Unveiling the Illusion of Perfection: Embracing Joy and Alignment in Business

It first starts with asking some really big questions of you and your business. And the questions aren't what should we do? It's how do I think about my life and my work? What is enough for us? Enough time, enough money, enough freedom. Instead of saying let's have more and let's have an abundance. You know, there's abundance that is born from scarcity mindset of I need to have more, to have more. And then there's abundance that is from an internal safety mechanism of I have enough, I have what I need. There's, I would say, somatic discussion about that, like what feels safe in your body? And then there's the actual math, like do you know what you need to have coming in from your business to to survive, save and thrive? Those are the numbers we really want to talk about. And then after you assess what's enough, then we have to start talking about the role you want to play in your business. Do you want to be the coach or do you want to be the leader of coaches, for example? Those are two different business models and two different ways to show up with your clients. Then I think we have to talk about the responsibility to your team, your clients and your community. Could you scale your programs up? Sure. Does that provide a different experience? It does. None of these are questions that lead to scale or not scale, but these are all things to consider in what is the business I am trying to build and run. For what purpose?

Oh my goodness. Our conversations on this podcast go to such beautiful, unexpected places because yes, Jessica Lackey is a strategy and operations advisor who on a mission to radically disrupt mainstream business culture to create sustainable businesses with a human centric approach. Yes, she has a background in corporate leadership, she's worked with McKinsey and Company, Harvard business degree, and she knows a thing or two about hustle culture because she has lived it and knows what it feels like to judge success by the bottom line at all costs. But now she combines her deep experience in consulting, Fortune 500 ops, leadership and coaching to help businesses grow without sacrificing the well being of their clients, team and community. This conversation went from a bit of a startup conversation. Jessica is two years into starting building growing her business even though she's got all that other business experience that she's pulling through. And we talked about the startup mode, but we also talked about seasons of change and evolving as your business shifts and your life shifts and how do you show up and navigate these changes and how do you watch out whether you're starting up or you are 14 to 16 years. I got to double check my math there. Down the road, how do you navigate the change and stay open to the possibility of the magic of your calling because it's right on time. This conversation was so right on time. I can't wait to see what you think of it.

Sure.

You let me know in the reviews or tag me in on Instagram because it's both strategic and so very right on time. Let's do this. Jessica, thanks so much for being here today.

Super excited to be here.

Oh, my gosh. What are you loving spending your time on these days?

I'm loving spending my time outside of business making these little crochet figures. They're called Amiguri. I found a kit on Instagram and I've been loving spending time not doing something digitally.

Yeah, I so get it. We spend so much time hands on keyboard. Hands on keyboard. No, I want to do something else. Something else creative. There's a lot of creativity coming through the keyboard, but it's different when you're. You're touch and feeling. Seeing it. That was so sweet. You lifted up one of those for everyone who's listening. I see this again.

Yes. It's Billy the Unicorn.

Oh, my gosh. Billy's adorable. What got you into this?

I love crafting and hand. Basically, I needed something to keep my hands busy and I've loved to knit. And the company that I bought them from is an Aapi local business in North Carolina. They were on Shark Tank and I saw these things and I'm like, I can make these little creatures and it's so much fun and it's something that keeps my hands busy. It keeps my mind busy. And it's not on the phone.

Oh, my gosh, I love this. Do you spend a lot of time on the phone also?

I do. I'm trying to get better at it, but the pull of social media is just so addicting.

It really is. And you say something on your website that draws me right in every time I look at it. The perfect business has us hustling and overwhelmed. And when you mentioned social media, I'm like, yeah, like, there are so many places. The perfect business has to show up and be present. And as leaders of these businesses, there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure. Can you explain what is behind this statement? The perfect business.

So let me start with, like, what the perfect business. I put this in air quotes. The perfect business is it's professional looking reels on Instagram or it's those reels that are unprofessionally scripted. You know those.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's the needing to feel like you have the course and the program and the. And. And. And. And it all has to be done perfectly, but you have to not be able to work so hard on it that you can talk about how you only work three days a week while you're making the seven figure lifestyle. I mean, those are all the things we're sold, and we're kind of all together. And of course, you need to do it overnight and fast. Right. That's what doing a perfect business looks like. It's kind of having all the things, doing all the things and living out. Many of the stereotypes were sold on social media. Almost all of our marketing, you know.

As you were talking, I'm like, oh, man, this almost sounds like an Onion article. And I'm thinking of that, because if anyone who doesn't know what the Onion is, it's basically like, news. But it's all like. Like, is it satire? Or it's all just all one big joke? And someone posted something in a travel expat group I'm in, and someone said, this reads like an Onion article, but it was real. Apparently, there's an airline. I'm not gonna out the air. I'm not gonna call anyone out here because I didn't see this firsthand. I just saw the graphics. So maybe it's not real, but one of their offers read like an Onion article in that you don't get miles with this purchasing of this flight. No miles, no choice in your seating. You might not be together. And it was like, is this a joke? And as you were reading, like, this sounds like a joke. Like, do it fast. You have to have all of these things. But it is exactly what it looks like. Sometimes on social media and marketing, sometimes.

What they're doing is telling you what your business should look like, even if you know in your core that's not really what you want to be building. But we're bombarded with messages of new tools and new techniques and new strategies and new things we didn't even know we wanted until we were told we wanted them or saw other people wanting them on social media. I say social media a lot because it just expands. Like, instead of comparing yourself to the Joneses in your backyard, you're comparing yourself to the Joneses worldwide.

Yeah, right. It just got exponentially larger.

So even if you have the ability to slow down, there's still this incongruence inside of, am I doing it wrong? Am I the only one who wants to do business differently? So even though we're not hustling towards a thing, we're always doubting ourselves and thinking like, okay, well, maybe, maybe buying that one program is going to be the solve for all of my problems. And even if it's a program that until I was sold, I told about it, I was like, I don't think I needed it. Oh, but now I do. I do now.

Yeah. Also, one of the things and the words that's used a lot when we're thinking about growing businesses is scaling scale up. Like it comes in with that faster grow, like, keep going bigger. What are your opinions and what do you think about scale and what is that costing us?

I think scale is a double edged sword for some businesses. It makes sense, right? If you're doing, if you're podcast pitching agency, for example. Right. Having additional people on your team that can help do some of the work makes a lot of sense. If you're a strategist or a graphic designer, someone whose work is the craft, scale doesn't make a lot of sense. You can scale by hiring junior designers or building a program to teach other people how to do design, but ultimately you're building a business that requires you to do more marketing in order to support your team members. So I think we are conflating scale with business design and I think we need to decouple what is the business you're trying to run and what are we optimizing for versus the top line financial revenue.

Yeah, I love this. I love this. Which gets us to something a little bit of a tangent here. I just, I want to come right back to what we're talking about because this is important, but could you tell us a little bit about your background? Because the words and the way things are coming together already, I'm like, okay, yeah, we got to make sure we touch on your background and how you got to where you are today.

Yeah. So I did not start an online business. I started at the creme de la creme, blue chip business, kind of heart of capitalism at McKinsey and Company Consulting. Got a degree in business from Harvard Business School. I worked for seven years at Nike, a Fortune 500 company. And I was kind of schooled in the. The purpose of business is to make growth for shareholders. Like, that's the, the social proof of business. That's the social requirement of business in this era. And I got kind of creamed by it. Because if the purpose of business is to make more money for shareholders, it's not to staff up teams properly. It's not to put guardrails on deliverables. It's not to really take care of your people and do things that maybe decrease the profit a little bit, but are serving the communities of business. And I got creamed by it. I ended up burning out, realizing that my life was my work, was my life. I had no other identities. And that's when I was like, all right, something needs to change. I no longer can continue to kind of put my soul at the corporate altar.

Yeah. Yep. I'm feeling all that. Just taking that in, because there's a lot there.

Yeah. And it was the great on paper job. It was the golden handcuffs. You know, the amount of deferred compensation I gave up to take a step away from that path. That's, you know, that's how they keep you grinding in the. On the hamster wheel of just work till the next bonus. Just work till this next deferred comp comes in. Even while you're losing out on your health, you don't have your friends. I had no roots. I literally worked and then recovered from work for the first 15 years of my professional career.

And how long have you been operating and consulting with business owners?

I've been doing this for about two years now. I had a bridge job in between, which was a promotion, actually, where I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where I live now. This is when I kind of grew up and put down roots, got married, bought a house, got a dog. And then, oh, yeah, the pandemic happened. And then I realized that it was the perfect time to. I could never go back to the office at that point. So I was like, all right, let's bounce. The COVID pandemic taught me that there really is no other time but now to take control of my life and work destiny.

Ah, Love it. I know you are not alone in that, and I know you are not alone in what you described as that, like, I've got these golden handcuffs and just wait till the next bonus and wait till the next thing. And I think this can happen to business owners as well. Right. Wait till the next launch, wait until the next year. I'll change it. It'll be different. Right. And you talked a bit at the beginning, like, do what is aligned for you versus the course and be on all the social media. And. And. And so how do you work with your clients and what's your perspective on, like, how do we get to that alignment? How do we get to the heart of it?

Yeah, I think it first starts with asking some really big questions of you and your business. And the questions aren't what should we do? It's how do I think about my life and my work? I am talking about four big questions we should ask, like, what is enough for us? Enough time, enough money, enough freedom, enough creative license. Instead of saying let's have more and let's have an abundance. You know, there's abundance that is born from scarcity mindset of I need to have more, to have more. And then there's abundance that is from an internal safety mechanism of I have enough, I have what I need. There's the, I would say, somatic discussion about that, like, what feels safe in your body? And then there's the actual math, like, do you know what you need to have coming in from your business to survive, save and thrive? Like, those are the numbers we really want to talk about. And then after you kind of assess what's enough? Then we have to start talking about the role you want to play in your business. Do you want to be the coach or do you want to be the leader of coaches? For example? Those are two different business models and two different, like, ways to show up with your clients. Then I think we have to talk about the responsibility to your team, your clients and your community. Could you scale your programs up? Sure. Does that provide the people in your community a different experience? It does. None of these are questions that lead to scale or not scale, but these are all things to consider in what is the business I am trying to build and run for what purpose? And I've got clients that are like, I want hundreds of people in a room together because the community is the point. And I'm like, that's great. I have other clients who say, I want to work with three to four organizations a year, being embedded in their organization. Great. I love that. Those are two very different businesses. We gotta start there.

Yeah, that's so good. Okay, I've got. Wait, what is enough? The role that you wanna play, the responsibility to team, clients, community.

Yeah.

What? I missed one in there.

Oh, I forgot to say it. It's the impact you want to have.

Oh, so good.

So. And again, there's not like, I want to impact lots of people. You might want to be deeply impacting a few people in really life changing, transformative ways. Or you might want to write a book or create a podcast where you don't necessarily even know who you're influencing, but you're influencing tens of thousands of people. So again, it's what is your calling. And I hate to say the word calling, like, okay, do what you're passionate about, but how do you want to serve and what's the impact you want to have? At what scale?

Yeah, I love the word calling, actually, because there's this voice, there's this inner knowing. Call it whatever. Right. But this inner knowing, this inner voice, like, this is what I need to be doing. This is it. And I think that gets to some of the alignment, too, that when we're out of alignment. Do you think larger businesses, companies, organizations also have a calling?

I think they can. But again, that requires setting aside the quarter over quarter.