After a much-needed pause, I’m back with a series of episodes that dive deep into the current shifts in digital marketing and the entrepreneurial landscape.

Today I’ll be sharing personal lessons and insights from my journey, including a recent period where I stepped away from the day-to-day operations of my business and faced unexpected challenges.

From navigating team dynamics to dealing with burnout, I’m here to offer transparency and connect over the real struggles and triumphs of entrepreneurship.

I’m excited to share this one with you, so let’s get started!

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. It has been a little while. I have missed it definitely and I’m really grateful for the pause and excited to be back. I am coming back this week with a series and I’m not titling the series. I’m just going to drop four really great episodes this week that gives you some behind the scenes, and teach you some lessons that I’ve learned and also really digs deep into the current state of business for most, if not all entrepreneurs and what they’re experiencing right now and digital marketing. um It’s not just me saying this. I’ve seen other leading marketing experts in the space say, We are in a whole new era. We are in probably one of the biggest shifts that has hit digital marketing and marketing your business online in the last 10 years. And so I want to speak to that. And I think that that shift is causing a lot of entrepreneurs to feel this deep need or desire or pull to pivot parts of their business or their marketing strategy. 

So before I dive into some of that today, I want to give you guys just a little bit of behind the scenes. I had put on my Instagram a couple months ago when I’m ready that I will share some things and it’s such a dance knowing you know what’s too much to share while also one of my core values is to show up authentically, vulnerably, transparently. I never want to walk this path of being an entrepreneur and a business owner and pretend like everything is easy and fine all the time. I think that it’s very easy to put people who are quote more successful than you on a pedestal and make yourself feel like when something goes wrong or you feel off or you know, something doesn’t work out that it’s just you. And unfortunately, I think that a lot of  successful entrepreneurs out there don’t share the downsides, the hard parts, the dark seasons.

But they’re there. They’re there for all of us. And there’s so much power and so many lessons in them that to be honest with you, I’m so grateful for them. Whenever I go through a rougher season, in the moment, it really sucks and you know I struggle with parts of it, but I never waver in knowing that the other side of this is going to be so much better. I know that every single time. And there’s this song I found two months ago that it’s called Empowerment. I think by face soul and like half the song is talking. It’s like a message in it and it talks about how we cannot have light without the darkness. We cannot have the good without the struggle and that literally that is what life is about. It’s about this constant ebb and flow through seasons of struggle and challenge and discomfort to get to the other side which typically means you’ve changed your beliefs you’ve up leveled as a person you’ve grown like to me that’s what life’s about that’s wisdom right that we can only gain from embodied experiences. 

It’s why when you speak to people who are in their 80s and their 90s and they have all this wisdom, they’ve lived life. They’ve lived all the seasons, all the spectrums, all the experiences, and they have learned from them. and It’s a learning that can only happen through an experience. You can’t read about it. Somebody can’t tell you about it. yeah Nobody else can teach you but yourself. and unfortunately, but fortunately that’s how we are designed as humans is like we can only learn through experience to the level that we need. And a lot of times that means we mess up, we make mistakes, we make decisions we’re not proud of, we show up in a way we’re not proud of and we learn from it so we can do better next time. And when you’re an entrepreneur, I feel you’re on a fast track path of this because in order for you to have the next level of your business, you have to literally constantly rebirth yourself.

You have to become a new version of yourself so many times. I have almost been an entrepreneur for 10 years now. Actually, should I take that back? I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was like eight years old, seven years old, but this business, almost 10 years, the business that has evolved from me being a virtual assistant to marketing, to my agency, to what it is today. And I think that that’s part of what I’ve gone through is a massive ending of a big chapter and beginning of a new one. I have kids who are now my my youngest is four and a half. So from the age of 20 when I had my first to in the last maybe year to year and a half, I’ve been raising babies. I’ve been breastfeeding up in the night like the way that we parent very attachment parenting very much me being there and not having the freedoms that I maybe had before but I was also 20 when I had a kid. So I didn’t really have the opportunity and this is the way I believe God designed it and I have i no regrets and and no no wishes that it was different but the reality is my life journey has been from a very young age thrown into providing, caring for children, running a business, having employees.

Having it all together and really a lot of fight or flight and show up even when you’re not okay. And over the last year, about a year, that has unraveled, right? And I’ve realized and started to sit with way deeper questions of, wait, who am I when I take away mom, when I take away entrepreneur? Who is Emily because I never really had the opportunity to figure that out and I think we’re all on a journey that never stops figuring that out and also What am I what do I want to do the next 10 years not just do who do I want to be? What’s the impact I want to have? I’m turning 30 in two months and some of my more woo friends tell me that there’s something called a Saturn return from the ages of like 28 and a half to 30 ish. And basically your whole life kind of not falls apart. Some people say that. But everything changes and a lot of people go through really big life shifts at this time in their life to kind of step into the next big decade, big season and I think it happens again around like 50 or something. So I think I’m in that. I think I’ve been in that the last year and I’ve just been in a place where I have sat and questioned everything. I have questioned my relationships. I’ve questioned what I want to do in my business. I’ve questioned the impact I want to have. I’ve questioned.

Am I where I wanted to be? Like that’s actually been a big one and it’s not hard for me to say that, but I feel that it’s, it’s like, yes, I have so much. I’ve built a multimillion dollar company. I have a dream life. I have so many things that I’m so grateful for, but also I’m like, I’m turning 30 and I don’t know, maybe part of me thought I was going to be even farther than I am right now, which I know sounds silly. Like those of you who are older than me are gonna be rolling your eyes, but that’s the thoughts I’ve been having and so I think this is just all contributed to a season of it like uncertainty questioning loneliness sometimes, yeah, but I wanted to share a couple of things because I don’t know. I, again, I want to always walk the path of transparency. And I feel that, you know, some of you have been here for all 650 plus episodes of my podcast. And that is the most incredible and beautiful and honoring like I’m so honored by that thing possible. So I Want to share a little bit of kind of what I went through Now that I feel pretty much on the other side of it because there are lessons in it and I think it also just creates that connection to me that you can you can you can understand what was happening behind the scenes so i In February, if you have followed, I took the whole month off, which was amazing. And I ended up taking two months off of social media, so February and March. And in February, I stepped very much out of my business. I was obviously still there and still speaking to my leaders who directly report to me, providing feedback, like guidance, but I stepped fully, fully out of the day-to-day. I took myself out of our Slack channel. I didn’t I stopped going to our daily huddles and just really stepped out of the day-to-day, which was very positive for me. It gave me a lot of space. 

It gave me a lot of room for creativity. And it definitely allowed me to step more into my impact that I want to have around retreats, my mastermind and the coaching because I love that. It fulfills me so much. However, there are definitely gaps that happened from that. And I have talked about this before, but anything and everything in business has a delayed reaction. So it is kind of timed perfectly that about 93 to four months after I did that, the gaps started to show themselves because they didn’t at first. It was like, this is all amazing and there’s no problems and everything’s running great. And so it took about until, I don’t know, probably June to the end of May until anything was starting to show itself as a gap. And I have also been very focused but struggled with building my leadership team. So the team that directly reports to me has been a big priority, but I have struggled with having that be where I need it to be for me to really be able to step out of the day-to-day and have leaders in my place because everything’s the top down in business.

So come, oh, I think it was June, there started to be clear indications that there were gaps in the business and there were gaps in our delivery. There were things in my marketing that I wanted to have moved faster or weren’t being looked at how I would look at them. And it felt like all at once everything was breaking. Like it felt like, oh my gosh, I have been removed from the business and I have been enjoying all of this extra capacity and space and white space and time. And now all at once I need to come back into our delivery, our marketing, our sales, like all of it. And at the same time, I was feeling defeated because I’m like, but wait, I built it so that I didn’t have to do that. you know and now it’s like three steps forward and two steps back kind of feeling.

And, you know, I think that this is a lesson because that’s a natural thing to have happened because now you come back in and I did, I came back into Slack. I’ve been back in since June. So I came back to Slack. I came back into the day today. I’ve been on client calls. I have been back like overhauling everything and getting it back to my standards, our onboarding, our reporting, our marketing strategy. I’m going to talk a little bit more about my marketing strategy on a later episode. But since basically I got back from Alaska in the middle of June, I have been back in the weeds of my business rebuilding much stronger. And this has happened to me now multiple times. So this is a lesson for you if you’re building a team. When you remove yourself from the business, without a negative intention, sometimes there are people on your team who have an idea on how to improve something. And it’s a good idea, but your team for the most part, is always going to have a limited perspective around that because you have the perspective of all the years. I have a decade of experience and knowing we’ve tried that before and that didn’t work. We’ve done that before and that didn’t work. We changed it because it needed to be changed because of XYZ reasons. 

And now twice this has happened to me where there’s somebody on the team with good intentions who overtime changes everything. For us, it’s like the reporting, the way that we’re you know tasking out different things for clients. like All of our internal operations get shifted, let’s say like 20 degrees from where they were. Well, over time, that’s going to become a problem. And so when I came back in, I was like, Oh my gosh, we have to go back to all this stuff, how I had it, like how I know that it needs to be because I have the experience and the wisdom from the last 10 years that this is how we need to do it. So it was frustrating. Honestly, it was frustrating, but it was a lesson that I clearly needed to learn. At the same time as feeling like at one time everything was breaking, I had a situation come up that I’m going to just share because you know what, when you grow a team, when you grow a team,

And if you want to have a company with a lot of employees and you want them to run things, which I am so grateful for every single day, I truly have the most incredible team. We have such high standards. One thing that we really have worked on the last two years is our hiring process. So bringing people into the team and going slowly in that process has really paid off. But I had somebody on my team who Basically this this whole situation happened and part like how do I share this in a good way? Somebody on my team who is I am not sure exactly what was happening, but it was either dealing with bipolar disorder or I don’t know, something. And it blew up on me from like, like in two days, team members, like having meetings about stuff. And it was like, it was complete chaos at for two days because of an individual who the best way I could say it is went crazy. And I’ve never experienced something like that before. And I send them so much love and hope that they have gotten some help. But for me, it was like so hard. 

And at the same time that that happened, my right hand for the last four years because of how the team responded internally and like basically all this unnecessary drama that happened decided to resign that day with no notice. And that was probably one of the lowest days for me because if you’ve experienced this in your and your company, you know, like the person that is your right hand for years and years, they’re like a best friend. It feels like you’re married. You talk to them all the time and you get into a place where you’re like, I don’t know how I’m gonna do this without them. And I don’t wanna do this without them. And you know now I can sit here and 100% with so much confidence say it was for the best for both of us. It was time. I was very blind to some gaps, not because of anybody doing anything wrong, but just personalities. I adored my right hand and she was very much like me.A visionary very much wanted to have the role of being removed and being a visionary and having a bunch of white space, but she was in an operations role ahead of the operations of our ads team. And so I never would have ended the relationship because I loved her so much. 

She worked so hard, but it wasn’t actually the right fit. And it was actually causing a lot of issues in the company because I needed someone who wasn’t like me in that role. I needed a super operational minded Person and I and I could not see it and it’s like one of those complicated experiences where you look back and you’re like it was so obvious and I should have probably made the shift for both of us a year or more ago, but I couldn’t see it. And now, you know again, it’s like thank you for the hard seasons because they have brought me here. Since then, I’ve replaced the role with an incredible, incredible person who has corporate operational experience way more than I have. like i I love hiring people who are wiser, older, more experienced than me because they can they can take that piece and so i’ve replaced our head of the ads team she’s been on the team for now six seven weeks so i’ve gone through the training she’s all on board and she’s meeting clients like it’s been amazing but i had to get in the weeds.

And it was hard. And when that person on my team left who I adored, I loved, like truly she’d stayed at my house. Like we had a friendship, a deep friendship. I got on our team call and I had to tell the whole team, you know, this is what happened. and then from there, it felt like I had to take it on all on my own. Like I had to fix it because my right hand left. And I want to say I have other incredible people on my team who did support me so I did have that help but I didn’t have the person who would have stepped in and handled the things that needed to be handled was now gone so it was like everything is breaking. You now don’t have your support and you have no other option but to go figure all this out and fix all this. And it was challenging you guys. Like I, it was dark because, you know, as a CEO, as an entrepreneur and as the breadwinner of my family, I think that’s an important thing to note because I know there are entrepreneurs out there who can walk away from their business. I have friends who have done that, who have been like, we’re set financially. We don’t have to be doing this. We’re going to take a year off. I don’t have that luxury in my current life. 

I am the breadwinner of our family. And so I’m responsible for that and I’m responsible for all of my employees and making sure everyone gets paid and everything runs. And so when this individual resigned, it was like, man, I wish I could fill out my fucking resignation letter and walk away too. That’s how I felt that day. And I just cried. Like I was just like, I was like, did you know, what did I do wrong? I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this and that’s the reality of being a CEO is, yeah and we trade it for the most amazing freedom and the most amazing opportunities, but we don’t have the luxury to walk away and go get another job. We always, the CEO, the founder, is always the last stop who has to pull up their sleeves and get it done. And that’s what I did. And it was freaking hard. And at the same time, you know having to create content and show up, I was like, I can’t. I can’t show up and pretend everything is fine. When I’m in the weeds of the weeds, rolling up my sleeves and doing what has to get done to improve all of this and fix all of this. And I’m not going to show up and pretend everything’s fine. And it’s also not appropriate for me to share the behind the scenes yet. So I’m going to pause. And I just was not feeling inspired.

It’s hard to force inspiration. And so we were going to go on a, we went on a two week family trip. It was incredible. And I was like, I’m not, report I’m not recording the podcast while I’m on the trip. Like I’m done. I’m going to take a break. And honestly that speaks volumes because and the me a year, two years ago, I would have been like, no, you have to force it. Pretend you’re fine, come up with something anyways and show up because that’s what you need to do to cross it off the box to never miss a podcast day. You know, because now I can’t say, oh, I’ve done 650 episodes and I’ve never missed a day. Okay. Who fucking cares? Like who cares?

Would you rather take a month off and then come back even stronger and more authentic and with true passion? Or would you rather just do it because you have to cross it off a box? And yes, consistency is important. And showing up when you don’t want to can be important. But also, it has to be authentic. And I was not capable of coming on here and showing up authentically when I was going through everything I was going through. And we basically stopped signing new clients for a little while where we would delay their start.

And I went deep, deep into everything. I rehired people. I trained them myself. We went through every single process in our delivery and made sure it was where it needed to be. I am back, you know, meeting with my team, I’m back in Slack, like, and and that’s going to phase out a little bit now that I have brought more people in and it’s way stronger, but it was not easy. So I share that to say, no matter what level you’re at, it probably just gets crazier from here. Like the people management part of business is really not fun because you are just dealing with a lot of people who all have their own thing. And it’s some days and some weeks, it feels like that’s all I do. But it’s worth it for the positives. So I wanted to share that. And I wanted to share that if you are in a season or you have been in a season or you find yourself in a season where you feel alone, you feel defeated, you feel like you’ve taken multiple steps backwards, you feel like the weight of the world is on you. That’s how I felt. I would go to bed at night and I would just be like crying or on the verge of crying but I’m also not really good at sharing that with people so I would hold it all in and I felt like the weight of the world was on me. 

Like you’ve got to fix all this, you’ve got to find new people, you’ve got to train them and the only person who can do it is you and you’ve got to hold it together because everybody was looking to me about what to do. Like when that was happening on our team and we had that week, the brutal week of so much unnecessary drama because of an individual, everybody’s looking at me. What do we do? And I’m like, I don’t know. Give me a second. But if you’ve ever gone through that, you’re not alone. And the only thing you can do is take it one day at a time, not put too much meaning into what this means for your future or months from now or a year from now or what you’re capable of. Because one day at a time, it’s like one step at a time, chip away, you will eventually get to the other side. You will eventually see the light. And, you know, I just do not think that enough entrepreneurs talk about this because yes, I am all for ease. I am all for alignment. I am all for creating the life of your dreams, but there are still some times that there are seasons where you’re going to have to face challenges. You’re going to have to be extremely uncomfortable. You’re going to feel like you don’t want to do things. You’re going to feel alone and you’re going to go through that dark season and it’s temporary.

And we learn our greatest lessons in those seasons and you will come out the other side and then you will look back and you’ll be like, oh, I did it and everything is fine now. And in the moment it feels so awful, but you will come out the other side. And that is just a part of business. It’s a part of doing hard things. It’s a part of having a life that you choose to play this game of constantly moving up to the next level which is business and with each level comes the shedding and the facing of the challenges which are uncomfortable and that’s the reality and we choose it. That’s the other thing is I found myself in some moments stepping into the role of a victim and going this is happening to me and you know this individual left me and I thought they cared about me and I’m resentful to my team or whatever would come up and it’s like no. The most empowering thing to realize is you get to change the reality yourself. And the longer you stay in a mode where you’re trying to blame circumstances, blame other people, blame the economy, or even blame yourself in saying, oh, I fucked up here and so that’s why blah, blah, blah, you will not get to the other side. The moment you say, okay. This is my reality. I’m going to accept that this is my reality. And then I’m going to do what is required to move to the next level. And I’m going to take full accountability in what I can control and I can do to get us through this season. And I’m going to recognize that ultimately at the end of the day, it does fall on me, which can feel challenging and isolating. It also is so empowering because if I don’t like something or something isn’t working or there is an issue, I get to be the solution. I get to find the solution. I am in full control. I am fully empowered. 

And when you can get into that moment, you start to see the light because now you’re not sitting in this place of like, I don’t have any power and all these things are happening and I must be doing something wrong. And you’re like, no, this is just the way it is. I’m going to acknowledge it. I see, I see myself. I see what you’re going through. And we’re going to pick ourselves up and we’re going to get to the other side because we’re a leader. We chose this path. We chose this game and we like the benefits of this game enough to do this. Okay. So that’s what I wanted to share with you guys today, uh, just to give you that insider information and yeah, just be vulnerable and show up and share what I went through. I learned a lot. I would say that one of the biggest lessons I learned is to never remove myself so much from the business without questioning more things and the importance of my leadership team and the radical willingness to withhold my standards without wavering.

And I think sometimes as you grow your business and you build a team, it’s easy to, especially if you’re like me with a very high standards for our delivery. It’s why we are one of the best. And there can be situations where people convince you that it’s too high of a standard or we could do it this way instead. And you kind of, you’re like, whatever, you know, you get, you get decision fatigue, you get exhausted from managing it all, that you loosen the reins so much that you’re not seeing things. And you know, I learned again through this. I learned even deeper how to lead with my heart, how to be transparent, how to show up on team meetings even when I didn’t know what to say or what to do but I still needed to show up and I didn’t want to show up. Like you think I wanted to get on that team huddle and share that All of their managers resigned the day before with zero notice. I mean, I was crying. And I said, I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen from here, but I will figure it out. And I’m sad right now, you know it’s okay. It’s okay for a leader to show up that way. and And your team or your audience and people around you actually would prefer that you’re real because then they actually have more security than if you’re like, everything’s fine. Everything’s fine. And they know it’s not.

And ultimately, I do want to say I’m just so grateful for the people that are in my life. I’m grateful for my team that I do have. There’s many, many people who really stepped up. who you know when some things happened, I was afraid everybody was going to leave and I had so many people on my team step up in the ways that they were able to and people in my life. I work one-on-one with a mentor here and I had probably some of the deepest sessions I’ve ever had during this time because when you are in the shit, when you are in the thick of it, that’s actually the best time to do the work because you’re in it. It’s so real for you and this side note like this is ironic and of course God. The day that that team member resigned I had a pre-scheduled session with my mentor here who does somatic and breathwork therapy with me and he showed up at my house and I was like I really don’t want to do this.

But we’re here and I’m doing it because I know I need this. but and We sat down and I was the whole time absolutely bawling for basically three hours. But I worked through and moved through so much and so many beliefs and so many things that came up and so many lessons. It was one of the most powerful sessions I’ve ever had. And so a huge lesson to always remember there is beauty in the darkness. There is beauty in the challenges There is beauty in the discomfort There’s beauty in the times where you don’t know what to do next and you feel all of those things isolation loneliness defeat Overwhelm all of those things there’s beauty in it because there are lessons that we cannot learn and unless we experience those things. And so for that, I am so grateful for everything that happened, every lesson I was taught, every situation, every conversation, every moment that I had to move through this when I didn’t want to. Because now I can so confidently say, number one, everything happens for a reason because my team is better and stronger than it was ever before, after we went through everything we did, rebuilt, overhauled a lot of things. And now I get to stand on a more solid foundation.

And so for that, I’m very grateful and I’m ready to be back. So the rest of the series is going to focus on the digital marketing landscape, what has changed and have some really spicy things to share. And then I’ll also share with you, the shifts that I’ll be bringing to the podcast. Cause part of the reason I paused was I was like, it’s just something feeling monotonous about it. And I need to feel that inspiration again. And then finally, the last thing I wanna share. I wish it didn’t take me 36 minutes to share this, but here we are. I am feeling very called to build a deeply connected community. I’m also feeling called to be on social media less myself. I really don’t like the way I get after a certain amount of time being on social media where it feels very hard for me to control my scrolling and my consumption. And through all of this, I noticed myself using social media a lot to numb. Because I just couldn’t handle anything else by the end of the day, the only thing my brain was able to do was either watch TV or scroll social media and I don’t really watch TV. So I’d scroll social media and then I would feel terrible about it. And so I’m feeling called to be off social media more.

I’m also feeling the call to have a community. So I have decided to open up a free telegram, which is a messaging app community. We did this in a most recent challenge I hosted and it was incredible and all the feedback was amazing about the community. It is going to be a place where I share insider knowledge that I would have shared on social media and I’m not anymore. It’s a place where you will be seen and supported in all seasons of your business and being an entrepreneur. It’s a place where you can get support from myself, but also the incredible community that I’ve built and I realized that during this challenge I hosted when all these amazing hundreds of entrepreneurs put their introduction in our chat and I was like, holy cow, this is so many incredibly talented, amazing individuals. So beautiful. And there’s only a couple of rules. One is you have to engage. We will actually remove people who don’t engage more than two times or at least two times a month. And you have to be kind and no promotions. That’s it. It’s going to be really amazing. So if you go to embodiedmarketing.com/businesscircle.

This is the Embodied Business Circle that used to just be for clients. I’m opening it up for free to the public to join and be a part of this experience, a part of this community. So embodiedmarketing.com/businesscircle. It’ll take you to a telegram group. You can request to join and we’ll send you a little video with an overview of it. It’s going to be really amazing. I’m really, really feeling the calling to connect deeper and deeper with you guys. So that’s kind of part of what’s coming in the next few episodes. I will be back tomorrow.