brick and mortar location. It could be an agency or a coach. Whoever it is, find someone who has already been on the other side of a deal with that person or entity, and ask them one direct question about whether the promises were followed through on.

It’s a quick call that most people skip because it feels awkward, or because they’re excited, or because they don’t want to slow down a deal that’s finally moving. I understand all three of those reasons. I felt all three of them myself. That doesn’t change my advice: Make the call.

I’m talking all about my exit in a two-part podcast episode this week. I’m also sharing what it looked like after I exited in a new four-part series right here called The Aftermath. The first part dropped last week. Part 2 drops this Thursday.

For today, here is your Quick Win. Before you say yes to anything that chnages the face of your business, or to w deal that could place real control in someone else’s hands, find someone who has already said yes to that same person or entity, and ask them if they followed through on the promises made and the contract signed. Make the call before you make the decision, not after.

If this was useful, forward it to a founder who’s about to make a big decision and needs to hear it before she does.

So much more coming your way this week,

Lindsay Pinchuk, Host + Founder of Dear FoundHer…

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There’s a version of my exit story I’ve told a hundred times. Bump Club and Beyond, sold in 2019, seven figures, acquired by a company most of you would recognize. And I always say the same thing at the end of it: it was not a great deal, and the sale of my company was not what I’d hoped it would be.

Then I usually leave it right there, in that moment, with: but that’s a story for another day.

I’ve shared about my exit here on Substack before, but I want to go deeper about what happened and the lessons I learned from it. I’m not leaving the story here anymore.

For two and a half years after that deal closed, I could not tell you what “not a great deal” actually meant. Not because I didn’t want to, trust me, I did. I couldn’t because I legally couldn’t. Transition agreements and the kind of fine print that keeps a founder quiet long after the confetti’s been swept up.

But this month, for the first time, I’m telling it all, in four parts, with lessons learned and with takeaways that you can use for your own business. I’m starting it all right here, right now, today.

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This month at Dear FoundHer… our theme is: Behind the Curtain. We’re not focusing on the highlight reel version of building a business, instead, we’re talking about the real one, including the parts that don’t make it into a caption.

Over the next few weeks you’ll hear it from three guests who’ve each agreed to tell me the parts they don’t usually say out loud: Elina Wang of ESW Beauty on August 11, Michele Henry of Face Foundry on August 18, and Rachel Berliner, co-founder of Amy’s Kitchen, on August 25. And starting this Thursday, I’m publishing the fullest version of my own story I’ve ever told, a four-part series called The Aftermath, about what actually happened after I sold my first company, Bump Club.

But today, I’m sharing a different story. And while it’s not the most flattering of stories, it’s one I think is important to share. Often I am asked: What would you tell yourself ten, twelve years ago as a founder. And this story, it’s my answer.

TLDR: Tune out the noise and don’t focus on what other’s are building. Focus on yourself.

I had a lot of very loyal customers at Bump Club. About a year into building, a local woman started reaching out to every brand and partner I worked with, legit copying my events. It turns out, she was one of my best customer’s sister in laws! My customer wasn’t in on it, in fact, she was embarrassed by it. And then, about a year later, another woman in the community was moving to LA. She wanted to help me expand Bump Club there. We had a contract we were negotiating and everything. One day she called me and told me she couldn’t sign it, because if she did she couldn’t start her own thing. (Ummm hello, duh.)

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A few months later I was on a call with a partner and a bunch of other women in the parenting space and she was on it. With her new company. We hung up and I went to her website and guess what? She had copied mine word for word and slapped a different name (using the word “club” on the header.” She wasn’t inspired by me. She had copied me, word for word, page for page, like they’d opened my site in one tab and typed along in another.

I was furious. I called a lawyer that same day and had a cease and desist sent within the week.

That part I’m not embarrassed by. What I actually want to tell you about, and what I share often in interviews is what happened after. For the next six months, I checked their site more than I checked my own numbers. I was so hyper focused on what they posted, who they partnered with, whether they were growing faster than I was. I told myself I was being strategic. I was actually just scared, and comparison was where the fear went to live.

Here’s how that story ends. Eventually, both of these copycats went out of business. (I love to say that, “karma is a big bit*h.”) Neither of them is a business anyone remembers now, including me, until I sit down to write something like this.

What mattered, the entire time, was never the competition. It was the foundation I’d already built that they could copy but couldn’t actually have: the relationships, the trust, the flawless execution, the community, the years of showing up before anyone was watching. They could steal my homepage. They couldn’t steal the sauce.

This is something I want to share and also something I’m thinking about a lot this month because our theme, Behind the Curtain, isn’t just about what we hide when things go well. It’s about the ugly feelings we don’t admit to either. And if I could tell myself one thing, or change one thing about the early days as a founder it would be this: don’t focus on the competition, ignore them. I often think about the time wasted worrying about a competitor who couldn’t even come up with her own ideas, so she had to steal mine.

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This week’s Quick Win: Run a Comparison Audit.

Open Instagram and find three accounts you check compulsively, the ones that leave you comparing instead of building. Mute them. Don’t unfollow them, but just mute them, so there’s no confrontation and no announcement. Then take the hour you’d have spent scrolling and checking, and put it toward one piece of your own foundation this week: a client follow-up, a piece of content, a relationship you’ve let go quiet. Do something to move YOUR business forward.

I want to remind you something, they can steal your recipe, but the sauce was never going to taste the same anyway.

If you want more Behind the Curtain today, today's podcast episode goes even further. I'm pulling apart the exact math behind an Instagram flex I saw this week, why the only exit stories anyone tells are the unicorns, and a three-step process I now run before I trust (and buy) anyone's business advice. You can find the episode right here.

I hope that your week is off to a great start. There is so much more coming your way. Get ready for Thursday when I kick off The Aftermath, a series focused on what happened after I sold my business, and then Friday is the final installment of my summer series, Everything I needed to Succeed in Business (and Life) I Learned at Summer Camp.

More soon,

Lindsay Pinchuk, Founder of Dear FoundHer…

P.S. Do you know someone focused more on their competition than their own business? Share this article with them.

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This is part three of a four part series here on The FoundHer Files about the lessons I actually learned at camp, and how every one of them still shows up in the way I run my businesses today. If you missed the first two, on self-reliance and confidence, you can read them here: Part 1 and Part 2

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It was some of my school friends and their moms who convinced me to give Camp Sea-gull a try. I made the decision to go with a family friend of mine, someone who shared a birthday with me and who I’d known since before we could talk. I assumed that we’d all be in the same bunk, and camp was just going to be an extension of the life I already had, in a prettier location.

But the night before I was leaving, my mom got a call from a friend who had a daughter that worked at camp and she told my mom I wasn’t with any of my school friends. My family friend and I had been placed in a bunk with a group of girls I didn’t know. Girls who all went to the same private school together across town. The night before I got on the bus, I found out that wasn’t happening. I was devastated. This was the summer before sixth grade and I was planning to spend it with a bunch of girls I would be going to middle school with. And now, I wasn’t in a cabin with any of them.

My mom asked if I was sure that I wanted to still go. She could see how upset I was, and there’s a particular kind of hesitation a parent gets when they’re about to send their child somewhere new, to a place where they’ve never been, not knowing if it’s going to break them or build them. But I went. I got in the bus and I had to figure it out.

It ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me at camp. The girls in that bunk became some of my closest friends. We spent years following at camp together, gave speeches at each other’s bat mitzvahs, and made some of the best memories together. That summer became one of my favorite summers, which became five more summers after it, which became friendships that never stayed inside the walls of that cabin.

These friendships followed me home. I became friends with their school friends and they became friends with mine. In high school we met up at parties and hung out whenever we could. I didn’t understand it then, but having friends who existed completely outside of my school life, turned out to be one of the most important things camp ever gave me, especially in middle school. I didn’t choose that bunk. I would never have chosen it if I’d been given the chance before I left. But what it gave me was more than the bunk I’d planned for ever could have.

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I watched a version of that same lesson play out with both of my daughters this summer. My oldest, in her final experience as a camper spent thirty-five nights out west with camp, placed with the eight girls who have been in her cabin every summer for eight years. This was incredibly important as this is the reason my kids go to camp…to be with the friends they’ve made over the years. But she was also placed with a group of boys who’ve been in her co-ed programs the last two summers, and a whole additional group of girls she knew but had never really spent real time with/hadn’t spent time with in years. Going in, there was hesitation from every direction. Different groups, different histories, different comfort levels. As parents, we all worried they wouldn’t gel.

But they did. Last week I picked her up from that trip, her very last as a camper, and the whole group got off the bus together, one big group, laughing, exhausted, clearly they had the time of their lives together. It turned out everyone got along spectacularly.

My youngest was placed on a camping trip with one girl she knew and the rest, girls she hadn’t ever spent much time with. Do you want to know what the letter I got said? “Mom, I made some new friends!”

That’s the lesson I learned and use every day in my business: you’re not going to always know everyone in the room. You’re not going to always be comfortable. You may have to walk into rooms (ir places) where you don’t know people. And you have to learn how to navigate that.

I think about that first summer at Sea-Gull, every time I walk into a room of people I do not know.

Networking has never come naturally to me, does it come naturally to anyone? It’s clunky, awkward, and often…uncomfortable. I’ve attended many conferences, dinners, or events full of strangers that still give me a pit in my stomach before I head inside. It was the same feeling the night before I got on that bus not knowing the girls who were going to be in my bunk. But camp taught me that the pit in my stomach is not a sign to stay home. It is just the feeling that shows up right before something good.

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I never know who I am going to meet in most of the rooms I walk into, and that is really the whole point. Some of the people who have mattered most to my business, collaborators, people who introduced me to my biggest opportunities, were not people I sought out with a plan. They were people I met because I showed up somewhere that may have been a little uncomfortable, and stayed long enough to have a real conversation. Just this week I was asked by a big brand to go to dinner. I knew no one going. Was I a little hesitant? Sure. But I made some great connections and don’t regret going for a moment.

That is what camp actually trained me to do, long before I understood it as a skill. Get placed in a room, a bunk, a trip, a table, with people I did not choose and do not know yet, and instead of shrinking into a corner, learn how to actually be there. Ask a question. Sit next to someone new. Stay a little past the point where it would be easier to leave.

My daughters are learning that same thing right now on buses, trips and on programs with kids they may not have picked either. Next summer, my oldest has already decided that she wants to go on a program where she probably won’t know anyone. But guess what? Nine years of summer camp have prepared her for that moment. I hope she carries it the way I did, because walking into an unfamiliar room and making something of it is not really a camp skill or a networking skill. It’s the same skill, just practiced in different rooms.

This is why I no longer avoid the awkward mixer, the icebreaker, the event where I do not know a single name on the list. Somewhere in that room might be my next collaborator, my next partner, the person who ends up mattering most to whatever I build next. I never know until I walk in and find out. And I’ll forever be grateful that camp gave me the skill to do so.

I’m sorry this was a little late, I’ve been taking some time off. The last installment of this series will drop on Friday. Have a great start to the week,

Lindsay

P.S. What’s a room you walked into not knowing a single person, that ended up mattering more than you expected? Reply and tell me, or leave a comment below.

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Quick refresher if you’re newer here. SWEEP is the marketing framework I built and teach inside the Dear FoundHer Forum, inside all of my classes and workshops and throughout my 12- month group mentorship, Marketing Made Simple for Small Business. SWEEP stands for: Social, Website, Email, Events, Partnerships, Publicity. Six tactics, one underneath all of them: your story.

Every pillar of SWEEP is powered by a relationship.

Most women are running their marketing without knowing which relationships are supposed to be doing what.

That’s the gap this Deep Dive closes. Not the version you already heard pieces of in July’s episodes of our podcast, but the actual mechanics behind them, and one gap I haven’t closed myself yet.

Read it this weekend. Then tell me which section makes you stop.

Around here, Tuesdays are yours. Thursdays are for premium subscribers.

What’s below is the part I don’t say out loud on the podcast. The exact asks, the real timelines, and the relationship I still haven’t built. Upgrade to keep reading.

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After months of this community asking, last week I brought together a group of thirty women from this community to meet live and in person in NYC.

The format was the same as what we do here in Chicago. It’s nothing complicated. You show up, you learn a small lesson and you connect with the people in the room. You put out into the world what you actually need help with right now and often times, you walk away with some kind of connection to actually help.

This event was somewhat small. I wanted to test it out to see if women in the NY-area really wanted these events before I get a huge room. Truthfully, we probably could have used a bigger room. But the goal of the event wasn’t to be big to begin with.

The goal was to facilitate deeper relationships among the women in Dear FoundHer…And, what happened in that room is the whole reason I built this community in the first place.

Many women traveled from out side of the city. Some stayed in NYC the night before, a group of them went to eat dinner at Shukette (one of my favorites.) After the event, there were women that left together to go get lunch before heading home.

I also watched women who walked in as strangers leave with a new connection, potential partnerships, and strategies from me and my special guest, Melissa Rosenfield, from IFP Communications. What transpired, were the kind of thing you can’t fake and can’t rush. The feedback afterwards was some of the best I’ve ever gotten from an event, and I think it’s because all everybody in that room wanted was to be surrounding by amazing women. And that’s exactly what happened.

I’m not trying to run the biggest networking community for women in business. I’m trying to build the most effective one for women 40 and over, so they can grow their businesses and live their lives the way they actually want to live them. You don’t get there with surface-level relationships. You get there with deep ones, and depth only happens in a room small enough to actually see each other.

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I’ve spent this whole month talking about networking. What happened in NYC is the version of it you can see with your own eyes. But just as I always say: I need you as much as you need me. And this month proved it, because I learned lessons about my own network that I wasn’t expecting at all.

For years, I said yes to everything. I often share the story that it wasn’t until I started saying no that my business actually started to grow. But in the beginning, I never wanted to turn down a single opportunity because it all felt like it might matter someday.

I thought that was how you built a network, with volume and presence. Never burning a bridge by saying no.

What I understand now that I didn’t then: saying yes to everything is not a networking strategy. It’s a people-pleasing strategy with a networking budget.

The relationships that have actually changed my business, came from investing deeply in a few specific things with a few specific people. These relationships came from working hard, getting to actually know a contact and truly investing in our connection.

As you heard on the podcast this month, Liz Lange didn’t dress every pregnant woman in Hollywood. She faxed the specific ones who would change the trajectory of her brand. Steph Weibring didn’t try to be everywhere. She found two friends with the right audiences and asked them to share her work. Christine De Wendel, who’s on the show today, didn’t network her way across a room. She spent 15 years building genuine expertise and relationships in a specific space, and those relationships raised $145 million.

The through-line in every single story we told this month, and the through-line in that room in New York, is the same: it’s not about more relationships, it’s about better ones.

Today’s quick win is actually a quick audit:

I want you to look at the relationships you invested in most heavily in July. Not the ones you were obligated to maintain, but the ones you chose. The coffee dates, the check-ins, the collaborations, the people you reached out to as a genuine customer or fan.

Now ask yourself: are these the relationships that are going to matter in 12 months? Are these the ones you’re investing in because they’re genuinely right, or because you haven’t stopped to ask the question?

If the answer feels uncertain, that’s not a problem. That’s information and it’s important that you use it.

Your network doesn’t need to be bigger. It needs to be better tended. And the first step in tending it better is knowing which relationships are actually worth the investment.

That’s the work of August. And I’ll be here for it.

See you Thursday, that’s the month’s final Deep Dive. The complete SWEEP networking module, how every pillar of the framework maps to a specific relationship strategy. It’s for our premium subscribers and it’s the best thing I’ve written this month.

Lindsay

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TODAY ON THE PODCAST…

She spent over a decade scaling two of Europe’s most successful tech companies, reaching the C-suite along the way. Then she moved back to her hometown and nobody knew her name. That tension is the heart of this episode of Dear FoundHer, and it sets up one of the clearest examples of starting a business after corporate you will hear this year.

Host Lindsay Pinchuk talks with Christine de Wendel, co-founder and U.S. CEO of Sunday, the digital checkout platform used in over 3,500 restaurants across the U.S., U.K., and France.

Lindsay and Christine talk candidly about networking for women, credibility, and why making a career pivot later in life can be an advantage instead of a setback. If you have ever wondered whether starting a business after corporate means starting from zero, Christine’s story offers a clear answer: the experience, relationships, and skills you have already built still count. Press play to hear how she used them to help raise $145 million for Sunday.

TUNE IN TODAY

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This is part two of a four part series here on The FoundHer Files about the lessons I actually learned at camp, and how every one of them still shows up in the way I run my businesses today. If you missed the first one, on self-reliance and the bus ride that started it all, you can read it here.

If you went to camp as a kid, or you’re a parent making this same call this summer, I’d love to hear about it. Hit reply and tell me, or leave a comment below.

Keep reading. I hope that you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it,

Lindsay Pinchuk, Host + Founder of Dear FoundHer…

P.S. If this is your first time here, welcome. I write about building businesses and building a life you actually want to be living, every Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe below so you don’t miss the rest of this series.

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The summer I finished fifth grade, camp offered an optional weeklong trip to a place called Pancake Bay, up in Northern Ontario. I had never slept in a tent or paddled a canoe. I had never gone more than a night without a shower. The trip was optional, which meant I could have said no and nobody would have blinked.

A few of my friends said they were signing up. I remember thinking I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but I signed up too.

I remember almost nothing about the actual logistics of that week, and everything about how it felt. I do have a vision of sitting under a tarp with my friends, but that’s about it. I remember jumping off a cliff into water I couldn’t see the bottom of, because everyone else was doing it and my legs moved before my brain could talk me out of it. I remember endless hours of canoeing, and getting better at it along the way. I remember not showering for five straight days and somehow not caring even a little.

By the time I got back in the yellow vans to head back to camp, that trip had become one of my favorite weeks of the entire summer. I was thrilled when camp made the trips a part of our summer programming permanently. Meaning, there was no option, everyone had to go. We all just went, every summer from then on, and they’re still some of the best memories I have of growing up at camp.

By my last three summers as a camper, those trips had gotten a lot bigger. We took weeklong trips deep into Northern Ontario, to places like Mij Lake and Ranger Lake, and one more I honestly can’t remember the name of anymore. We portaged our own canoes between lakes. We hung our food in the trees every night so bears couldn’t get to it. There were no bathrooms, just the BIFFY (Bathroom In Forest For You…IYKYK.) Each summer the trip pushed us a little further than the year before.

My final summer as a camper, we did a solo. They dropped me alone on an island with nothing but a book of matches and left me there for three, four, five hours. Who actually knows how long it was. I built a fire. I sat with my own thoughts until someone came back to get me. There was nothing to do but be there, completely alone, with myself. There was also a HUGE sense of trust in that someone was in fact coming back.

I think about that solo a lot right now. My youngest daughter is setting out this week on her own first big overnight trip at camp. My oldest is about to finish her ninth summer, and after three summers of bigger and bigger trips, she’ll be coming off of a thirty-five night adventure this summer camping across the western US. No beds, barely any showers. Just her best friends and the kind of memories that last a lifetime.

Trips like that build more than a good story. They build confidence, communication skills you can’t learn any other way. They also build proof, real proof, that a city kid is capable of doing what she once thought was impossible.

What strikes me now, looking back, is that nothing about that first decision made sense on paper. I had zero relevant experience. I didn’t know if I’d be good at any of it, or if I’d hate it, or if I’d spend the whole week wanting to go home. I said yes because my friends were going, and because some part of me, even at ten years old, understood that the only way to find out if I could do something was to actually do it.

I think about that cliff jumping a lot, because I jumped off a version of it again years later, long before I had any business being anywhere near the edge.

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I hadn’t told most people I was pregnant yet. I was still working my corporate job, the one I loved, the one that had nothing to do with parenting or babies or community building. I had an idea for something called Bump Club Chicago, but I had no experience running a business, no plan, and certainly no funding. I gave myself a five hundred dollar budget to get make something of this idea. What I had was a feeling that wouldn’t leave me alone. I knew I wanted a community once I announced my pregnancy and this idea to build one was keeping me up at night. That’s honestly all I knew.

So I sent an email to everyone I knew. I told them I was starting something, and if they happened to know anyone who was pregnant, would they mind passing it along. I was hosting a prenatal fitness event in a couple of weeks, it was free, just email me if you want to come. That was the whole pitch. I hit send before I’d fully thought through what would happen if people actually wrote back, and before I’d figured out what I’d do with a single referral if one came in.

I wasn’t ready. I want to be honest about that, because I think the instinct in business is to wait until you feel ready before you put yourself out there, and I don’t think that feeling ever actually arrives on schedule. I wasn’t ready to run a business any more than I was ready to sleep in a tent for a week at ten years old. What I had, both times, were people around me who were already saying yes, and a decision to try it too instead of watching from the shore.

Confidence, I’ve come to believe, isn’t a feeling you build up in advance and then deploy once you have enough of it. It’s closer to a muscle that only shows up once you’ve already jumped. You don’t feel confident and then cliff jump. You cliff jump, terrified, and confidence is what’s left over on the other side once you realize you survived it and you’re already planning to do it again next summer.

Every big thing I’ve built started with some version of that first Bump Club email. A leap sent out into the world with no idea what would come back. The only difference between the ten year old at Pancake Bay and the thirty-year-old who hit send on that email is that by then, I already had enough evidence from camp to know that trying the thing you’re not ready for is usually how you find out what you’re actually capable of.

Lindsay

P.S. What’s a version of your own cliff jump, in camp or in business? Reply and tell me, I read every single one.

P.P.S. Stay tuned for part three next Friday.

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The best collaborations I’ve ever had didn’t start with a pitch, they started with a purchase.

As many of you have heard me share, Jenn Sherman carried me through one of the hardest periods of my professional life from that Peloton bike before we ever spoke. I rode with her almost exclusively every week. By the time I reached out to ask her to be on Dear FoundHer…, the relationship, at least on my end, had been building for years. When I reached out, I led with this, and she said yes within an hour.

Steph Weibring’s products from Joy Creative Shop have been in my house for years. When I wanted her on the podcast, I led with that. I sent a DM sharing that I’m a customer and I love what they are doing. I’d be honored to have Steph on the show. She said yes the same day.

This pattern isn’t a coincidence. Being a genuine customer is the warmest possible introduction you can possibly make when wanting to work with someone. I’ve been on the receiving end as well. Don’t forget, I get pitches for the podcast and collaborations daily. I can tell when it’s real and when it’s forced. And I can definitely tell when. computer has written it.

But when you show up as you in the most genuine of ways, it signals that you’re not there to extract something, or to create a transaction. You’re there because you already believe in what they’ve built.

That is the foundation of the customer-to-collaborator sequence. And this Deep Dive is the specific steps.

Keep reading for the exact five-step sequence I use on repeat to go from customer to collaborator, word for word, including:

• The outreach template I actually send, filled in and ready to copy.

• What to do in the two to four weeks before you ever make an ask.

• What the first message needs to contain, in what order, and why most people get the second sentence wrong.

• And what to do thirty days after they say yes, when most people let the relationship go cold.

If you’ve ever sat down to write a cold outreach message and deleted it four times, this is the Deep Dive for you.

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I want to tell you the networking strategy most people are completely overlooking.

Be a real customer first.

I know. It sounds almost too simple. But I’ve watched this work over and over again in my own business and in the businesses of the women I work with, and I think it’s one of the most genuinely underused moves in relationship-building.

When I reached out to Steph Weibring to invite her on the podcast, I didn’t craft a formal pitch. I didn’t put together a media kit. I reached out as a customer. I DM’d her team on Instagram and told them that I love Joy Creative Shop, that I’ve been following what she’s built, and asked if she’d want to come on the show.

They replied within minutes. Steph said yes the same day.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s what happens when you lead with genuine appreciation instead of a transactional ask. The energy is completely different. You’re not asking for a favor from someone you don’t know. You’re reaching out as someone who already believes in their work.

Here’s the thing most people get backwards: they try to build the relationship first and become a customer later. But buying something someone made, caring about what they’ve built, and telling them specifically what you love about it, that IS building the relationship. Often faster than anything else.

I’ve seen this play out in so many directions. The Jenn Sherman story started with me being a genuine Peloton rider who actually rode with Jenn every week. The Steph story started with me actually buying from Joy Creative Shop. The best podcast guests I’ve ever had came to me not because I cold pitched them but because I was already a genuine fan of their work.

And then there’s perfectwhitetee.

I wear their Ziggy sweatshirt almost every day, I have it it maybe ten colors. It shows up in my podcast recordings, in my social media, in my life. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s become part of how people know me. So when I reached out to the founders, I reached out as a customer, because I am one. We had an incredible conversation on the podcast. I didn’t say a single thing I didn’t mean. No paid partnership. No agreement. Just a genuine customer who wanted to share what they’d built with her community.

Almost a year later, they reached back out to me via email.

They wanted to buy usage rights to our episode. They’d been watching what I’d built with it, how it had performed, how my audience had responded. They wanted to use it as a test in their Meta ads, with my content, my name, my credibility attached to it.

We came to an agreement. I got paid. My content is going to be running in their ads. They’re crediting me with it.

None of that was in the plan when I reached out as a customer. There was no plan. There was just: I genuinely love this brand, I wear this sweatshirt constantly, I want to share it with the women who listen to me.

That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.

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This week’s move:

Think about three people or brands you genuinely admire right now. Not strategically. Not “who would be good for my business.” Who do you actually follow, buy from, read, listen to, believe in?

Now think about whether you’ve ever told them.

Pick one. Send a note. Not a pitch. Just: I’m a real customer, here’s specifically what I love about what you’ve built, here’s who I am if you want to know.

You don’t have to have an ask attached. Often the relationship that forms from that note becomes something neither of you expected.

And if you do have an ask? Make it easy. One specific thing, something low friction. Something that costs them almost nothing to say yes to.

Being a genuine fan is the warmest possible introduction in business. Stop waiting for someone to introduce you. Introduce yourself through the thing you love about their work.

You can hear me talk about it today on the podcast with Steph Weibring, Founder of Joy Creative Shop. She has one hell of a story. You absolutely are going to want to listen to this one.

I’ll see you back here on Thursday for our Deep Dive. It’s the customer-to-collaborator sequence in full, with the specific steps and the template. You’re not going to want to miss this one.

Have a great week,

Lindsay Pinchuk, Host + Founder of Dear FoundHer…

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THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST…

Steph Weibring’s Etsy shop made $8,000 in an entire year. Then she made $8,000 in a single November. On this episode of Dear FoundHer…, Steph, founder and CEO of Joy Creative Shop, tells me exactly what changed: a partnership strategy that let her borrow an audience instead of building one from scratch. No massive following required, just the right move at the right time.

We also get into the chaotic weekend behind her now-famous bag of tags, why copycats on Etsy and TikTok don’t actually worry her, and how a handwritten note still beats an AI-written thank you every time. Steph turned that old-school instinct into a full subscription business. And for anyone over 40 who dreads showing up on camera, she’s honest about the personal brand strategy she resisted for years, and why she now runs her company as a “lowercase ceo,” a title she made up on purpose.

Steph closes with three steps for any woman starting a business this year. Press play to hear the full story behind the November everything changed.

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Before I get into today’s story, I want you to know why I am writing this series.

I realized something important while driving my daughter to camp this week. I realized just how important that bus ride to camp actually is. And in thinking about it, the importance of what I learned from those many rides to camp became more apparent.

Ever since COVID, our camp stopped running the bus. I’ve been told it’s easier on kids who get anxious about the ride up to have their parents drive them. But, I have two kids who deal with anxiety, and a quiet car alone with me and my husband doesn’t calm that anxiety, it usually gives it more room to build. For the hour ride, it’s just quiet miles and a lot of time to sit with their nerves.

Sure, if it works for some families, they can drive their kids. But I realized that my kids were missing out on an important life lesson. That bus is where I learned to sit with nerves I couldn’t control, where I learned self-reliance before I had a word for it. So much of what I still use today as an entrepreneur, the comfort with not knowing how something will turn out, the skills I use in every partnership and negotiation, started on those five hour rides to Northern Michigan.

I don’t want to hand my kids a childhood with the discomfort edited out. Discomfort isn’t something to be protected from. It’s something to be practiced.

And this is just one of the many lessons I realized I’d learned at summer camp that I use every single day in my business.

So starting today, I’m sharing a short series here. One camp lesson a week for the next four Fridays, and exactly how I still use it in business now.

If you went to camp as a kid, or you’re a parent making this same call this summer, I’d love to hear about it. Hit reply and tell me, or leave a comment below.

Keep reading. I hope that you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it,

Lindsay Pinchuk, Host + Founder of Dear FoundHer…

P.S. If this is your first time here, welcome. I write about building businesses and building a life you actually want to be living, every Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe below so you don’t miss the rest of this series.

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After dropping my daughter this week, we continued on to Northern Michigan. As I was driving through the winding two-lane roads that hugs the tree line for miles, it hit me. I know this road. My body remembers this road, even if it has been decades since I rode it in the back of a bus instead of behind a wheel.

That road led to Camp Sea-gull, on the shore of Lake Charlevoix, and for six summers of my childhood it was the most important road in the world.

The bus ride was five hours from West Hills Middle School in metro-Detroit. It doesn’t sound that far until you’re a kid and the ride feels endless. Especially after waiting ten months to be back on that bus. We usually fell asleep an hour into the ride, waking up with about an hour to go, when we would sing the entire rest of the way. Camp songs we’d learned the summers prior, songs that made no sense to anyone outside that bus, at the top of our lungs until we pulled into the entrance at 08580 Boyne City Road.

We laughed until our stomachs hurt. But underneath all of that noise, if I’m honest, there was a current of nerves running through me the whole time. Who would be in my bunk this year? Would my counselors be nice? What cabin would we be in and how far would it be from the shower house? Would the ten months that had passed feel like forever, or like no time at all?

That’s the thing about the bus ride to camp that nobody told me. You don’t know what’s waiting for you on the other end, other than a lunch of grilled cheese and tomato soup. Camp isn’t magic for every kid, and there was no guarantee it would be magic for me either. But I got on the bus anyway, and I trusted that whatever was waiting for me was going to be good, because the people who loved me promised me it would be.

But, that bus ride was never really about the ride. It was about learning to sit with something hard, with no one there to fix it for you. Nobody on that bus was coming to take away those nerves for me. My mom wasn’t in the seat next to me. There was no phone to call her if it got hard. I just had to sit there, in the discomfort, for five hours, and figure out how to be okay anyway.

This is the part I don’t want taken away from my own kids. It’s not just that the bus ride taught me self-reliance, though it did. It taught me something more specific than that. It taught me how to be uncomfortable and stay in the discomfort instead of looking for the closest exit. Nobody swooped in to shorten the ride or hand me a distraction the second I got nervous. I had to sit with it. And because I had to sit with it, over and over, summer after summer, I got better at it.

I think about that yearly bus ride every single time I start something new.

I thought about it the morning I hit publish on the very first episode of Dear FoundHer… sitting with a microphone in my house, wondering if a single person besides my mom would listen. I thought about it again when I opened enrollment for Marketing Made Simple, my mentorship, for the first time, watching the clock and having no idea if anyone would register. I’m thinking about it right now, writing this newsletter to you, wondering if this is going to land the way it does in my head before I hit send.

Every one of those moments came with real discomfort. Not the fun kind, not the kind you can talk yourself out of, but the kind that sits in your chest while you wait to find out if the thing you built is going to work. And every single time, I’ve been able to sit in that discomfort without needing to fix it immediately, without needing an answer right away, because I had five hours on a bus, a half a dozen summers in a row, practicing exactly that.

Starting something new in business is its own five hour bus ride. You believe in what you’re building enough to get on. You sing along the way, because you have to, because the excitement is real even when the nerves are louder. And then there’s a long stretch where you genuinely don’t know what’s waiting for you. Will anyone show up? Will anyone care? Will this thing you poured yourself into, land the way you hoped, or will it just disappear into the noise?

The camp version of that story resolves fast. You get off the bus, you find your cabin, and within a day or two you’re not the kid who didn’t know her bunkmates anymore. The business version takes longer, and it doesn’t resolve every single time. But twenty-six years into building brands, sixteen of them my own, I can tell you the bus ride never fully goes away, and it isn’t supposed to. If you’ve stopped feeling nervous before you launch something, or start something new, you’ve probably stopped taking real risks. The nerves are the tax you pay for building something that matters to you. They’re not a sign you’re doing it wrong.

Taking away the bus doesn’t remove the discomfort from a kid’s life. It just removes their only chance to practice sitting in it before something bigger and harder comes along, whether it be a job that doesn’t go the way they planned, a business that doesn’t take off the way they hoped, a negotiation that goes sideways. Kids need somewhere with low stakes to learn that discomfort is survivable. For me, that somewhere was a bus to Northern Michigan for six summers in the 90s.

What I learned, on the bus and off it, is that self-reliance isn’t the absence of fear. It’s getting on anyway. It’s trusting that you’re capable of figuring out whatever is waiting for you on the other end, even when you can’t see it yet from where you’re sitting.

Nobody at camp promised me my bunk would be full of my closest friends. Nobody in business ever promised me an engaged community, or a sold out mentorship, or a newsletter people actually want to read. The promise was never the outcome. The promise was that I’d figure it out once I got there. And I (almost) always have.

This is part one of a four part series here on The FoundHer Files about the lessons I actually learned at summer camp, and how every single one of them ended up being the same lessons I’ve used daily to build my businesses. Stay tuned for part 2 next Friday. I’d love to hear your thoughts, feel free to leave them below.

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Ann Wessing was an employee for Target, and in 2012, she called my company. We didn’t pitch Target. They pitched us.

I want to stay with that sentence for a moment, because I think it’s the most important thing I can teach you about how business relationships actually work at the level where they change everything.

Most business development advice assumes you’re the one initiating. That you’re the one cold emailing, pitching, knocking on doors. And sometimes that’s true, sometimes you have to go find the relationship. But the partnerships that have changed my business the most have almost always come the other way: someone saw what we were building and reached out to me or my team.

The question isn’t how to pitch better. The question is how to build something that makes the right people pick up the phone.

I shared a little bit about this on Tuesday, but here’s the full Ann Wessing story. And here’s exactly what we built before she called.

HOW IT STARTED

In 2010, I launched Bump Club and Beyond with $500 and no marketing budget. The first thing I did was drive around Chicago placing cards on counters at local businesses where pregnant women already gathered: The Daily Method, Preggers, Belly Dance Maternity, Galt Baby + Kids. I wasn’t building a list. I was finding the room where my people already were and putting myself in it.

Our first events were small. I sent an email to everyone I knew and asked them to spread the word. Those friends brought friends. I made every event good enough that people came back and told someone else about it. Not great, not perfect, good enough to generate word of mouth. That was the only marketing strategy I had.

As Bump Club grew, brands started showing up in our gift bags. At first, I reached out to them. I asked for product samples to include for our attendees. The value exchange was simple: they got their product in front of expectant mothers, we got gift bags that justified our ticket prices and made our events feel valuable.

Then something shifted. Within a few months of starting the gift bag program, a brand came back to me and said, “What else can I do? I want to do more to engage with your community. I’m willing to pay you.”

That was the first time a trade partnership became a paid one. And from there, every time we worked with a car seat company, we let other car seat companies know. Every stroller brand. Every baby gear brand. We leveraged what we were already doing to get more. We never stopped the trade partnerships, they were part of our marketing strategy until the day I left. But they started generating paid partnerships alongside them.

This is what Ann Wessing saw when she looked us up.

She worked at Target and was taking on a side project, her goal was to build community around their baby registry. She wasn’t looking for someone who could pitch her a great idea. She was looking for someone who had already built something real in the space she needed. She found us because we had spent two years making ourselves visible, consistently, in exactly the space she was trying to reach.

She called us. We didn’t pitch her.

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THE CALL CAME

I had an amazing employee (shout out to Katie Blozis), in Minneapolis who was running our events there, and that’s who Ann reached out to. Katie ran this partnership from the start, working with Ann and sorting the details with me for months to figure out what it would look like. This is something I want to pause on, because I think people underestimate how much of building a major partnership is just staying in the conversation long enough for the right structure to emerge.

We didn’t have a deck. We didn’t have a case study. We had a track record and a clear understanding of what we could deliver. And we spent months talking through what that delivery would actually look like before a single dollar changed hands.

What we landed on: a series of three educational events inside Chicago Target stores. The topics were simple: Registry 101, Baby Wearing and Car Seat Safety. Each event would be free for attendees. Brands would provide samples and have the opportunity to speak to our community. Target would pay Bump Club to execute.

The first contract: $50,000.

At the time, that was a very big deal.

THE MOMENT I ALMOST MISSED

Those first events happened three weeks after my second daughter was born.

I was in the back offices of a Target store in the Chicago suburbs, pumping, in between sessions of the first event in what would become a multi-year, multi-million dollar partnership.

I want to be specific about this, because I think the sanitized version of this story, ‘she showed up even though the timing was hard,’ doesn’t capture what was actually at stake.

I had just had a baby. I had not slept properly in three weeks. I was physically postpartum, emotionally postpartum, and I was running an event in a Target store because I had made a commitment to a partner that mattered and I was not going to miss the moment we’d spent months building toward. I have to be honest, in hindsight, maybe I should have flown Katie in to do it. But somehow I managed, and the events were amazing.

The events had 150 to 200 people each. Lines out the door. Every person who attended signed up for a Target registry, which is exactly what Target wanted to deem this a success. The brands got their products in front of the exact audience they wanted. Bump Club delivered everything it promised and then some.

Target saw what we could do.

And that is why everything that came next was possible.

WHAT CAME NEXT

Here is the financial arc of the Target partnership, because I think the numbers tell the story better than anything else:

• Year 1: $50,000. Three events in Chicago stores. Three topics. We tested what worked.

• Year 2: We expanded into more stores and more markets to test, including Minneapolis, Austin, LA. We created a financial structure where now the brands paid for the programming and it counted towards their merchandising fees required to keep their shelf space. In 2014, Target also brought us in to partner with The Honest Company when they launched at Target, an event with Jessica Alba.

• After testing: We settled on baby registry as the focus. 15 to 20 Target stores across the country, every year, for two years.

• Last two years under my ownership: The Target partnership was generating over $250,000 a year for Bump Club and Beyond.

• In 2019, I closed on the acquisition of my company to Advantage Marketing Solutions, a Orange County-based agency conglomerate who bought the brand for my relationship with Target.

• March 20, 2020: We were set to host our largest Target activation yet. We were going to be in 300 stores, distributing 10,000 gift bags to those who signed up for a new registry. But then, COVID lockdowns happened. Target had cancelled all in-store programming at the end of February. When this happened, I immediately said: we are not losing that revenue. And I created a digital program complete with webinars and Facebook Lives with the brands involved. We started on March 8th, before the lockdown even happened. Ultimately, we shipped the gift bags to people who claimed them. After six weeks, we’d delivered millions of impressions. Target renewed through the end of the year. Then renewed for 2021. The partnership continued to generate revenue even after I left.

What follows is the part I’ve never written out in full: the four specific things we did before Ann Wessing ever called, and the exact mechanics you can apply to your business right now. Every step has a specific action. Upgrade to premium to keep reading.

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I want to tell you about Ann Wessing.

Ann worked at Target. And like many employees at Target, in 2012, she’d taken on a side project. She was working to build community around Target’s baby registry, and she’d been watching what we were doing at Bump Club and Beyond for a while before she ever picked up the phone to call us.

She didn’t send a cold pitch. She didn’t fill out a contact form. She figured out a way to contact my employee, Katie, who lived in Minneapolis, MN, where Target is based. She’d been watching us long enough to decide we were worth calling.

That’s the part people skip when they tell this story back to themselves. They hear “Target called me” and they think it was luck, or timing, or being in the right place. It wasn’t. Ann had been watching us for months, maybe longer, before that call ever happened. The call was the visible moment. The work that earned it was invisible, and it had been going on for years.

Here’s what nobody tells you about that kind of call: it doesn’t come with a script. Ann didn’t call with a signed deal in hand. She called with an idea and a question. What if we did something together? Target and Bump Club and Beyond, my first company.

We spent months after that figuring out what “something together” actually meant. There was no template for a baby registry brand partnering with a parenting community on in-store events. We had calls that went nowhere. We had ideas we scrapped. We had to figure out what Target’s brand could actually say yes to, and what our community would actually show up for, and where those two things overlapped. Months of that. Unglamorous, unpaid, uncertain months where I genuinely didn’t know if it would turn into anything at all.

We landed on a series of educational events in Chicago surrounding topics important to expectant moms: Registry 101. Baby Wearing. Car Seat Safety. Target paid us about $50,000 for those first events. And it was all a test.

At the time, that was a very big deal. I want to be honest about what $50,000 felt like to me then, because I think we lose something when we only tell the after-the-story version. It felt enormous. It felt like proof. It also felt fragile, like something that could evaporate if we got the first events wrong.

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The first events happened three weeks after my second daughter was born, but there was no way I was missing it. And so I was there, pumping in the back offices of a Target store in between sessions, because I wasn’t going to miss what we’d built toward. Some people might have delayed. This was the date that they gave me, so I didn’t. To me at that time, this was the moment, and while I would probably do things differently today, at that time I felt that you show up for the moment, even when the moment is inconvenient in ways nobody prepares you for.

Those events had 150 to 200 people each. Lines out the door. Once they were complete, Target renewed. Then we expanded, more stores, more markets, more topics, testing what worked and quietly dropping what didn’t. Eventually we were running events in 15 to 20 Target stores across the country every year.

The last two years I ran that partnership under my ownership, it was generating over $250,000 a year for Bump Club and Beyond.

And then in 2018, I got a call from a company that wanted to acquire Bump Club. Because of our relationship with Target.

Sit with that for a second. The partnership that started with a simple phone call and an employee's internal side became the reason someone bought my company. Not the app. Not the email list, although that mattered too. The relationship. The years of showing up, event after event, market after market, long enough that our name became synonymous with trust in a room full of people Target actually wanted to reach.

Here’s what I want you to take from this, and I want to be specific, because “network hard” is not useful advice.

Ann Wessing called us. We didn’t pitch Target. We didn’t cold email their partnerships team. We didn’t pay for a booth at a trade show hoping someone from Target would walk by. We built something real and visible, in public, for years, before anyone from Target ever knew our name. We showed up consistently for the community we already had, long before there was a bigger brand watching. And somewhere in there, without a campaign or a strategy session, we became the kind of thing that gets noticed.

And while this is a story for another day, the same exact sitaution happened with Nordstrom.

That’s the order most people get backwards. They want the partnership before they’ve built the thing worth partnering with. They want the call before they’ve done the years of work that would make someone want to make it.

Your network is not just the people you reach out to. It’s also the people who reach out to you, when you’ve built something worth calling about.

This week’s Quick Win is this: think about what you’re building right now and ask yourself honestly. Is it visible enough that someone outside your existing audience could actually find it? Is it consistent enough that if someone watched for three months, they’d see a pattern, not a series of one-offs? Is it real enough, delivering something true for the people already in it, that the right Ann Wessing in your industry would notice and pick up the phone?

If the answer is yes, stay the course. The call is closer than you think, even if you can’t see it yet.

If the answer is not yet, that’s the work. Not a bigger pitch. Not a better cold email. The unglamorous, consistent, visible work that makes the call possible in the first place.

Make sure that you tune in to the Dear FoundHer… podcast today, to hear how Liz Lange leaned in to relationships long before Google or social media existed, to build what became the largest maternity brand in America.

I can’t wait to hear what you think of this episode.

Have a great week,

Lindsay Pinchuk, Host + Founder of Dear FoundHer…

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Most of the women I work with do not have a networking problem.

They have an activation problem.

The network exists. The relationships are real. The trust was earned years ago and is still sitting there, waiting. But nothing is happening with it, because nobody is reaching out.

I’ve asked hundreds of women why. The answers are always some version of the same thing: it’s been too long. I don’t want to seem like I only reach out when I need something. I’m not sure what to say. I’ll do it when I have something more concrete to share.

So the network sits. And the business grows slower than it should.

This week’s Deep Dive is the system I use to fix this. Not the concept, but the actual sequence. Who to contact first, what to say, how to follow up, and how to turn a reactivated relationship into real business over 30 days.

Run this once and you’ll run it every quarter for the rest of your career.

STEP 1: BUILD YOUR ACTIVATION LIST

Before you write a single word, you need the right 30 names.

Not your closest friends, they already know what you’re doing. Not cold contacts, they’re not what this is for. What you’re looking for is the middle tier: people who know you, trust your work, and haven’t heard from you in six months to three years. Depending on the work it is you’re looking to do, you can even reach out to contacts who go back further. I do this all the time. (And I will say, people are usually glad to hear from me.)

Open your contacts, your LinkedIn connections, your email sent folder from two or three years ago. Look for:

• Former colleagues who moved into roles where they now have budgets, teams, or influence you didn’t know about when you worked together.

• Former clients who loved working with you and have since moved to a new company, started their own thing, or expanded their scope.

• Former collaborators: podcast guests, co-panelists, event co-hosts, people you built something with once and never followed up with.

• Industry contacts you’ve met at events, exchanged cards with, had one good conversation with and never continued.

• People from your previous career chapter who watched you build something and would be curious about what you’re building now.

Write down 30 names. Don’t edit as you go, just list. You’ll prioritize in the next step.

STEP 2: SORT BY ACTIVATION TYPE

Once you have your 30 names, sort them into three buckets. This determines what you say and what you’re asking for.

Bucket A: Direct Business Potential These are people who could hire you, buy from you, or refer you to someone who will do either within the next 90 days. These are former clients or people currently in roles that match your ideal client profile. Former colleagues who have moved into decision-making positions.

Bucket B: Strategic Value These are people who can’t immediately hire you but can open doors, make introductions, or amplify what you’re building. Former collaborators with audiences you’re trying to reach. People who know a lot of the right people. Journalists, podcast hosts, event organizers you’ve worked with before.

Bucket C: Relationship Maintenance These are people worth keeping warm even if there’s no immediate business potential. Future clients. People in your field who will cross your path again. Supporters who will advocate for you if they hear your name come up.

Most people treat their entire network like Bucket C, they just maintain. The activation sequence prioritizes Bucket A and B first, then circles back to C.

Keep reading for the exact message template I use with every client, the follow-up line that gets responses when nothing else does, and the full 30-day week-by-week activation sequence. This is the operational piece, the part you can run using today and it’s for our premium subscribers.

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