Your business is trying to tell you something but…
You’re Too Close To See It.
Your business is trying to tell you something but…
You get inklings, hunches & gut punches. They’re coming from inside the business.
Ideas you’ve been thinking about but can’t quite finalize. Clients you’ve outgrown still getting your best hours. An offer you’re unsure about. Wanting to redesign something that’s working. Needing a bigger umbrella than the title on your LinkedIn. Doing the same things because you’re good at them. Still playing it safe.
Maybe you haven’t said any of this out loud in a way that feels complete. But it’s there. (Usually between 2-3am.)
It’s your business picking up on something before you have language for it.
Sometimes it’s a warning. More often it’s the next good idea showing up early — and the longer you manage it like a problem, the more likely you miss it.
It doesn’t mean you need to shut something down. Launch something new. Blow anything up. (Not yet, anyway.)
No rehearsed line about being slammed. No steering the conversation toward the one client you still love. Just the truth: you’re doing the work you’re best at, it pays the way it should, and you’d build it this way again. (Plenty of people post that. You’d be the one who means it.)
Move too fast and you make an expensive decision based on a feeling you haven’t understood yet. You change the wrong thing — or the right thing in the wrong direction.
Wait too long and the inkling becomes a pattern you’re living inside of. The energy drains. The resentment builds. What started as useful information becomes something you can no longer read clearly.
The numbers look fine. You’ve stopped opening the dashboard.
Your calendar is full of yeses you wouldn’t give today.
You’re making more money than ever… and secretly hoping someone cancels their discovery call.
Programs hand you a model. Coaches hand you the one that worked for them. The feed shows you everyone else’s working. None of them were built for the one you have now. It matched what you’re good at with what pays and what matters, for years. Then you evolved, and the business didn’t keep up with you. That part was never supposed to come with a playbook.
Every one of them worked from what you told it.
You can’t hear what you’re not saying. Or asking. The assumption you’ve stopped questioning. The move that’s native to how you operate that you’ve talked yourself out of. The thing that’s been sitting right there the whole time — invisible to you, obvious to someone who isn’t carrying your history.
You’re too close to see the bird’s-eye view of what you’ve been building all along. Everyone is. You can’t see the back of your own head without a second mirror, and your business is no different.
Those aren’t rhetorical. Your business keeps asking them.
The inkling is yours. What I read is how you respond to it: the pause, the joke, the quick change of subject, the things you say that don’t even register with you. After 24 years of asking founders questions about their own businesses, I’ve seen where most of those responses lead.
So why does the inkling persist, while you grab at a little of everything, not sure where your energy should go?
So do I.
Finding it takes questions. Knowing what it means for your business takes someone who’s built, sold and redesigned a few herself.
Miss it, and you build around the wrong problem. A sharper offer for the clients you’d rather lose. A growth plan for a business you’re not sure you want to grow. A launch that fixes the boredom for 3-6 months.
Another lap around it in your own head won’t find it either.
It’s fast. It’s useful. And it only works with what you ask of it. (Nobody types the tangents you go on in real life… which are gold in my world.)
Wharton researchers asked people to invent a toy using a brick and a fan. Nine people using ChatGPT named theirs “Build-a-Breeze Castle.” Every idea from the people working without it was different.
The more founders lean on the same tools, the more their next moves look alike. What makes yours different comes out in conversation. You couldn’t prompt an AI into finding it.
A 90-minute read on what your business is trying to tell you — and what to do about it.
90 min · live on Zoom · written brief in 48 hrsIt comes out through the conversation — through the questions, through what slips out between the things you say. I catch it. Then I hand it back.
We start with a 90-minute private Zoom call — cameras on. It’s structured, with two proprietary tools, Founder’s Five™ and The Simplifier™, running underneath the conversation. A written brief follows within 48 hours.
01 The Founder’s Five™Covers the five core pillars of your business. We run through it live together at the start of the session, as a lens, never a quiz. Fifteen minutes in, it tells us which pillar is carrying the weight right now — and which one you’ve been treating as the problem when it isn’t.
02 The Simplifier™Maps your ecosystem: every offer, every platform, every funnel — and what’s connected to what. We don’t always go through all of it. Where we focus depends on what you bring to the session. Most founders find one connection they didn’t know was there — two offers propping each other up or working against each other.
03 The Written BriefDelivered within 48 hours of our session. What I heard, what I see, and what I think you should do next — written up and yours to keep. A read, not a summary.
By the end of THE TELL, you’ll know:
What your business has been trying to tell you, named in writing within 48 hours. Then the no’s get easy. Nope, passing on that. Yes, more of this.
In a mastermind, you get feedback from people who are also in it — smart, well-meaning, working from the same information you gave them. THE TELL comes from outside your story entirely.
“How do I sell more of these experience tours I’ve been doing in NYC?”
A sales question. That’s how some inklings show up.
The tours aren’t a marketing problem.
They’re her asset.
They’re her entrée to Paris, with a foot still in NYC. She can build them into a repeatable business and have something to eventually sell, license, or simply leave — when she’s ready.
“Help me pressure test the new membership model I created in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program.”
A business model question. That’s how other inklings show up.
Thirty minutes in, Denise shared a side story about skipping a family trip to Disney when she was nine. To her, it was just a tangent.
I followed the scent. Turns out it was because she wanted to keep working on a Jerry’s Kids charity carnival that wasn’t perfect yet. When I asked whether that nine-year-old’s tinkering had made its way into her business, she gasped. Deep down she already knew — but had never connected a carnival from forty years ago to a business idea she was still refining.
Her business model wasn’t the problem.
The tinkering was.
“Getting to the ‘tinkering’ insight so quickly was magic.”
— DeniseCarolyn saw what I just could not see on my own.
Carolyn solved a problem that had been plaguing me for years. To say she has X-ray vision is an understatement. She has a way of seeing what you cannot see. She saw my blind spot — even though I do this kind of problem-solving with people myself.
Beth Grant
Marketing Strategist
One session and my year-long struggle is over.
Suddenly everything falls into place. If you want a high-level thought partner who really knows how to build a business and listens to your unique needs, hire Carolyn.
Nika Stewart
CEO, Streambank Media
It was like literal magic.
I was like, ‘Okay here’s the thing that’s not going to happen’ — and then that thing happened. It was like literal magic to have a new thing come out all ‘Oh here I am, I’ve been waiting.’
Kristen Kalp
Entrepreneur
Built it. Made it pay. Noticed the inkling and didn’t look away.
The business pays for the life you wanted. And you’re still reading this.
Twenty-four years ago, I left my cushy corporate gig at Oracle to spend seven years as a franchisee — inside someone else’s model, learning what actually drives a business. Even wrote a book on how to buy a franchise — because choosing the right business model is everything. Played a hand in the launch of over 100 businesses. Created a sales training program for founders who package and sell their expertise. Ran 26 cohorts of a business accelerator I built from scratch — one clients still draw on years later. Conducted thousands of one-on-one strategy sessions with hundreds of founders. Co-founded Impostor Syndrome Institute and grew our client base into 27 countries. And my BEYOND private strategy clients? They average an 11x ROI.
Put together, it’s a long view of how businesses make money and how founders make decisions (including my own) — their tells, their blind spots, the thing they say quickly like they want to get past it.
I work with founders who’ve built real businesses on original thinking and now feel the weight of a question they can’t quite answer from inside. Starting, building, redesigning, exiting: I work on all four.
My focus: what’s worth protecting, what’s run its course, and where the next opportunity is hiding.For years I folded this read into much bigger engagements. Then I noticed everyone needs it first.
THE TELL is where I point all of that at your business.She still couldn’t see her own blind spot. If I’m not the right fit for what you bring, I’ll say so.
To find the thing that’s been eluding you long enough that you’re done trying to figure it out alone.
At the rates you charge, is waiting it out worth the tradeoff?One week spent executing on something that’s almost right will cost you more than the $1,500. (Do the math on your day rate.)
Fifteen minutes in, the Founder’s Five shows you where to look. If it doesn’t, say so. I’ll refund you in full and we’ll end the call there.
What if I don’t know exactly what’s wrong?
Good — that’s almost the point. Come with the thing that’s been sitting heaviest. The read does the work.
Do I need to prepare anything?
No. Come as you are. Verbal processors are especially welcome.
What if I’m not ready to change anything?
Also fine. THE TELL commits you to seeing what’s there. Changing anything is a separate decision, and it’s yours.
What if I already know what I want to do?
Then THE TELL pressure-tests it before you act. More than once, what a founder was certain about turned out to be a symptom of the real thing — not the thing itself.
How do I know you’re the right person?
24 years, hundreds of founders, an 11x average ROI for BEYOND clients. And if fifteen minutes in it isn’t working, the guarantee covers you.
Is this worth $1,500 if I don’t move into BEYOND?
Yes. You leave with the read and the brief, and both are yours whether or not we work together again. For most people, the not-knowing is what’s been costing the most. The $1,500 is for that. BEYOND is separate.
Fewer, if someone books before you.
Some founders take the brief and run with it. Others want a partner for the build. That’s BEYOND: 90 days designing and implementing the next version of your business around what THE TELL found.
Yes works. No works.
Leaving it in the Business Ideas note doesn’t.
$1,500 Includes 90-minute live Zoom session + written brief within 48 hours Book THE TELL >>Covered by the 15-minute guarantee.