Business Growth Is Personal: The People Who Become Part of the Story

A commitment to show up and write my truth | Day 258 of 365

Today was Joy's first day with us.

She's sweet and experienced, ready to work, and she came in with the kind of energy that makes you hopeful about everything you might build together. I already find myself wanting this to be the start of something long.

But welcoming someone new has a way of pulling you backward, too. It took me straight back to the person who was there when this whole thing was brand new.

I thought about Anne.

Anne was our first assistant. She joined us back when we were making it up as we went, which is a nicer way of saying we were drawing the map while the car was already moving.

She stayed with us for about eight months, but somewhere in there she stopped being just an assistant and became part of the family. Anne was warm and endlessly grateful, the kind of person who noticed not just the work but the human being doing it.

She watched my daughter grow from the time she was tiny. On the days motherhood felt impossibly hard, Anne would remind me to slow down, because it all moves faster than you think. I believed her then. Now, watching my daughter get bigger every time I blink, I believe her completely.

When Anne left, there were circumstances around her hours and a painful miscommunication with the company we'd hired her through. I'm not going to get into the details. They aren't really the point of this story.

The point is that we cried. All three of us, actually, because my daughter cried too.

It wasn't just the end of a work arrangement. It was someone who'd been present for a real chapter of our lives no longer being part of our days the same way. We loved her. We still do.

So when an agency placed Kay with us next, I braced myself a little. Would it feel the same? Would she feel like she was stepping into somebody else's shoes, trying to fill a space that wasn't quite hers?

It didn't feel the same. It became its own thing, and a good one.

Kay is still with us, and she has been incredible. She's spearheaded processes, kept track of more moving pieces than I could ever list, and learned to pivot every time the business shifts direction, which during a growth phase is roughly every twelve minutes. She didn't replace Anne. People don't work that way. She showed up with her own strengths, built her own relationship with all of us, and became essential to whatever we're building next. Honestly, I couldn't do this without her.

The Human Side of Business Growth

People love saying "business is business," like those three words scrub the humans right out of it.

They don't.

Yes, a business needs structure. It needs clear expectations, boundaries, and decisions that aren't always easy. Costs and profit matter, because a company has to stay healthy enough to support the people who rely on it for a living.

But people come first, because people are the reason any of it works at all.

When I talk about treating employees like family, I don't mean the hollow version companies trot out right before asking everyone to sacrifice their weekends for the mission. I mean something much simpler: real relationships form when people build something side by side. They see each other through the hard weeks. They notice when someone's struggling before anyone says a word. They catch what got missed, calm the chaos, and pour their energy into a vision that used to live only in one person's head.

That deserves respect. It deserves patience and gratitude, and being treated like it matters. Because it does.

Investing in people isn't separate from growing a business. It is the business. A company that only tracks cost and profit misses the very thing that made its success possible in the first place: the judgment, the care, and the quiet effort of the people showing up every day.

Today I'm grateful for Joy, who's just getting started. I'm grateful for Kay, who came after Anne and still carries so much of this with me. And I still feel something soft and unresolved when I think about Anne, who helped build the foundation and became part of our story doing it.

None of those feelings cancels out the others.

I still hope there's a place for Anne to come back to someday. Until then, what she gave us is still here, woven into everything we built after her.

Maybe that's the truest thing about business growth: it might start as one person's vision, but the story never stays that small. It ends up belonging, at least in part, to every single person who helped make it real.

About the Author

I'm a soul-led coach, entrepreneur, mother, and recovering perfectionist, currently navigating healing, uncertainty, temporary chapters, motherhood, work, big transitions, grief, nervous system healing, overstimulation, emotional growth, and the ongoing lesson that life works a whole lot better when we stop trying to carry everything alone. Today that lesson looked like welcoming someone new while still holding a soft spot for someone who came before her, and realizing I don't have to choose between the two.

Day 258 of 365. Still building. Still grateful. Still believing people come first. 🐧