Hola Familia,

It’s been awhile since I’ve written - well, it’s been awhile since I’ve written here in this space. But I promise it’s not because I’ve forgotten about all of you, but I would be lying if I didn’t say that this part of my life hasn’t taken a back seat lately, and you deserve to know why.

Sure, most people will think it’s because I have an almost one year old (crazy, I know) and maybe that is partly true, but not in the way you’d think. Motherhood has unleashed a new wave of creativity over me like I have never felt before. I am the best I’ve ever been at my job. Constantly coming up with ideas for content and strategy. And it has even led me to try new things and even bring back a part of my life that hasn’t made an appearance in almost ten years.

All this to say, in the last two weeks I’ve not only submitted part of a memoir I’ve been ideating to an agent for feedback at an upcoming conference, I penned my first children’s book, and officially decided to perform my first show as a singer/songwriter for the first time in nine years.

The show is the perfect example of what this season has been like. I was preparing food for the baby when my friend Eviana called to tell me about a show opportunity and asked if I’d want to join her for a few songs. Completely unplanned. We have less than a month to prepare. And my response was something I haven’t said in a very long time: YOLO.

One would think that with an almost one year old, preparing for the busiest season in my business, events I’m hosting, planning bebecito’s first birthday party, and my whole family coming into town, I would be crazy to add more to my plate. But I know myself, and when I feel that something is right, it’s right. So here we are.

The children’s book is the same story. It just kind of happened? But I know better than to question when inspiration strikes.

The thing about doing what I do for work is that at some point, when you have the right frameworks, or at least the right guiding points, strategy becomes instinctive. If this happens, then this happens. And while I’m a creative, I do believe in thinking outside the box, and in business we know anything can happen, analysis and problem-solving is just how my brain works now. Work stopped scaring me a long time ago. Professionally, it’s been years since I’ve felt like a beginner at anything.

And I think that’s actually where this all started. Going through postpartum made me feel more vulnerable than I had ever been, and my strategist brain had nothing for it. There was no framework. So I started writing about it, somewhere else, in a corner of the internet where I’m not expected to have all the answers.

Now, as I get ready for the Latinx Storytellers Conference in New York in a couple of weeks, with pages of my memoir in hand for an agent to read, I am completely out of my comfort zone professionally for the first time in a very long time. I’m a beginner again. And it’s waking everything else up.

And if you’re reading this, chances are you’re more than one thing too. Most of you are. Somewhere along the way, somebody probably told you to pick a lane, to niche down, to be easier to introduce at gatherings. (But please don’t ever change!)

This is exactly why my other newsletter is called Holding Multitudes. If The Reframe is my strategist brain, Holding Multitudes is everything else. The identity essays, the postpartum ones, the beginner era, the memoir behind the scenes. The first essays are already up, including one about postpartum anxiety I never thought I’d let the world see, and TBH it scares me a little every time I hit publish over there.

If you’ve ever read something here and wondered about who I am when I’m not in my “Jefa Ashley” alter ego, come over to HM where I might take you on a different kind of emotional rollercoaster.

Holding Multitudes

I Thought I Could Prevent It

When I first started Holding Multitudes I was in the thick of postpartum anxiety and spiraling into the depression I had prepped myself for. Or at least I did what I could as an eldest daughter/Capricorn and set myself up for what I thought was “beating” or “preventing” PPD. I did my own research, (because what…

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17 days ago · 2 likes · 3 comments · Ashley K. Stoyanov Ojeda

But don’t worry friends, I also have plans for The Reframe. You’ve all been asking what my process looks like behind the scenes, and I can’t wait to share with you some more musings about what I’ve been up to and seeing in my work.

xx,

Ashley

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Hola Familia,

This Substack has taken many shapes over the last four years. If you’ve been here a while, you’ve seen it all. From Jefa in Training updates to sales frameworks, membership content to motherhood rantings. Some of you subscribed during one era and stayed through three more. I see you and I love you for it.

And now there are three homes for my writing (well, four actually) where there used to be one. The Reframe, right here (previously known as La Hoja).

Then there’s Entre Nosotras, which just launched for the Jefa in Training comunidad (and if the excitement in my DMs is any sign, some of you have already found it).

Holding Multitudes, my personal Substack, where the motherhood and identity writing now lives, along with the behind-the-scenes of my memoir-writing journey.

And the Awesome Latinas Substack that I co-author with Mirtle.

A few of you have asked me, very reasonably: wait, what’s the difference? Which one is for me?

That’s a fair question. And true to my own advice from the 3-second test essay, I’m not going to make you figure it out on your own. I’m building clear doorways. But first, I need to actually know who’s in the room.

So today I’m asking for five minutes of your time.

I put together a short survey. Ten-ish questions, mostly checkboxes, a few open ones. It asks who you are, what you’re building, what you’re stuck on, and what you actually want from me. There’s also a question about which of my four homes fits you best, so I can point you to the right door. Or doors. Picking more than one is allowed and encouraged.

Take The Survey

Here’s my promise. I’m going to read every single response personally. Your answers stay with me. They will directly shape what I write and what I build next.

And here’s the thank-you. The Reframe Room (the paid layer of this newsletter) is recently launched and I’m giving you 3 months free of our monthly subscription.

That’s it. No essay today. Just a small ask from me to you, so that everything I write after this is actually for you.

ICYMI: Here are some of my other recent posts I am excited to share with you.

Awesome Latinas: The Substack

I Hated History Until I Started Learning About Our History

I was always bored in history class. I can say that unflinchingly, despite having co-written a history book. I especially hated high school history because I kept asking, “Why do I need to learn all of this?” Maybe that was naive. What I didn’t yet understand was how much I wasn’t being taught in school. What was taught felt irrelevant because none of i…

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2 months ago · 1 like · Ashley K. Stoyanov Ojeda

Gracias, truly.

xx,

Ashley

just a girl who has too many ideas and needs help her prioritize. i appreciate you!

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Hola Familia,

So this is the story of how the strategist did not, in fact, follow her own strategy.

Some housekeeping first. Today, Entre Nosotras (our new media platform for the Jefa in Training community) soft-launched, and so did our new Jefa in Training Circle website. I am excited (and also tired, so tired). This is the third or fourth big move I’ve made since coming back from maternity leave, and it definitely does not fit the “ease into things” plan I made for myself back in August.

So how did we get here?

I want to tell you the pattern I only recently noticed. I have been building things the same way since 2013, before I had the words for what I was doing. And knowing that has changed the way I understand everything I’ve built.

Let me back up for a minute.

Back in 2013 I was in NYC booking shows for a local venue and putting on release shows for my own music. I was a singer-songwriter, in a couple of bands, curating what I loved. It was fun and formative. But it wasn’t yet mine.

In 2015 I moved to Portland. Could not find a community of other women songwriters to collaborate with. So in 2016 I did what feels obvious to me now and wasn’t obvious then. I threw a showcase. Then another one. Then a full year of them. Turns out I was beta testing before I knew what beta testing was.

In 2017 I made it official. #WomxnCrush Music, a nonprofit arts organization for rising womxn songwriters. Within a year we had a community of thousands, 30 volunteers across 16 cities running showcases, workshops, and networking events.

#WCM was iconic. I know that in my bones. It was also the first thing that ever felt truly mine.

We closed the org in 2021 because COVID had changed the music industry, especially live music, and we had no idea when we would be able to resume the programming people knew us for. To this day, when I go to shows, people still ask me when I’m going to bring it back. Who knows? Never say never.

But by then I had also been offered a book deal that could change my life. Jefa in Training was written because of everything #WCM taught me. The organization I closed became the book that opened everything else. They are the same story.

Fast forward. In 2020, while #WCM was still winding down and Jefa in Training was still in me, I started Ashley K. Stoyanov LLC. I did not really know what it would be. The original plan was consulting for virtual membership communities, which honestly ended up being genius timing, because it was COVID and everyone and their mom was building online community because what else were we going to do. The work found me. It took on a life of its own.

Do you see the pattern yet?

Because Jefa in Training the book came out in 2022. And then the Jefa in Training Circle came out of a need that already existed. The women who read the book kept messaging me looking for a place to land, and I built it for them. And then, for three years, I beta tested that Circle. I have run it, tweaked it, listened to it, restructured it. Only now do I actually know what it wants to become.

For a long time I could not imagine separating any of it. Everything lived under Ashley K. Stoyanov LLC. Every invoice, every offer, every launch. It was all one thing, or so I told myself. I was too in it to see what was already happening.

Here’s what I noticed over the last couple of years. Jefa in Training is not going away. The book came out four years ago and we’re just getting started. Circle members keep showing up. New readers keep finding the book. The movement has legs I honestly did not expect it to have this many years in.

And in order for it to grow the way it deserves to grow, I had to stop trying to keep it under my personal LLC. Because here’s what a separate house unlocks that a shared house doesn’t. Grants. Pitch competitions. Fiscal sponsorship. Foundation partnerships. All the funding structures that exist for community-facing work with a mission behind it. None of those are available to me under my personal consulting LLC. Under a dedicated Jefa in Training LLC, all of them are.

Here’s where I landed:

Ashley K. Stoyanov LLC now operates as The Reframe Consultancy. For leaders, organizations, and brands who want to build trust that turns into loyal communities and owned audiences that compound revenue. A little bit of sales, a little bit of relationship marketing and community engagement, a little bit of PR, a little bit of thought leadership development. My last decade of experience in one house.

Jefa in Training LLC houses resources for Latina entrepreneurs building on their own terms. The book. The Jefa in Training Circle. And Entre Nosotras. And who knows what else.

Two houses. Same me. Different growth engines.

Now, about that “ease into things” plan.

I started mat leave in August 2025. I started taking new clients again in March 2026. I told myself all seven of those months would be about slowing down. What actually happened is that mat leave finally gave me the space to see the pattern. Ease is a nice thing to say and a hard thing to actually do when the work is already yours. What “ease” ended up meaning for me was not “do less.” It meant “stop trying to build one confused house and finally build two clear ones.” Same amount of building. So much more clarity which TBH that IS the ease.

So here is what I finally see. I keep building things before I know what they are. I beta test them by putting them in the hands of the people who actually need them, and I let the thing take shape based on what shows up. The stuff that sticks, sticks because it was tested by real people needing something real. That is the pattern. It works.

If you are throwing spaghetti at the wall, you are doing it right. Building without testing first, IMHO, is a really good way to build something unsustainable.

And if you need someone to chat about this with, I’m happy to help.

xx,

Ashley

Just a girl from Queens with two businesses now.

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Hola Familia,

What started out as an innocent trip to JCPenney with my brother to relive our childhood photoshoots (awkward poses, infamous floating head portraits, the whole vibe) has now turned into a case study.

Welcome to a new series I’m calling Bending the Rules, where I take traditional marketing advice and show you what I’d consider more effective instead. Or just simply what not to do, IMHO.

A couple of months ago Diego and I went to the JCPenney Portrait Studio (for likely the first time since we were teens?) to take pictures for my mom’s Mother’s Day gift. We laughed so much that day and honestly had a great time with our photographer. The whole experience was very low stress, and we were very happy with our TBH iconic photos.

But now here I am two months later, saying that I will probably never do this again, not even as a joke. I’m a little salty with their marketing tactics.

Last week they called and asked if my family wanted to come model for them because they had new photographers in training. Mind you, I think my kid is the cutest kid in the world, so this sounded great. We should be models! I thought perhaps my whole life had prepared me for becoming bebecito’s momager (like a less toxica, more badass Dance Mom).

I asked what we’d get in return, and a few free prints and a discount on the digital album seemed okay! Until I was sharing this info with my husband and realized something.

The exact thing they were “offering” us as a perk for modeling for them? Is the same promo they have running on their public website right now. Anyone walking in off the street gets it.

What a huge bummer.

Now, I’m taking my momager hat off and strategist hat on. I KNOW business is business, and I’m the first one to say get your money, especially because when we were there in April the place looked dead. I get it, they need foot traffic.

But as someone who preaches about building consumer trust, that move was a mega trust violation. And I see entrepreneurs and brands reach for it every single week, especially when business is slow.

The classic tactic is “make it feel exclusive to attract customers.” Frame the offer as access. Make people feel special. Sure, that works when the exclusivity is real.

The second it isn’t, you lose more than you gained.

Because I was excited about JCPenney for about 45 seconds. Then I caught the move. And I didn’t just lose interest in the offer, I lost trust in the brand. I went from “what time should we book” to “I’m probably never going back” in one phone call. It was wild.

Tiny upside (the people who don’t catch the move), massive downside (the people who do catch it tell ten others, write a review, never come back). You’re betting on the customer not checking. That is a worse bet today than it has ever been.

Trust is the slowest thing to build and the fastest thing to lose. JCPenney spent years of my inherited trust in them to get us in the store in April. They spent 45 seconds of a phone call to lose it.

If they had just called and said, “Hey, we know you came in for Mother’s Day, we’d love to invite you back, here’s a real perk only past customers get,” I would have considered booking for a gift for my dad too.

But I guess we’ll always have these…

Shout-out to my little brother for always going along with my shenanigans.

Until next time,

xx

Ashley

Hola Familia,

About a month ago as I was creating the content for my upcoming Sales Summer Camp, I opened my own website on my phone and stared at it for three seconds. And I embarrassingly could not pass my own three second test exercise. What I saw was a page built for the 2023 version of my business not the 2026 version.

It was Jefa in Training book-forward. The early-author and building energy of 2022 when the book first came out. Made sense then. But three years and a whole career later, it told a stranger almost nothing about the consulting work I now do with organizations, the thought partnerships I do with entrepreneurs, or the Jefa in Training Circle that operates as its own business now. (story time coming soon on that).

A stranger landing there could not tell you who I serve. I teach this work for a living, and I had let my own page fall three years behind. (In fairness to me, new working mama is doing what she can over here.)

I’ve since rebuilt it with two clear doorways, one for individuals, one for organizations. It’s still rough and there’s more to do. But anyone landing on the homepage now can at least find her way to the version of me she came for, instead of bouncing because the page was talking to 2023 her.

This is what I want to talk about today, because I see it in client work all the time. Especially with the kind of business (solo or institutional) who has been busy actually doing the work. You assume the people who land on your page will figure out the value if you just... explain enough. So you add another paragraph. Another testimonial. Another freebie. And still no conversions.

You more than likely have a buyer clarity problem, not a lack of content problem.

This is part of the first phase of my framework, TEK, (Trust, Engage, Keep). Before anyone engages with your work or stays for the relationship, they have to TRUST you in the first three seconds they are looking at your page (website, IG, anything really). And in those three seconds, a stranger is asking three questions.

1. Is this for me?

Not “is this for women” or “is this for entrepreneurs.” Those are too general. Specifically: am I the person this person serves? Am I the stage of business or life or role she’s talking to? Do I see my actual situation reflected here?

Now here’s where I want to bend a rule of traditional business advice. The classic positioning line is “pick one buyer” or “niche down.” It works for plenty of people, especially early in business when you’re trying to find your first 100 paying clients. But the entrepreneurs I actually work with mostly serve multiple buyers (a B2C lane and a B2B lane, a founder track and an institutional track), and the variety IS the business model. So instead of telling you to pick one, here’s what I’ve seen actually work for the ones serving multiple.

Build clear doorways.

A doorway is a section of your page or your bio that says, in one line, “if you’re [X], start here.” A founder building visibility, start here. A nonprofit leader looking for a thought partner, start here. A Latina at the beginning of her business, start here. Each doorway then leads to its own page or its own clarity. Each one passes the 3-second test on its own.

IMHO, the mistake isn’t serving multiple buyers. The mistake is trying to talk to all of them on one homepage with one vague sentence and hoping each visitor figures out where they belong.

So if you serve multiple, the question becomes a two-parter: does the top of my page carry a worldview ALL of my buyers share? And does it lead each one to a doorway built specifically for them?

2. Do I need this?

A stranger has to be able to name the specific pain or want your work addresses. In their words, not yours.

This is where most expert-level entrepreneurs lose people. The work you do is sophisticated, layered, and honestly hard to put in a sentence. So you describe what you do. “Strategic consulting at the intersection of identity and growth.” That sentence is accurate and it converts nothing. A stranger doesn’t buy what you do. They buy what changes for them if you do it.

Tell them what’s on the other side of the work. “You’ll know what to charge by Friday.” “You’ll write a book proposal an agent will read.” “Your team will stop missing the second wave of brand loyalty.” “Your board will stop asking what your strategy is.” That’s what people are scanning for in three seconds.

3. Can I trust her with it?

This is where credibility and cultural fluency actually do their job. The credentials, the photo, the writing voice, the testimonials, the way the page feels in the body when you land on it. A stranger is asking, “Is this someone who could understand me, or am I going to have to translate myself to her first?”

This applies to institutional pages too. A chamber’s about section. A nonprofit’s leadership bios. An ERG’s mission statement. They all face the same three-second test, and the trust signals are the same: does the page show me you’ve understood the people you’re claiming to serve, or are you still using language that signals you’ve never been in the room?

For us underrepresented builders, this last question often carries more weight than the other two, because we have often spent our whole careers translating ourselves to people who weren’t going to do the work to meet us. The three-second decision is whether your page has done that work in advance.

Here’s the test for this one: name one specific thing on your page that signals you’ve understood THIS reader vs. a generic audience. One word, one image, one detail that only your right-fit reader would clock. If you can’t name it, you’re running on general-audience signals, and the reader you actually want is going to bounce, because she’s tired of doing the translation work.

Here’s your homework:

Open your own homepage right now, or your IG bio, or your Substack about page. Set a timer for three seconds, look at it, and ask: did the page just answer those three questions, or did it leave the visitor to figure it out?

We are running this exact diagnostic on your actual page in the first session of the Summer Sales Camp that kicks off on June 18th at 4PM PST, with the rest of the cohort in the room telling you what they’re seeing. Doors are open through Wednesday at 5pm PT.

Apply Here

Even if Camp isn’t for you, do the test today. Set the timer on one of your own pages. Let me know what you find out!

xx,

Ashley

PS: Loved this exercise? Maybe take a read through the last few Reframe posts too?

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Hola Familia,

A couple of years ago I was at Latina History Day in Los Angeles, sitting at a table with a stack of my books, and I signed a hundred copies of Jefa in Training in about twenty minutes. A hundred women walked up, told me what the book meant to them, took one of my cards, and walked away glowing.

It was one of the best days of my life as an author.

It was also one of my biggest mistakes.

I think about this often (and this is why I’m teaching it now): If a hundred people connected with me that one afternoon, and a few thousand more found me across two years of touring, podcasts, stages, and signings, then where is everybody? In 2026 I still have around three thousand followers on Instagram.

The math doesn’t math. I connected with so many people, and then I let almost all of them slip right through my fingers.

Where did they go?

They went back to their busy lives, same as you and me. They meant to follow me. Some of them did. Most of them got home, got pulled back into work and kids and dinner, and the moment passed. The book has maybe stayed in their TBR pile (as so many have for me as well) and they think about getting to it often.

Here’s what I know now:

What I should have done was so simple it makes me wince. A QR code on the table. Scan it, drop your email, tell me one thing: why you were excited to read this book. That is it. I would have walked away from Latina History Day with a hundred real connections I could actually stay close to, plus a goldmine of insight about who my readers were and what they wanted next. I could have built them a part two.

Instead I bet on the worst strategy there is. They’ll find me.

Here is what nobody tells you about being an author, or really about being any kind of builder. People can love what you made and still never look you up. Not because they don’t care. Because authors come off as unapproachable, or because they assume someone like you is too busy for them. I am not, by the way. If you are reading this and you ever read my book, reply and tell me. We need to hear it more than you know. But I digress.

When you rely on people finding you, your whole business is sitting on rented land. The stage was rented. The podcast audience was rented. Social media is the most rented land of all, because you do not own those followers. The algorithm does, and it decides who sees you and when. Rented land is wonderful for one thing: it introduces you. It is terrible at keeping you.

The only land you truly own is a direct line to a person. Email. Maybe a text, if they are already paying you, because I am not trying to be in everybody’s messages for free. That direct line is the whole difference between a reader and a relationship.

This is the Engage piece of how I teach sales. Rented land introduces. Owned land converts. You do not build a real audience by going viral. You build it by capturing the connection while you have it, and then showing up for those people again and again, not just the week you happen to be selling something.

Relationships are not built at enrollment time. So many coaches go quiet for months and then slide into your inbox the second their cart opens. People feel that. It is transactional and everybody knows it. The connection has to be there all along, in the in-between, when you have nothing to sell at all.

And I did not learn this just once. There was a woman at an event who told me about a chance to design an entrepreneurship program for a Latina organization. I was so excited about it. And I lost her contact. To this day I have no idea where that lead went, who she was going to introduce me to, what it could have become. It fell straight through a crack I left wide open.

So I am not teaching you this from a mountaintop. I am teaching it from the pile of connections I fumbled, the readers I cannot find, the opportunity I cannot trace. Communities show up. Followings scroll past. I had to learn that difference the most expensive way there is.

Where did those hundred women go? I honestly don’t know. But I know what I do differently now, and I know I am never handing out a business card again when I could be building something we both get to keep.

If this is the exact thing you keep getting wrong, the connecting without the keeping, I’m excited to talk about more of it in my Sales Summer Camp. In 4 weeks, we will create the structure for you to build the audience you actually own, and the system that makes sure your people don’t vanish after one great moment. It starts June 15, and there’s a spot for you.

Reply to this email if you want to chat more about joining us!

And if you only want to say hi because you read the book once and we lost touch? Reply anyway. I would love to find you again.

xx,

Ashley

Just a girl from Queens who makes mistakes too.

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Hola Familia,

I want to talk about the thing almost everyone dreads. The sales call.

First of all, can we retire the name? Because “sales call” sets the whole thing up wrong before anyone even logs on. On my calendar, these don’t say sales call. They say “virtual cafecito”. Because that’s what they actually are. A conversation over coffee (or whatever your favorite emotional support drink might be).

What I mean is this:

A sales call isn’t just a sales call. Most of the time, it is a first interaction. And the entire point of a first interaction is not to sell anybody anything. It’s to make a connection, and to show someone what becomes possible when the two of you work on their business together. As partners. Not me up on a stage and them sitting in the audience taking notes.

Nobody wants to be lectured into trusting you

The most common way people blow this is the intro dump. They get on the call, introduce themselves, and then it’s fact after fact after fact. Here’s what I’ve done. Here’s who I’ve worked with. Here’s my certification, my big result, my impressive number.

And the person on the other end just shrinks. Because that’s not connection. That’s a lecture. And nobody, nobody, wants to feel lectured while they’re trying to figure out if they can trust you.

Think about how trust actually works between two humans. You don’t earn it by listing your résumé at someone. You earn it by making them feel seen.

They already raised their hand

Here’s the part people forget. By the time someone books a call with you, they’ve already told you something important. They know they’re looking for something. They wouldn’t be on the call otherwise.

So your job is not to convince them they have a problem. They know they do. Your job is three things:

1. Show them you understand what they actually need.

2. Show them you’re the right person to help.

3. Actually show them how. Not tell. Show.

That third one is where almost everybody stops. And that is why I’m teaching it in this course (and to you now).

Everybody promises. Almost nobody shows.

Anyone can make a promise. I’ll help you make an extra three grand a month. I’ll help you lose the weight. I’ll help you fix the thing that’s been keeping you up at night. Promises are free, and your buyer has heard every one of them before.

What almost nobody does is let you see how they actually think.

So on every cafecito, before that person has paid me a single dollar, I leave them with a real nugget. “You know what I actually think would work well for you? I’d put your energy into thought leadership. I’d build a group cohort instead of stacking more 1:1s.” Something specific. Something they can use the minute we hang up, whether or not they ever hire me.

Why give it away? Because that nugget does something a résumé never could. It lets them feel what it’s like to have me on their team, just for a minute. They get the clarity, the relief, the “oh, she actually gets it” feeling that I want them to have when we work together for real. And once they’ve felt that, they’re already in it. The decision gets easy. They’re not weighing whether to hire a stranger anymore. They’re choosing to keep a feeling they already have.

So what do you actually do on the call?

Less pitching, more asking. What’s going on right now? What are you stuck on? Where do you want to be a few months from now? Then reflect back what you heard, hand them one or two real ideas, and talk through how you’d tackle it together.

Notice that word. Together. “Here’s how we could approach this” lands completely differently than “here’s what you need to do.”

And then let them go. I never make anyone decide on the spot. I follow up the next day with everything we talked about so they can choose with a clear head. Pressure breaks trust, and we’re not doing that here.

A sales call was never supposed to be a performance. It’s just the first time someone gets to feel what working with you is actually like. Make that feeling good, and you’ll almost never have to “close” anyone.

xx,

Ashley

Just a girl from Queens who’d rather have a cafecito than a sales call.

P.S. This is the heart of Week 3 inside Sales Summer Camp, the art of the cafecito. Doors close June 8 if you want to build your version of this with me. LEARN MORE AND APPLY HERE.

Not ready for Sales Summer Camp but still want to be in a room where you can learn from me for only $20 a month? Join The Reframe Room.

Hola Familia,

Years ago when I was building my consulting practice, my first financial advisor told me something I’ve never forgotten, that I now pass on to all of my small business clients.

“Time is money. Even if you’re not charging hourly.”

It sounded like a basic line. It wasn’t. That one sentence changed how I price every single thing I do in my business twelve years later.

The math most consultants are running

A lot of newer consultants tell themselves a version of this. “I work 40 hours a week. If I see one client per hour, I can see 40 clients a week.”

Read that back. Forty clients. Per week.

That’s eight client sessions a day. No breaks. No prep. No follow-up email. No marketing. No brainstorming. No learning. No coffee. No life.

If you zoom out for two seconds, it’s kind of crazy. But most consultants build their pricing on some version of that math.

The non-billable reality

The thing my advisor was actually telling me is this. Every billable hour you spend with a client requires non-billable hours behind it. Marketing. Brainstorming. Strategy. Follow-up. Admin. Email. Learning. Recovery. The work that makes the work possible.

How many non-billable hours per billable hour? Depends on the business, but for most service providers at most stages, it’s at least one. Often two. Sometimes three.

Run that math against your actual life.

If you can realistically see three to five clients a day (which is closer to the truth for anyone doing thoughtful work), and you have one or two non-billable hours behind every client hour, your actual revenue-generating capacity is way smaller than the “40 hours a week” framing suggests.

If you priced your work on the 40-clients-a-week version of the math? You’re operating at a permanent loss and calling it a business.

What I’ve actually done over five years

I’ve raised my rates slowly. Not because I suddenly got better overnight. Because cost of living went up. Because I had a baby. Because my expertise grew. Because the business has to keep funding the life I’m actually living, not the life I was living in 2021.

A lot of consultants set rates once and then never touch them. As if the math should stay frozen while everything else in their life moves. It can’t. The math has to keep moving because your life keeps moving.

This isn’t just a service-provider thing, by the way. Membership businesses, product businesses, hybrid models. Same problem. We don’t do the math. So our actual investment in the business ends up costing more than we’re bringing in.

We just don’t see it for a while.

The hidden cost most people don’t calculate

Here’s the part nobody talks about.

Underpricing doesn’t bankrupt you in one quarter. It kills your longevity.

You can run a business at unsustainable rates for a long time. Months. Years. The cash keeps coming. The clients keep coming. From the outside, it looks like things are working.

What’s actually happening is you’re depleting. You’re putting in 70 hours to make what 40 hours should make. You’re cutting your own corners. You’re missing things that matter. You’re saying yes to clients you should have said no to because you can’t afford to be picky. You’re tired in a way that’s hard to name.

And eventually, you can’t keep doing this. Not because the business failed. Because you ran out.

The hidden cost of underpricing isn’t financial. It’s longevity. You can keep going until you can’t.

A few questions worth sitting with

1. When you set your current rates, did you actually calculate your real non-billable to billable ratio? Or did you guess?

2. Have your rates kept up with cost of living, your expertise, and your phase of life over the last 24 months?

3. If you ran your current business at your current rates for the next five years, would you be okay? Or do the numbers only work because you’re not really doing the math?

If you don’t love your answers, we can change this! You are NOT bad at business, you’ve just inherited the wrong math.

Here’s the chisme on the Sales Summer Camp

This is most of Week 3 of Sales Summer Camp. The math behind sustainable rates, the minimum viable rate calculator, and the conversation framework for raising your prices without losing the clients you actually want to keep.

Apply here.

One last thing

My financial advisor didn’t tell me what to charge. She told me what to count.

And once you know what to count, the number figures itself out.

Need help? Reply to this email or drop a comment. I can’t wait to hear what you’re working on.

xx,

Ashley

Hola Familia,

Last week I was wandering the streets of Manhattan and I read an ad that said something like “Chisme. It deserves better than popcorn.”

It was a snack brand. I wanted to take a picture but I was too desperate to find a sausage egg and cheese cart, because let’s be for real, that’s what I miss most about the city. But I’m still mad at myself because I knew it would make a good case study.

THAT is how you do marketing to Latinas, IMHO (or at least a start). No tropical destination B-roll. No performative Hispanic Heritage Month campaign. Just a photo of people hanging out on the couch, chismeando, true to our ritual. And then of course hiring Latina influencers to chismear on socials while eating the product.

And as I continued walking through my hometown, I couldn’t stop thinking about the ad. Not because it was super clever. Because it nailed the first part of my framework: Ecosystem Entry. It’s part of the Trust section of Trust, Engage, Keep, the sales framework I’ve been using with clients for years.

And that is exactly where Sales Summer Camp starts.

Because we start with the mindset shift.

After years of doing this work, here’s what I keep landing on: most people don’t have a sales problem. They have a sales relationship problem. The thing that’s stuck isn’t “what to say on a sales call.” It’s the story they’re carrying about what sales even IS.

Most of us were taught that selling means convincing. Pressuring. Scripts. The “always be closing” thing. And honestly? Fair. Most of what’s out there about sales is gross.

But the brands and builders who actually grow? They’re not better at convincing. They’re better at connecting.

That ad on the street in Manhattan wasn’t a brand convincing me to buy crackers. It was a brand recognizing a ritual I already love. They didn’t try to bring me into their world. They went into mine. And I noticed.

That’s the shift we work on inside Camp. From “I hate sales” to “I love connecting with people and making money.” From scripts to conversations. From pressure to recognition.

Ecosystem Entry is the practice of showing up in the spaces where trust already lives. You’re not building trust from scratch. You’re earning the right to be inside trust that’s already happening.

The same principle works in your business. You don’t need to convince anyone. You need to recognize what your buyer already values, show up in the rooms where that value already lives, and earn the right to be there.

And here’s the chisme on Sales Summer Camp.

The Founding Rate, extended

I’ve extended the founding rate for Sales Summer Camp through Tuesday, May 19 at 11 PM PT.

The founding rate is $397 for the public, $297 for Reframe Room members (learn about The Reframe Room here). It locks in for the first 5 people who apply OR through Tuesday May 19, whichever comes first. After that, standard rates (go up $50+) kick in.

Four Thursdays starting June 15. Recordings if you can’t make it live. The Sprint Workbook, a WhatsApp community, one group office hour, and weekly 1:1 voice note check-ins with me.

If you’re ready to rebuild your relationship with sales, without a bunch of bro marketing and icky tactics, you’ve found your place.

APPLY HERE

Questions? Reply to this email!

xx,

Ashley

P.S. If something here landed, here’s how we can keep building together:

🌟 The Reframe Room VIP — A one-time $199 patron tier with an annual 1:1 strategy session.

🌿 Sales Summer Camp — My 4-week cohort program built on the TEK framework. Founding rate extended through May 19

🎤 Speaking & keynotes — ERG events, corporate keynotes, HHM, women’s conferences. Booking inquiries here.

🌸Consulting - for organizations, leaders, authors, entrepreneurs. Learn how to build trust, owned audiences and loyal communities. Read more here.

Subscribe now

Hola Familia,

This is your invitation to The Reframe’s Sales Summer Camp.

ICYMI, it’s a 4-week virtual sprint to help you redevelop your sales strategy in a way that works for your business and speaks to your audience.

Here’s a little exercise from our sprint that you can do right now to see if it’s time for you to sit down with your strategy. Take 5 minutes. Answer yes or no.

1. Can you tell someone what you do and who you do it for in three seconds, without trailing off?

2. Have you raised your prices in the last 12 months?

3. Do you walk into sales calls confident? Or do you freeze, undercharge, or talk yourself down?

4. Is your audience growing faster than your revenue right now?

5. Do past clients refer new clients to you, on their own, without you having to ask?

6. If I asked you to walk me through your sales process out loud right now, could you do it without making it up?

OK. Count your no’s.

If you said NO to three or more of these, Sales Summer Camp is built for you.

What it is

Sales Summer Camp is a 4-week virtual sprint starting on June 15th built around TEK. Trust, Engage, Keep. The same framework I use with Fortune 500 brands and with the solopreneur landing her first paying client. You leave with a sales strategy that fits the way you actually want to show up. (Not the way bro marketing says you should.)

The curriculum

Week 1 — Trust: Offer Clarity & Buyer Psychology. The 3-second test. Where your offer is leaking. Ready vs. Nurture buyers and how to design for both. You walk away with: a one-sentence offer that converts, and a clear picture of who you’re actually selling to.

Week 2 — Engage: Your Owned Audience Strategy. Rented vs. owned land. Choosing your one channel. Content that converts, not just performs. You walk away with: a 90-day owned audience plan and a content approach that moves people toward your offer.

Week 3 — Pricing + Sales Calls: Charge Confidently. Sell Without Scripts. The math behind sustainable rates. The minimum viable rate calculator. Sales conversations that feel like conversations, not pitches. You walk away with: a pricing structure that reflects your value and a sales call framework that doesn’t feel gross.

Week 4 — Keep: Loyalty Loops & Long-Term Sales. Designing offers that complement each other. Re-engaging past clients. Referral structures that work. Mapping your full ecosystem. You walk away with: a complete Trust · Engage · Keep system mapped to your business and the next 90 days of action.

What’s included

• Four 90-minute live sessions on Thursdays, 4 to 5:30 PT, June 18 through July 9.

• Recordings within 24 hours so life-happens days don’t break your week.

• The Sprint Workbook with templates for offer clarity, owned audience, pricing, and ecosystem mapping.

• A WhatsApp community active for the duration.

• One group office hour for hot-seat coaching.

• And weekly 1:1 voice note check-ins with me, for your questions about workbook homework, followups from sessions, etc.

About pricing

Founding rates are now expired as of 5/22.

We have limited remaining spots at $497 for non-members and $350 for members of The Reframe Room + The Jefa in Training Circle. The cart is open through June 8 as sessions start on June 18th.

How to apply

Three steps. No high-pressure sales call.

1. Fill out a short application (5 to 7 minutes). Tells me where you are, what’s stuck, what you want.

2. I review within 48 hours. I read every one personally. You’ll hear from me directly. Yes, no, or “here’s what might be a better fit.”

3. Approved applicants get a payment link to lock in their rate.

Apply here.

If you said yes to all six questions at the top, you don’t need Camp right now. You probably need a vacation (or at the very least to go drink some water lol).

If you said no to three or more, this is the room where we can do something about it. Respond to this email if you have any questions!

Hope to see you in the room where it happens.

Con cariño,

xx

Ashley

Just a girl from Queens who found her superpowers.

Last year, when I was eight and a half months pregnant, I built a 12-module sales course.

I started recording it even though I couldn’t breathe halfway through any sentence. I essentially went into labor while recording module four. Four months postpartum, I came back to those videos, watched ten minutes of myself, and scrapped the entire thing.

And instead, I hosted a workshop last week for The Jefa in Training Circle. It was important for me to debut this framework in that space because as one of our community members said last night “we are not taught how to sell, only to consume”. And that hit. And consumer habits run deep, which is why I also am developing a talk on Latine consumer trust for any brand that wants to tap into our community - the ethical and culturally relevant way.

But I digress.

I wanted to find a way to teach sales differently because I have never felt that the “traditional” coach/consultant sales tactics were for me. The constant emails from a coach you only hear from when they want to launch a new program. The 45-min fluff webinar with almost as much of the same time pitching to you to spend thousands of dollars and take a second mortgage on your house.

I sat with this for a year.

And what I kept coming back to is this: most sales advice fails people not because the advice is wrong, but because it skips the part that actually matters.

It skips the experience.

Sales is an experience, not a transaction.

I will die on this hill.

The sales call isn’t where sales happens. By the time someone is on a call with you, the sale has already been decided — or it hasn’t — by everything that came before. Their first impression of your Instagram. The way your newsletter made them feel. Whether the language on your services page made them think yes, that’s me in three seconds, or whether they bounced because they couldn’t tell who it was for.

The same feeling you want people to have when they’re working with you is the same feeling they should have at that very first interaction.

That realization is what TEK came from. Trust. Engage. Keep. Three stages, and a sales process that finally felt like mine. I hope it feels like yours too.

Trust

The buyer recognizes themselves in your offer in three seconds. If they can’t tell who it’s for, what transformation it delivers, and where it fits in their life — they’re not going to trust it. You have to create a safe space for them. They have to know their time, energy and funds are going to something that will add value to their life, not take away from it.

Most people think this is a content problem. I’m not posting enough. I’m not visible enough. I need to be on more platforms.

It’s almost never a content problem. It’s a clarity problem. And no amount of content fixes a clarity problem. It just buries it deeper.

Engage

Your Instagram following is not the same as your buyer personas. The people who like your posts are not always the people who will hire you, and that’s fine — but you need somewhere else for the people who will hire you to find you.

Build an owned audience. A newsletter. A membership. A recurring event series. Somewhere you have direct access to people without an algorithm in the way.

Rented land introduces. Owned land converts.

Keep

Once a client, always a client. Past clients are gold mines for referrals and re-engagement. Communities show up. Followings scroll past.

Build recurring formats — office hours, quarterly check-ins, referral systems — that give people a reason to come back. Not because you’re chasing them. Because you’ve made it easy for them to keep choosing you.

And the part most people miss: not yet doesn’t mean no. A lot of sales come from long leads — people who’ve been quietly reading your newsletter for two years and finally make the move because you stayed in their inbox.

If you delete everyone who’s said “not yet,” you’d have nobody.

Three questions to sit with this week

1. Can your buyer recognize themselves in your offer in three seconds?

2. If your most-used social platform disappeared tomorrow, would you still have direct contact with your people?

3. When somebody works with you once, do they have a clear path to work with you again — directly or through referrals?

If any of those is a no, that’s where the work is. Not in more content. Not in a new platform. In the part you’ve been avoiding because it requires you to get specific.

Want the full workshop?

Last week I taught all of this in a live workshop, and the clip above is just one piece of it.

Subscribe now

Going deeper: Sales Summer Camp

For those of you ready to spend four weeks actually applying TEK to your business — not just thinking about it — I’m running Sales Summer Camp this June.

Four Thursdays starting June 15, 4:00–5:30pm PT. Live sessions, workbook, WhatsApp access, group office hours, and a 1:1 voice note check-in with me during the sprint.

What you’ll walk away with: A sales process that feels like you. An offer your buyer recognizes themselves in within three seconds. An audience strategy that doesn’t depend on going viral. The confidence to talk about pricing without flinching. And a plan for keeping past clients in your orbit so they keep referring, keep buying, keep showing up.

Founding rate (first 5 applications): $397 public, $297 for Reframe Room subscribers. Standard rate kicks in May 16: $497 / $397.

Application-only. No direct checkout.

Apply Here

Until next time,

xx,

Ashley

P.S. — An open invitation:

If you came to The Reframe through my work in the Latina entrepreneurship space, you might want to know that the Jefa in Training Circle has its own newsletter now — it’s called Entre Nosotras and it lives on Kit. Latina-only entrepreneurship resources, events, and insights specifically for the comunidad.

Subscribe to Entre Nosotras here.

Read more

For a while I kept telling myself that other people had put me in a box.

That because I wrote a business book for Latinas, that’s all I was allowed to be. The Latina business writer. The one you call when you need a workshop on multicultural entrepreneurship or a panelist who can speak to the “diverse founder experience.”

And I’m not going to lie, I was frustrated about it. I kept saying it like it was something that had been done to me. Like the world had decided who I was and I was just stuck there.

But then I had to get honest with myself. Because nobody was actually keeping me in that box. I was staying in it because it was familiar. Because I’d built real things from that identity. Because it felt safe to keep being the version of myself that had already been validated.

The truth is, that identity is one part of who I am. It’s real and it matters and I’m proud of it. But there is so much more to me, personally and professionally, that I want to share with the world. And I couldn’t do that while I was still protecting an old version of myself that I’d already outgrown.

I had to let it go. Not abandon it. Just stop letting it be the whole story.

I’m telling you this because I keep seeing the same thing with the women I work with.

Someone comes to me with a plan. It’s solid. Makes sense on paper. And usually it involves doing a version of what they’ve already been doing, just packaged differently. Become a coach. Launch a course. Take the thing you’ve been known for and turn it into a business model.

Then something shifts. A book launches. A room opens up they didn’t expect. People start responding to them differently. Not asking how to do the thing, but asking how they think. How they see. How they built what they built.

And the plan that made so much sense three months ago starts to feel too small. Not “dream bigger” small. Small in the sense that it was built on an old version of who they thought they were allowed to be.

So many of us are sitting here right now. First-gen professionals, Latinas, women of color building from lived experience. You’ve done the reflection. You might have even set some Q2 goals. But something still feels stuck.

And I think the reason is that we’re trying to move forward while still holding onto things that were never meant to come with us into this next season.

The thing you’re protecting is often the thing keeping you from what’s next.

An offer that’s been on your website for two years that you haven’t sold in six months. A collaboration that looks good but drains you. A pricing structure you set when you were still unsure if anyone would pay you at all. Or maybe it’s the role itself. The way you describe what you do. The version of your expertise that felt safe because it was familiar, even though your work has already outgrown it.

Those things got you here. And letting go of them can feel like letting go of proof that you made it.

But you don’t need a new goal for Q2. You need to decide what you’re willing to release.

And here’s why this matters right now, specifically.

DEI budgets are shrinking. Publishing is consolidating. The platforms and companies that amplified diverse voices two years ago are pulling back or going quiet. The rooms are getting smaller. The invitations are getting fewer. That is the reality.

Which means the voices that stay, the ones that keep showing up, keep building, keep writing and teaching and creating from lived experience, those are the ones that shape what comes next. If we don’t step into our thought leadership, if we don’t share our stories and our strategies and our hard-won expertise in this climate, who will?

And you can’t step into that if you’re still building around a version of yourself that was trying to stay safe.

So if your Q2 plan feels flat or recycled right now, try this instead.

Ask yourself:

What am I maintaining out of habit, loyalty, or fear, even though it no longer fits where I’m headed?

If I gave myself permission to be the person my work is already pointing me toward, what would I stop doing?

What would I build if I stopped trying to be credible and started building from the fact that I already am?

This is your gentle reminder that in order to make room for what’s actually meant for you, you need to release first <3.

xx,

Ashley

PS: If you want to do this work with support, The Reframe Room is now open. Become a founding member to join us 💕.

Hola Familia,

Can I tell you something I don’t say enough?

I see you.

Not the polished version you bring to the networking event. Not the confident caption you scheduled at 11pm after a hard day. But the version of you who has read every business book, taken every course, sat in every masterclass, and still walked away feeling like something wasn’t quite adding up.

Not because the advice was wrong.

Because it wasn’t written for you.

I see you because I AM you.

We have been doing something exhausting for a long time. Translating. Taking frameworks built for a default that was never us and adapting them to our actual life. Our actual history. The version of entrepreneurship that comes with generational weight, cultural complexity, the specific math of building something when the safety net was never there to begin with.

We became fluent in business content that was never fluent in us - because we didn’t have another option.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, between the podcasts and the courses and the masterminds full of people who didn’t quite get it, I know we have all wondered if maybe the problem was us.

It wasn’t us. It never was.

The frameworks were incomplete. The rooms were wrong. The content was built by people who didn’t have our POV and couldn’t imagine needing it.

I have never been a stranger to saying this out loud.

I am not the first person to notice that most business resources were built for people who are already wealthy, went to business school, and have a network that opens doors before they even knock. And let’s be honest about what else that default looks like. We know. We have always known.

That is why I wrote Jefa in Training, the first entrepreneurial guide book for Latinas. That is why the membership community I built from that movement is still going. Because the gap was real, the need was urgent, and I wasn’t willing to wait for someone else to fill it.

But my work has taken me to new places since then.

Consulting for state vocational rehab programs, building pathways for entrepreneurs with disabilities. Speaking for Latine and women ERGs, helping leaders believe in the power of their uniqueness. Sitting across from people who are brilliant and strategic and deeply committed to building something real, and watching them struggle with the same thing over and over again.

They don’t see themselves in the resources. The podcasts aren’t for them. The strategies feel icky or unsustainable or built for someone with a completely different starting point.

And I kept thinking: we need a bigger room.

Not just for Latinas. For anyone and everyone who doesn’t see themselves represented in the business content that is supposed to serve them. The ones who want strategies that don’t feel gross. That are actually sustainable. That were built with their reality in mind.

We build those here.

In The Reframe Room.

Here is what is inside.

Quarterly masterclasses — real strategy sessions built from the specific reality of building as an underestimated entrepreneur. Not recycled frameworks from someone else’s audience. Some ideas I have for this year: building profitable membership communities, writing thought leadership books to grow your business, trust-based sales strategies - and this is just the beginning. And I promise they will all be the real numbers, the real mistakes, the things I could only learn by having been in these spaces for over ten years.

Ask Ashley drop-in sessions every quarter — bring the question you have been carrying. The one you haven’t known who to ask. We work through it live, in a room full of people who actually understand the terrain. You will not leave with homework. You will leave with clarity.

A new framework, tool, or worksheet every month — something you can put to work the same week. Built for how you actually build, not how the default entrepreneurship playbook thinks you should.

And if you come in as a Reframe Room VIP, the founding members who get in while this is still being built and help shape what it becomes, you get something else entirely.

A 45-minute 1:1 strategy session with me, every year.

Here is what is available.

The Reframe Room — $20/month or $120/year

Reframe Room VIP Founding Member — $199/year (includes your annual 1:1 strategy session, a $130 value)

And through April 30, you get 15% off any annual plan.

My normal rate is $260 an hour. Even at $199 a year, the session alone nearly pays for the whole thing. And as a bonus: you are getting a seat at the table while The Reframe Room is being built.

Founding members have real input on what comes next, the masterclass topics, the tools, the direction. This is not a transaction. It is an invitation to help build something together.

We build differently in here. Sustainably. Strategically. In a way that actually fits your life and the business you are trying to grow.

And we do it together.

You have been sitting at tables that weren’t built for you for long enough.

Come sit at this one.

Join The Reframe Room →

Hope to see you there.

Questions? Reply to this email.

xx,

Ashley

If you’re subscribed to both this and the Awesome Latinas Substack, you already know: Tuesday was pub day. My co-author Mirtle and I are still processing it, honestly. Two years, one pregnancy, and approximately one million late nights went into that book. And last night we were finally able to celebrate here in Portland at Annie Bloom’s Books. The Jefas PDX and ALPFA PDX community showed up along with so many allies, and what happened in that room was nothing short of magical. We talked about the women in the book, the fights they fought, the legacies they left. And we all walked out feeling exactly what I had hoped for: hopeful.

The takeaway that kept coming up, in conversation after conversation, was this: everyone can create impact. And one of the most powerful ways to do it is to share more of your story. Because uno nunca sabe (you never know) what can happen when you do.

That has always been my belief. And it started with my love for music.

Before I was a strategist or an author, I was a songwriter. And if you have ever heard a song that made you feel like the artist crawled inside your brain and wrote down exactly what you couldn’t say, you already understand what I’m talking about. That feeling of being truly seen is why we become ride-or-die fans. Not because someone did a trend or had the best production budget. Because they told the truth and it happened to be our truth too.

I’m a lyric girlie through and through. And I have learned through the years that somehow - business is not so different.

That’s what I brought to Jefa in Training, and to The Reframe, and to years of building content online. I haven’t grow trust by chasing trends. I’ve done it by keeping it real, sharing what’s worked in my business, what hasn’t, and everything in between. And slowly, consistently, the right people found me. Clients came in already trusting me, already feeling like they knew me. My story became the thing that differentiated my consultancy and helped me build a six-figure business.

And I don’t say this to brag. I say it because I know how many of you are sitting on stories you haven’t shared yet, waiting until you have more credentials, more followers, more confidence, more something. And I just want to lovingly tell you: that’s not how it works.

Don’t Wait For The Book

Last night I shared something vulnerable from my own journey. I told the room that last year, when I was pitching a memoir, a literary agent told me something that stopped me in my tracks: don’t wait for the book to start sharing your story. She pointed out that a video of you talking straight to camera on Instagram or TikTok will reach more people than most books ever do. Everyone nodded. A few people smiled like something had just clicked.

And that’s the thing about vulnerability. It’s not a weakness. - in fact, quite the opposite. When you share the real parts of your journey, people don’t think less of you. They trust you more. They feel seen. That is exactly how stories create impact.

Vulnerability is power. It makes people feel seen, and it makes people trust you.

I know it can feel like you don’t know where to start, or that your story isn’t “big” enough, or that someone else has already told it better. None of that is true. But I also know that no amount of me saying that will make the fear go away. The only thing that does is starting anyway.

So here’s where I’d begin: think about the experiences that have most shaped who you are. The ones that changed how you see the world. Then ask yourself why your perspective on this might be different from what someone else would say. That gap is your story. That’s where you start.

It doesn’t have to be a book. It can be a post, a video, a newsletter, a talk. The format is secondary. What matters is deciding that your story is worth telling.

Because here’s what last night reminded me: history is just stories. The women in The Book of Awesome Latinas didn’t just survive their moments in history. They made history. And they did it by refusing to be invisible. Our community is going through something hard right now. People are scared. Joy, visibility, and the reminder that we have always been here, that we have always fought and won, that’s not a small thing.

Your story is part of that legacy too. Uno nunca sabe who is waiting to hear it.

Are you sitting on a story you’re not sure what to do with? I’m building ways to help people use their stories as real business assets: thought leadership strategy, book proposals, and 1:1 sessions to figure out where to start. Hit reply and tell me where you are with it. I’m here to be your thought partner + guide on this journey.

Until next time,

xx

Ashley

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So. 2018. I’m in a hospital bed after a ruptured ovarian cyst, I’m on medication, I’m in real pain. And I am answering emails.

Not because anyone asked me to. Because my nonprofit had just landed a South by Southwest showcase, like, the biggest thing we’d ever done, and I was convinced that if I didn’t respond right then, every single opportunity would disappear. That is what endometriosis-level exhaustion plus first-gen hustle brain looks like in real life: you genuinely cannot tell the difference between an actual emergency and an email that could have waited 48 hours.

I made a really poor judgment call that I had to fix later. Because nobody should be making strategic decisions on painkillers. Lesson learned. Eventually.

I say eventually because this is not one of those stories where someone gets sick, has a big epiphany, and completely transforms overnight. That would be a much shorter essay and honestly a little suspicious. This is the story of someone who had to learn the same lesson multiple times, in multiple ways, before it actually landed.

And if you grew up the way I grew up, you probably already understand why that is.

Some context, because it matters

I started working when I was 12. Babysitting. By 14 I was helping my mom in a coat room and had entered the world of hospitality, where I stayed through college. In college I was working two jobs, interning, and going to school full time. This wasn’t some extreme hustle story. This was just normal. This was what you did.

For a lot of first-gen kids, hustle isn’t a personality trait. It’s a survival strategy that got passed down without a name. Nobody in my world was talking about capacity or bandwidth or work-life balance. You worked, you were grateful for the work, and you kept going. Slowing down was not really presented as an option.

So when the endometriosis symptoms started (digestive issues first, then pelvic pain that would sometimes stop me completely, then a fatigue that was genuinely different from just being tired) I did what I was raised to do.

I kept going.

I went to a lot of doctors who sent me in a lot of directions. It might be gastrointestinal. It might be gynecological. The tests weren’t showing anything clear. Come back in six months. And in the meantime I had a nonprofit to run and a full-time job to hold, so I kept going.

I now know I have both endometriosis and PCOS. But that diagnosis took years. And during those years I was doing a very specific kind of performance at work. The performance of someone who is completely fine, totally managing it, definitely not running everything on fumes and Capricorn ambition (and stubbornness).

There is an invisible tax on that performance. I want to come back to that.

The part where I admit I don’t like being told what to do

Here’s something you should know about me: I have always known I was not made for office life. I’m more creative without rules. I do not love structure that someone else designed for me. And I really do not like being told what to do.

So the universe, with its excellent sense of humor, gave me a chronic illness that started telling me what to do.

And I, a person who does not like being told what to do, did not take this well initially.

After the hospitalization, and then a surgery, and then a car accident that really forced me to stop, I started thinking differently. If I couldn’t sustain a traditional schedule, I needed to build something I could actually survive inside of. And I’d always known, if I’m honest, that I wasn’t meant for the nine-to-five. The endometriosis just made that impossible to keep ignoring.

So I started consulting on the side. The math was straightforward: if I could stabilize my finances enough to step back from a traditional full-time job, I could go to acupuncture at 2pm. I could make the food that kept the inflammation down. I could rest when my body said rest and not only when my PTO allowed it.

It wasn’t a grand vision. It was a survival plan. And honestly, that’s how a lot of us end up here.

The thing nobody tells you when you go out on your own

When I went fully into business for myself six years ago, I thought I’d finally solved it. I was the boss. I set the schedule. Nobody could tell me what to do, including, I apparently still believed, my own body.

And then one of my business advisors said something that stopped me:

“Just because you have forty hours available doesn’t mean you have to fill them.”

I had to sit with that for a while. Because my whole life the equation had been more hours equals more output equals more value equals more security. That’s the math you absorb when you grow up watching the people around you work themselves into the ground just to keep things stable. You don’t question it. You just absorb it and perform it until you start to believe it’s just who you are.

And unlearning that is not a mindset shift. It is a full rewiring. For those of us who started working at 12, who were praised our whole lives for how much we could carry, who learned that love and worth look like availability and sacrifice: it takes more than one lesson to undo.

Good thing my endometriosis was patient enough to give me several.

The second time I had to learn this. Yes, really.

In 2024, I went through infertility treatment. Which, for those who haven’t been through it, is its own full-time job on top of whatever full-time job you already have. I was managing my business, a book launch, and writing another book, while also making my body the first priority. While also not knowing whether any of it was going to work.

And I’ll be honest: it felt unfair. Watching other people just live. Not having to negotiate with their own body before every work week. Not having to build in recovery time because their symptoms might have other plans for Tuesday. That grief is real.

But here’s what was different this time: I had actual evidence. Years of it, in my own body and my own business, that slowing down worked. That treating my body like a partner instead of an obstacle, the acupuncture, the food, the rest, genuinely telling my body out loud that I was grateful for what it was doing even when it wasn’t doing what I wanted, that moved things.

I was fortunate. It paid off. Good pregnancy, healthy baby, and a version of me who had finally, actually, gotten the message.

What six years of building in this body has actually taught me

I know my real capacity now. I can say that with confidence, and for a long time I genuinely could not.

Before I take on anything, I ask myself three things: Will this make me feel good? How much time will it actually take, the real number, not the hopeful one? And will I still be able to protect what keeps me functional: my mental health, my physical health, and now my kid?

If I’m tired, I don’t push through. If I need a nap, I take the nap. If something needs to move, I move it. And I’m not going to pretend that’s easy when you’ve spent your whole life being praised for pushing through.

I also want to be really clear: none of this is passive. I’m not a trust fund baby. I’m not fully supported by my spouse. I still have to make money, more than ever now that I’m also a mother. Knowing what to say no to is not a luxury for me. It is a business-critical skill.

I always say slow and steady wins the race, and I mean it as strategy, not comfort. Time blindness is real. Moving fast is not always the right move. The version of me who thought speed and constant availability were the same thing as value burned out. More than once. And had to rebuild. Also more than once.

The version who started asking “will this make me feel good” before saying yes? She’s still here. Still building.

What I’d tell the version of me answering emails in that hospital bed

Put the phone down. It is not that serious.

You cannot pour into your community, your clients, your mission, your family, any of it, if you are running on empty. That’s not a self-care caption. That’s operational reality. You are the infrastructure. Everything runs through you. You don’t get to neglect the infrastructure and act surprised when things start breaking.

I know the voice in your head sounds like survival, and that voice has kept you going this long so it’s hard to argue with it. I know it feels like people who didn’t grow up the way you did don’t have to prove themselves as hard, and a lot of them don’t, you’re right about that. And I know having endometriosis on top of all of it means you’re fighting a battle nobody else can see while trying to show up like everything is fine.

I carried all of this into motherhood too and had to unlearn it there as well. Because moms, especially those of us who were raised to find our worth in how much we give and how little we ask for, we don’t put ourselves first naturally. And I’ve watched that pattern turn out poorly enough times that I am genuinely, actively working on doing it differently.

The business I have now was built by someone who finally started listening to her body. Not because it was a trend. Because I didn’t have a choice, and then because I realized that making the choice, intentionally, was actually the strategy.

If you’re in the middle of an endometriosis diagnosis, or managing symptoms while trying to build something, or just exhausted from performing okay while your body tells a completely different story, I want you to know that the systems you’re designing around your real capacity are not compromises.

They might be the most sophisticated thing you ever build.

Your body isn’t working against you. It’s been collecting data this whole time. The real question is whether you’re ready to use it.

So tell me in the comments: what has your body been trying to teach you about the way you work?

With love + gratitude,

xx

Ashley

I’ll be honest with you.

For years, I avoided opening QuickBooks until what seemed like the last day of December. Every single year, I told myself it wasn’t going to happen again. And every single year, I found myself sending a frantic message to my accountant: help me, I broke it.

The panic. The shame spiral. The convincing myself I’d deal with it later — until later became an emergency.

I used to think this was a me problem. A discipline problem. A time management problem.

It’s not. And yesterday, during The Jefa in Training Circle’s February Finance Panel, I got to sit down with two of the people I trust most with this — Viridiana Ponce, business consultant and finance expert who has spent 11 years helping Latina women build sustainable and profitable food businesses, and Vanessa Duran, founder of MAGDA (formerly DCC Accounting), who has been supporting founders from pre-revenue all the way to multi-million dollar enterprises for 16 years. What they said confirmed what I’ve been sitting with for a while.

The financial patterns that hold us back aren’t really about money. They’re about something much older than that.

Pattern 1: Avoidance, and the shame cycle it creates

Vanessa named it first, and she named it clearly: avoidance is the number one financial pattern she sees.

But here’s what makes it a pattern instead of just a habit — it compounds. You avoid looking at your numbers once. Then a month passes. Then six. Then you’ve gone a year without real clarity, and now the avoidance isn’t just about the numbers anymore. It’s about the shame of not having looked. The embarrassment of not knowing. The weight of time passing and the story you’ve told yourself about what that means about you as a business owner.

It becomes a vicious cycle: you don’t do it, so you feel shame, so you don’t want to look, so more time passes, so there’s more shame. And on it goes.

The reframe — avoidance is not always coming from where we think it is.

Sometimes it’s trauma. The money scripts we inherited — that money doesn’t grow on trees, that asking for help is weakness, that looking at the numbers means confronting something scary. Those messages get into us early and they don’t leave without intention.

Sometimes it’s an education gap. Nobody taught us this. We were handed a business and expected to figure out accounting, tax law, profit margins, and pricing strategy on top of everything else we were already figuring out. That’s not a character flaw. That’s a systemic gap.

And sometimes — and Viri named this one — it’s capacity. When you’re a solo founder wearing every hat, the things that feel hardest get pushed to last. Finances feel complicated, so they get scheduled for someday. Someday becomes December 23rd.

Knowing why you’re avoiding doesn’t automatically fix it. But it does change the conversation you have with yourself about what it means — and that matters more than people realize.

Pattern 2: Underpricing, and the ripple effects nobody talks about

Viri laid this one out in a way that I want everyone to hear.

Underpricing isn’t just a pricing problem. It’s a whole-body problem.

When you undercharge, you have to overwork just to cover your costs. When you overwork without seeing the results you expected — because the numbers never quite add up — you burn out. When you burn out, your confidence drops. When your confidence drops, you price even lower, because now you have even less to stand on. It’s not just a pricing spiral. It then becomes an identity spiral.

The reasons we underprice are familiar: I’m new. My community can’t afford this. What if they say no? What is the competition charging? Who am I to charge that much?

Every single one of those questions is understandable. And every single one of them is costing us.

Viri’s framework for breaking this: know your costs first. Then do your market research — but don’t let it be the ceiling. Then ask yourself what makes you different, what you do that nobody else does, what your clients are actually paying for when they work with you. Because people will pay for what makes you unique. The job is to communicate it clearly enough that they can.

Pattern 3: The myth of the CEO who knows everything

This one is quieter, but it might be the most damaging (and the one I learned some hard lessons from).

There is an expectation — unspoken, relentless — that if you’re the founder, you should know all of this. You should understand your books, your taxes, your profit margins, your cash flow projections. You built this thing. You should be able to run every part of it.

No. You shouldn’t. And the belief that you should is keeping you from getting the help that would actually move your business forward.

The shift Viri offered: let go of the expectation that you need to be as fluent as a CPA. Replace it with something more honest — I can learn enough to manage my business like a CEO. That means understanding what the numbers are telling you, knowing when something is off, and knowing who to call when you need more than you can see yourself.

This is also where community matters more than people admit. Vanessa said something that resonated: she has been doing this for 16 years and still second-guesses herself before posting a question in a forum. The am I going to look stupid voice doesn’t go away when you get more experienced. It just gets quieter when you have people around you who make it safe to ask.

Which is actually why we hold events like the one this week but connecting. Building the circle of trust that means when you’re stuck at 8am on a Tuesday, there’s someone you can call.

What actually helps: The 3 R’s and a few honest habits

When I asked Viri what habits would make this easier, she offered the most practical framework of the whole conversation. She calls it the three R’s: Register, Review, Reflect.

Register means getting your numbers into a system — whether that’s QuickBooks, Wave, Xero, or a well-organized spreadsheet. The system doesn’t need to be fancy. It needs to exist. The goal is that when money moves, you’re capturing it.

Review means actually looking at the output. Not just your bank balance — your profit and loss statement. The full picture. How much came in? How much went out on what? What’s the pattern over time? Vanessa made the point that clients who meet with her team monthly — even when they don’t want to — come away with something more than organized books. They come away with confidence. The knowing-that-everything-is-fine that trickles into how you show up everywhere else.

I’ll add my own example here: in 2022, I had almost $200 a month going out to software subscriptions I had completely forgotten I was paying for. Trial offers that became autopay that became invisible line items bleeding out of my business for months. A monthly review would have caught that in week two. It took me almost a year.

Reflect is where strategy lives. It’s the step most people never reach because they’re still stuck on Register. But this is where you ask: what led to this incredible sales month? What happened when I tried that experiment? What needs to change? This is CEO work. This is the part that makes all the number-looking actually worth it.

One more thing Vanessa said that I want you to carry with you, especially if you’re in a season of growth:

Budget isn’t a diet. It’s not a restriction. It’s a resource. It’s the document that tells you what you have to work with and where you’re choosing to put it — and it should have your salary on the first line. Not as an afterthought. Not as a when the business can afford it item. You started the business. Pay yourself from the beginning, even if it’s small. It changes your break-even, it changes your pricing, and it changes what you believe you’re building toward.

---

The real question underneath all of this

Everything we talked about in this event comes back to one thing: clarity.

Not perfection. Not a flawless set of books. Not knowing every accounting term or understanding every line of your P&L on day one.

Clarity. Knowing what’s coming in and what’s going out. Knowing what it costs to deliver your work. Knowing what you need to sell each month to cover your life and your business and still have something left. Knowing, as Vanessa put it, that your T’s are crossed and your I’s are dotted — so that when you walk into a room, you walk in with the confidence of someone who isn’t carrying a secret dread about what her numbers might say if she looked.

That confidence, she said, trickles into everything. The way you price. The way you negotiate. The way you speak to your clients, your vendors, your family.

That’s not a finance lesson.

That’s a power lesson.

And that’s exactly what we’re here to reframe.

Watch the full replay:

Connect with this week’s guests

Viridiana Ponce is a business consultant and finance expert specializing in helping Latina entrepreneurs build sustainable, profitable businesses. Learn more about how to work with her on her website.

Vanessa Duran leads MAGDA (formerly DCC Accounting), supporting founders from launch to scale with bookkeeping, tax strategy, and financial planning. Visit https://www.magdafinance.com/ for more info.

This event was hosted by The Jefa in Training Circle (my membership community for Latina entrepreneurs). We are currently accepting applications for new members. Join us?

Not a Latina entrepreneur but feel like other business communities and resources aren’t built for you? Think you could benefit from a strategist and thought partner in your corner? Consider becoming a paid subscriber of The Reframe. Masterclasses, group coaching and more coming soon.

Subscribe now

Until next time,

Ashley

xx

Where has the time gone?! How are we so close to tax-time - AGAIN?!

Ugh.

I know that there’s a particular kind of dread that lives in the bodies of many small business owners when tax season rolls around.

It’s not laziness. It’s not irresponsibility. For a lot of us — especially those of us who grew up in households where money was either scarce, secretive, or both — financial conversations carry weight that has nothing to do with spreadsheets.

We were taught that talking about money was rude. That asking questions about finances meant you didn’t know enough. That the people who really understood this stuff sat behind desks in offices that didn’t feel like they were built for us. And so we learned, early, to either avoid the conversation entirely or to white-knuckle through it alone.

That pattern doesn’t disappear when you start a business. It just gets more expensive.

So let’s try and do something about it, yeah?

Here’s the reframe: knowing your numbers isn’t a bookkeeping task. It’s a power move.

For underestimated founders — first-gen entrepreneurs, immigrant business owners, Latinas building something from nothing — financial clarity is one of the few things that is fully, completely yours. No one can take away what you understand. No policy shift, no funding cut, no system that was never designed with you in mind can touch the knowledge you have about your own business.

We are living through a moment right now where the economic ground is shifting in real time. Access to capital is becoming harder. Immigrant-owned businesses are being targeted. Resources that communities relied on are disappearing. In that context, understanding your finances — really understanding them, not just surviving tax season — is not optional. It is protection.

Knowing what you made. What you owe. What you can deduct. What you should be setting aside. These are not just numbers. They are the foundation that lets you make decisions from clarity instead of fear.

One of the things I’ve noticed in working with entrepreneurs across our community is that the avoidance isn’t about intelligence or capability. It’s about not having had access to conversations that actually spoke to our reality.

The financial advice that exists out there was largely built for someone else. It doesn’t account for the guilt of charging what you’re worth when your family sacrificed so much for less. It doesn’t address the complicated feelings around wealth-building when your community is still surviving. It doesn’t speak to the specific tax realities of the self-employed Latina who is also sending money home, managing inconsistent income, and trying to build something that lasts.

That’s exactly why this event matters.

Tomorrow at 12pm PST/3pm EST, The Jefa in Training Circle is hosting From Receipts to Relief: A Tax Season Prep Panel — a free, one-hour conversation about the money side of running a business, led entirely by Latina leaders who understand not just the numbers, but the cultural context around them.

We made it free because this conversation should be accessible. We made it Latina-led because representation in financial spaces is not a nice-to-have — it’s the whole point. You deserve to ask your questions in a room where the people answering them actually get it.

No jargon. No shame. No pretending this stuff is simple when it isn’t.

Just real talk, from people who get it, for people who are building something real.

Register here — it’s free and it’s today.

And if you can’t make it tonight, still RSVP so that you can get the recording.

I hope that you will join us - let’s do things differently this year <3.

xx,

Your Business Hada Madrina

Ashley

And just when we think the headlines are going to stop pissing us off, here comes another one.

Familia,

I will be transparent and say that I initially read this news while I was in my “disconnect era” , trying to be present during my time in Bulgaria as we brought Bebecito J to meet his dad’s side of the family for the first time.

And as much as I wanted to rage-post this update, I also acknowledged that we all need breaks (so go and take one if you haven’t lately) so here it is.

The Small Business Administration is moving to bar green card holders from applying for SBA small business loans starting on March 1st.

And here are my thoughts.

Limiting the growth of green card holder–owned businesses is a direct attack on people’s livelihoods — and on the collective economic growth of our communities.

Green card holders don’t come to this country to play small. They come to build a better life for their families. They believe in the American Dream because historically, immigrants have been the ones who get the job done (yes, a Hamilton reference — but also because it’s true).

But that dream?
It’s been dead for a while now.

America loves to depend on undocumented workers and green card holders to keep the country running — to staff industries, open businesses, generate revenue, and stabilize local economies — while doing everything possible to deny them real access to power, protection, and capital.

That contradiction is not accidental.
It’s the system working exactly as designed.

These systems were never built to be pro–non-citizen. And at this point, even citizenship doesn’t guarantee safety, access, or dignity - because proximity to whiteness, wealth, and political favor often matter more than contribution.

I’m not surprised by this policy shift. I work directly with this community. I see how often the rules change mid-game. How often immigrant founders are asked to “wait,” to prove themselves again, to accept scraps while being essential.

What I am outraged by is how disposable immigrant entrepreneurs are treated — especially when entrepreneurship itself is political, whether people want to admit it or not.

Access to capital is political.
Who gets to build is political.
Who is allowed to grow without fear is political.

And I will die on that hill.

Because when you limit immigrant entrepreneurship, you’re not protecting the economy.
You’re exploiting it.

So what do we do when the systems fail us?

I won’t pretend this doesn’t feel hopeless. It does.
And bypassing that reality helps no one.

But here’s what I know — especially as someone deeply embedded in these communities:

If you are in the position to support:

• Be intentional about where you spend your money. Support local, immigrant-, and minority-owned businesses consistently, not just symbolically.

• Share their work. Refer them. Hire them. Pay them on time.

• This isn’t charity — it’s circulation. It’s how ecosystems survive.

If you are an immigrant business owner:

• There are still organizations, advocates, and alternative lenders fighting this fight alongside you — even when federal systems shut their doors.

• You are not foolish for continuing to build. And you are not failing if you need help.

• I’m happy to do more research and help direct folks to resources that are still showing up — because community-backed support has always filled the gaps policy leaves behind.

And for all of us:

• Keep building your community. Your safe spaces. Your people.

• Isolation is how this becomes unbearable. Connection is how we stay sane.

• It’s time to bring back community over competition — not as a slogan, but as a survival strategy.

Because no one else is coming to save us.

👉🏽 If you know of funding resources, organizations, legal support, mutual aid networks, or programs that support immigrant and green card holder business owners, reply to this post or comment below.

Let’s make this a living resource list. Let’s share what we know.

Until next time <3

xx

Ashley

It would be a lie to say that the weight of what’s going on in our country hasn’t taken a toll on me. I mean, how could it not? I imagine many of you reading this are wondering the same thing.

How do we possibly move forward when everything feels so heavy?

Not just exhausting. Not just overwhelming.
Heavy in a way that makes your chest tighten every time you scroll through your feed.
Heavy in a way that makes you worry about your people, your parents, your children, your neighbors.
Heavy in a way that makes you question what safety even means anymore.

We shouldn’t have to live like this.

We shouldn’t have to worry about families being detained while seeking healthcare for their child. Or children being stopped while getting off a school bus. Or families being torn apart while simply trying to live, work, and contribute to their communities.

What is happening right now is heartbreaking.

And yet, somehow, I have a small glimmer of hope.

Part of it is because I have a four-month-old and I need to believe that he will not grow up in a world this cruel. But it’s also because I am constantly inspired by the people I get to work with every day.

I see our comunidad breaking barriers.
I see Latinas building economic power, fighting for their communities, showing up in leadership, and creating space where none existed before.
I see people sharing knowledge and telling their stories in ways that move others to keep going.

And it reminds me of something I know to be true:

Our stories matter.
They always have.
And they always will.

Because when you zoom out, this isn’t new.

We have always come up against some shit.
And we have always found a way to persevere.

That belief is at the root of a project that has been living in my heart for a long time. And today, I finally get to share it with you.

I’m so excited to officially reveal the cover of a book I co-authored with journalist and writer Mirtle Peña-Calderón, The Book of Awesome Latinas: From Passionate Pioneers to Unstoppable Innovators.

Mirtle and I actually met because of my first book, Jefa in Training. She profiled me years ago for People en Español / People Chica, and that connection eventually turned into friendship, collaboration, and now this book.

As writers, strategists, and storytellers, we’ve both seen firsthand how stories can change lives. How they can create impact. How they can remind people of who they are when the world is trying to convince them otherwise.

This book is a love letter to past and present Latinas who made history regardless of what stood in their way.

The women on the cover alone tell that story.

They are artists, athletes, activists, writers, scientists, and leaders.
Afro-Latinas. Indigenous women. Immigrants. Daughters of immigrants.
Women who were told no. Women who were erased. Women who refused to disappear.

They are proof that even when systems try to crush us, silence us, or make us feel powerless, we endure.

And more than that, we build.

Right now, it may feel easier to disconnect. To pull back. To numb out from fear or exhaustion.

But this book, and the work that will continue beyond it, is our refusal to believe that our stories no longer matter.

Because stories are a form of resistance.

They remind us that we come from women who fought back in ways big and small. And if they could do that under sometimes far more brutal conditions, then we owe it to them, and to each other, to keep going.

This book is one way we are resisting.

Join us in keeping these stories alive and pre-order your copy today!

And I cannot wait for this book to land in your hands on March 17th, 2026.

Pre-Order The Book Of Awesome Latinas

PS: This is also just the beginning.

An invitation to celebrate with us IRL:

A day for Latinas to reconnect, remember, and rise together - in the heart of Oregon’s Wine Country.

Reconnect with your lineage through the art of shared storytelling.

Find strength in a community that honors your history and your future.

Walk away with the clarity and collective power to move forward.

LEARN MORE HERE - SPOTS ARE LIMITED

And coming soon: Awesome Latinas - The Substack.

A home for Latina stories of resistance, creativity, care, and courage, past and present. Coming to you on February 18th, 2026.

Subscribe + Join The Movement

Because no matter what anyone tries to tell us:

We are not going anywhere.

If this post resonated, please consider sharing it with an awesome Latina who needs it. Our stories travel farther when we let them.

Share

Until next time -

Con todo, menos con miedo,

Ashley xx

Hola familia,

I keep seeing this quote lately:
“In order to have a village, you have to be a villager.”

And now that I’m a mom, it lands in a much more literal way.

I don’t have a lot of family nearby. I have one cousin close to me—an incredible, supportive tía—but she’s not a mom. And sometimes, you just need people who are in the same season. People who don’t need context. People who get it. And I’ve been doing my best to show up for people the way I’d want them to show up for me - slowly and intentionally building my chosen family for this new chapter of my life.

What I didn’t hear nearly enough when I started building my business was this:
you also need community while you’re growing something.

As we kick off year three of The Jefa in Training Circle, I’ve been reflecting on what actually makes a community feel real and why that’s been so rare to experience elsewhere.

Here are five things I’ve learned along the way:

1. People don’t want to feel like a number

A lot of communities grow quickly. And while growth can be exciting, there’s a point where people stop feeling seen and start feeling replaceable.

No one wants to feel like a number.

Inside the Circle, we check on each other just to check in. Not because we need something. Not because there’s an ask attached. But because relationships matter—and we’re building ones that last.

Real community starts with being known.

2. Real community isn’t transactional

One of the most beautiful things I’ve witnessed inside this space is how much people give without expectation.

Members share resources.
They offer time.
They cowork together.
They listen to each other’s challenges and problem-solve side by side.

No one is keeping score.
No one is tracking who’s helped who.

That kind of generosity feels rare and it’s what makes the space feel safe.

3. Being spoken about in rooms you’re not in is a form of care

There’s a specific kind of confidence that comes from knowing your name is being said when you’re not present.

Members hype each other up on social media.
They share opportunities privately.
They refer one another without being asked.

This isn’t networking.
It’s a form of advocacy.

And it changes how people show up and how much they trust themselves.

4. Real community is co-created

I learned early on in my community-building career that in order to keep members around, they need a place where they can evolve, and inevitably means that the membership needs to be allowed to shift gears alongside them.

Our Circle grows and shifts as the members grow and shift. The culture evolves because the people inside it evolve. That’s one of the reasons I’ve kept the community intentionally small—so there’s room to adapt, listen, and respond in real time.

Real community isn’t something you micro-manage. It’s something you tend together.

5. Strong foundations matter more than fast growth

We’ve taken our time building this.

Now we have a solid foundation and a small-but-mighty team supporting the work. That’s why this year feels different- more grounded, more spacious, more ready.

And that’s why I’m hopeful that more mujeres who need this kind of space will find us now.

So to all of my jefas reading this - know that our doors are open and we are ready to welcome you with open arms.

This space is for the Latinas who are building legacy businesses, want to write books and speak on stages, care about creating impact with our work and want to make money while doing it.

The Jefa in Training Circle is for the first-gen Latinas who crave real connection, eldest daughter jefas looking for a thought partner, las que piensan en Spanglish who want to pave their own paths and las chingonas who have sisterhood + strategy on their vision boards this year.

We can’t wait to meet you.

LEARN MORE ABOUT JOINING US

xx,

Ashley

PS: Pricing is going up at the end of the month, so get those applications in before January 28th.