Description

Episode 69 - SOLO - When the Thing You Built Falls Apart
Hosted by Katelyn Calhoun

What do you do when the thing you built your whole identity around falls apart?

The burnout series officially starts today, and I'm going first. This is my most recent story of burnout. I say "most recent" on purpose, because I'm a full-throttle kind of person and I'm not going to pretend it won't happen again. It's the story of Teardrop Pictures, the business I started in 2016 and poured everything into, and the season where I tried to grow it faster than it could hold.

This one's a little heavier. I talk about chasing a seven-figure business on a timeline I picked up from a podcast, assembling a team I'm still proud of, and then having to let them go. But mostly it's about the moment when nothing fit anymore and I had no idea what to do next... and the fact that I kept waking up anyway.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Building my business one coffee chat at a time in Indianapolis
• The 2020 online business boom, and getting caught between two very different "this is how it's done" worlds
• Setting a seven-figures-in-three-years goal that my actual numbers never supported
• Having three coaches at once (and why more input isn't the same as more progress)
• The magic of a first hire who was chasing down unpaid invoices by week two
• Hiring three people in under six months, and a business that wasn't built to carry that weight
• Letting go of all three in the summer of 2023
• Six figures of debt, a lost of most the business income, and the question of how you even begin to rebuild

A few moments that stood out:

• Realizing I was doing to my business exactly what diet culture had me doing in my twenties: trying to follow every rule at once
• Twenty-seven people applied to work for something I built. I'm still proud of that, even knowing how it ended.
• The week I let my team go, my power went out for almost a week. A text that said "I just want you to have your power back" landed in a way the sender never intended.
• Feeling like years of good work and relationships had been erased by a few months of falling apart

If you're in your own valley right now, or you've been in one and never quite said it out loud, I hope this one keeps you company. You don't have to know the whole way out. You just have to keep waking up and trying.

Next week, I'm sitting down with a mentor of mine to talk about her own business stories, and how this is a season so many of us move through.

P.S. If your videos are stuck in your camera roll, head over to @calhounedits for quick editing tutorials, or book a free 30-minute consult here:[link]

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