Welcome to your Owner's Manual Newsletter
Here's what's happening next.
Entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey.
One thing I've noticed over the years is that as you grow, your relationships and the conversations you want to have can change.
Sometimes, you outgrow familiar circles. Other times, you simply struggle to find people who understand the challenges you're facing or share the ambitions you have for your future.
And while networking events are everywhere, finding a room where you can have honest conversations with people who are at your level, or where you aspire to be, isn't always easy.
That's why we're collaborating with OneMoreSeat to host a special Founder's Brunch in Amsterdam on October 23, 2026, at 11:00 AM.
It's an opportunity to connect with fellow founders, share experiences, exchange ideas, and build meaningful relationships over brunch.
I'd love to see you there.
Learn more and save your seat
Okay, onward to your Owner's Manual
Dear Owner,
In 2015, I began organising business workshops for women entrepreneurs in The Hague. A year later, I launched my first Idea2Income programme, bringing eight women together for eight weeks to work on their business ideas.
Since then, I have continued mentoring women founders, even as my work through Rise & Lead Women expanded into the corporate world.
Every year, I work privately with a small number of founders. Some are just finding their feet. Others have been running successful businesses for years.
And over time, I have noticed something interesting.
The challenges women face when starting a business are often different from the challenges that keep them from growing one.
When you are starting out, you are trying to figure out what to sell, who will buy it and how to get your first customers.
But three, five or even ten years into business, you may find yourself dealing with a different set of problems.
You have customers, but you don't know where the next ones will come from.
You have experience, but you struggle to explain what makes your business different.
You are making sales, but revenue is unpredictable.
You have built a good reputation, but too much still depends on you.
I have seen these challenges repeatedly, and I recognise some of them from my own 25 years of entrepreneurship.
Here are five lessons I want to share.
1. Being good at what you do is not enough to build a successful business.
Many of the women I mentor are excellent at what they do. They are experienced consultants, coaches, creatives, advisers and business owners who genuinely know how to help their customers.
But expertise alone does not guarantee commercial success.
One of the most common challenges I see is a founder who can do many things and tries to sell them all.
Her website lists several services. Her marketing talks about different problems. Every new enquiry becomes an opportunity to create something different.
The result is a business that potential customers find hard to understand.
What I encourage founders to do instead:
Start by identifying the customer you are best positioned to serve and the important problem they are willing to pay you to solve.
Then build a clear offer around that problem.
You don't need to stop using your other skills. You need to make it easier for the right customers to understand why they should choose you.
Ask yourself: If someone visited my website today, would they know within a few seconds who I help, what problem I solve and what they can buy from me?
2. Many founders are busy marketing, but they don't have a reliable way to get customers.
I see women investing enormous amounts of time in social media, networking, attending events and creating content.
These activities can help people discover your business. But they are not a complete sales strategy.
I often ask founders, "What happens after someone expresses interest in your offer?"
Sometimes there is no clear answer.
An enquiry comes in; they reply, perhaps arrange a call, send a proposal and wait.
If the customer doesn't respond, the conversation ends there.
Then they go back to marketing, hoping to find someone else.
What I encourage founders to do instead:
Map the journey from the moment a potential customer discovers your business to the point where they decide to buy.
How do people find you? What do they need to know before they trust you? What is the next step you want them to take? How do you follow up?
A simple, repeatable sales process is more useful than constantly increasing your marketing activity without knowing what happens to the enquiries you already receive.
This week, look at your last ten enquiries. How many became paying customers? What happened to the others?
You may discover an opportunity to improve sales without spending more money on marketing.
3. Growth becomes difficult when every customer needs something different.
This is another challenge I see among experienced founders.
A customer makes an enquiry, and the founder creates a completely new proposal. Another customer comes along, and the process starts again.
Everything is customised, from the offer and pricing to how we deliver the work.
I understand why this happens. We want to give customers our best.
But when you build everything from scratch, it becomes difficult to plan, delegate, or serve more customers consistently.
What I encourage founders to do instead:
Look at the work you have already delivered successfully.
What problems keep appearing? What steps do you repeat? What results do customers consistently want?
Use those patterns to develop a core offer with a clear process.
You can still adapt parts of the work to individual customers. The important thing is that you are no longer reinventing the entire service every time.
4. The founder often becomes the biggest limitation to growth.
A few years ago, I met a talented voice coach who was preparing to have a baby.
She told me she planned to close her business temporarily during her maternity leave because she couldn't see how it would operate without her.
What stayed with me was that she had delayed having a baby because of her business.
I understood her situation.
Years earlier, I had taken six months of maternity leave while running my restaurant business. The restaurant kept running because we had built the structures needed to keep it going.
I offered to help her.
Over three short mentoring sessions, we examined how her business worked, what depended on her and what needed to change.
Three months later, she went on maternity leave.
Her business remained open, her clients were served, and revenue continued.
That experience reminded me of something I have seen throughout my career.
You can be an excellent professional and still have a business that depends too much on you.
The solution is not necessarily to hire a big team.
Start by identifying which activities genuinely require your expertise and which you can document, simplify, automate, or delegate.
Ask yourself: If I needed to step away for two weeks, what would stop working?
Your answers will show you where to start building better systems.
5. Many founders focus on growing their businesses without deciding what they want to build.
This is perhaps the most important conversation I have with women founders.
They tell me they want to grow.
But when I ask what growth means to them, their answers aren't always clear.
More customers? A larger team? New locations? Higher income? More time to focus on family? The opportunity to expand into new markets?
These goals differ, and they require different decisions.
A founder who wants to build a company with 50 employees will need a different structure from someone who wants a small, highly specialised business.
Neither ambition is wrong.
But if you haven't decided what you want your business to become, it is easy to spend years responding to opportunities without making meaningful progress towards your own goals.
What I encourage founders to do instead:
Take some time to describe the business you want to be running three years from now.
Who are your customers? What are you known for? How does the business generate revenue? Who is on your team? And what role do you want to play?
Then look at your business today and identify what needs to change.
You don't need a complicated strategic plan to begin. You need to make a few clear decisions about your direction.
My biggest lesson from these conversations
After mentoring women founders for over a decade, I'm convinced many established businesses don't need another idea.
They need to make better use of what they have already built.
They need clearer customer and offer clarity, a reliable way to generate sales, and systems that let them deliver good work consistently.
This is also why I’m creating a dedicated space for female founders called the OwnerCEO School.
Through this platform, I help established women founders build businesses that attract the right customers, generate predictable revenue, and have the structure to grow.
I believe women should be able to build successful companies without burning out.
I don't want you to finish reading this newsletter and simply move on to the next task.
Take 15 minutes and answer these three questions:
- Where am I losing the most opportunities? Is it attracting the right customers, converting enquiries into sales, or delivering the work consistently?
- What part of my business still depends too much on me? Think about the decisions, processes and activities that cannot happen without your involvement.
- What is one change I can make in the next seven days? Choose something specific. It could be following up with old enquiries, simplifying an offer, documenting your client onboarding process or reviewing your business direction.
Don't try to fix everything this week.
Identify your biggest constraint and begin there.
If you're willing, reply and tell me which of these five challenges you recognise most in your business.
I'd love to hear from you.
Until next time,
Ebere Akadiri
Founder, Rise & Lead
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