No One Teaches You How to Run a Business When …
I have been an entrepreneur for 25 years. I have coached hundreds of business owners through starting, growing, scaling, and closing their businesses. I thought I had seen everything this life could throw at a person running a company. I hadn't. Not even close.
Nobody teaches you how to run a business when your life is falling apart.
Not in any course. Not in any coaching program. Not in any business school or mastermind or leadership retreat.
There is no module for this. There is no framework handed to you when the personal and the professional collide in ways you never saw coming and the business still needs you to show up anyway.
I know because I looked. And I know because I lived it.
The list I never expected to write
In the last six years, my life has changed in ways I could not have predicted and did not plan for. I want to tell you about it — not because I need your sympathy, but because I need you to understand where this work comes from and why it matters more to me than anything I have ever done professionally.
No one teaches you how to run a business when your relationship is ending — when the person you built your life with is suddenly on the other side of everything.
No one teaches you how to run a business when you're managing lawyer appointments between client calls, financial negotiations between discovery calls and grief between everything else.
No one teaches you how to run a business when you quit your full-time job to finally pursue entrepreneurship full-time — a dream you have held for years — and then the ground shifts beneath you immediately.
No one teaches you how to run a business when you finally quit your full-time job to pursue entrepreneurship full-time — a dream you have carried for years — and then the ground shifts beneath you immediately.
No one teaches you how to run a business when you move cities, start over, and find yourself living a life that looks nothing like the one you planned.
No one teaches you how to run a business when you become a full-time bonus mom to four girls overnight — and suddenly you are needed by more people than you have ever been needed by in your life.
No one teaches you how to run a business when your father is falling — again and again — and you are quietly bracing yourself for a call you know is coming.
No one teaches you how to run a business when you are navigating a complicated relationship with parents who are struggling in their own ways, and you are learning who you are to each other after years of distance.
No one teaches you how to run a business when you find your father — just gone. When you are the one who walks through that door. When you are the one who makes the calls that nobody ever wants to make.
No one teaches you how to run a business when grief takes up permanent residence in the room and you keep having to ask it to wait — just for this call, just for this meeting, just for today.
No one teaches you how to run a business when you become the primary caregiver to your mother — in a different city — while running two businesses and raising four children who are not biologically yours but have completely become your people.
No one teaches you how to run a business when your body starts changing in ways nobody warned you about and perimenopause is quietly rewriting the rules of your energy, your focus and your capacity.
No one teaches you how to run a business when you are in the middle of an identity crisis so complete that you don't recognize yourself some mornings — and the business still needs you to be the expert by 9am.
I kept going through every single one of those things. Not gracefully. Not without cost. Not without moments of sitting at my desk with my chest so heavy I couldn't breathe — pulling myself back together because I had a client call or project to work on and I couldn't break down right now.
My separation was the hardest chapter. The one that nearly broke everything. The one where I had to keep showing up professionally while privately negotiating the end of my life as I had known it — alone, because nobody existed who understood both the business that had to keep running and the person who was barely holding it together.
But I kept the businesses running. I showed up. I delivered. I coached. I advised. I held space for other entrepreneurs who were struggling with their own versions of hard. Because that’s what we do.
There is an enormous amount of support available for entrepreneurs who want to grow, scale and lead. Almost none of it exists for entrepreneurs who are simply trying to survive.
The gap that nobody is filling
I have spent 12 years as a business coach. In that time, I have watched the entrepreneurship support industry grow into something vast and impressive. There are thousands of coaches, programs, communities, masterminds, events, and resources for the entrepreneur who wants to scale their revenue, build their team, strengthen their leadership and grow their impact.
That market is well served. Beautifully, abundantly served.
But when a business owner's relationship ends? When their parent dies? When a health crisis hits? When caregiving lands on their plate overnight? When the weight of everything becomes so heavy that showing up feels like the bravest thing they do all day?
Almost nothing exists for them. Not specifically. Not practically. Not from someone who has actually been in it.
The gap is not a small one. Research tells us that nearly one in twenty business owners closes their doors entirely due to the financial strain of divorce alone. Fifty-seven percent see their business take a direct financial hit. Seventy percent say they couldn't focus the same way.
Those are businesses that were worth saving. Those are entrepreneurs who deserved support that nobody provided.
That gap — between the business that has to keep running and the human being who is temporarily running on empty — is the most expensive and least talked-about reality in entrepreneurship.
And it is exactly where I am choosing to work.
What I am building from all of it
The entrepreneurs I most want to serve are not the ones optimizing their funnels and scaling their teams. There are more than enough brilliant coaches already serving them well.
The entrepreneurs I most want to serve are the ones who are sitting at their desk or in their car before a client meeting trying to remember how to sound like someone who has it together. The ones running their businesses at half their usual capacity and hoping nobody notices. The ones going through the hardest season of their lives while their business keeps demanding full presence they don't currently have.
The ones who need someone in their corner who understands both the strategy and the storm simultaneously.
I am now a Business Triage and Stability Advisor — specifically for Canadian entrepreneurs navigating separation, divorce and relationship breakdown who are determined not to lose what they have built.
I created the STEADY Framework from everything I learned the hard way. I built programs that meet entrepreneurs where they actually are — not where a growth plan assumes they should be. Programs built around the reality of reduced capacity, overwhelming decisions, legal and financial complexity, and the simple desperate need to keep the business alive long enough to get to the other side.
My Mission
To be the person who sits with entrepreneurs in the hardest seasons of their lives and helps them keep what they built — while they find their way through.
I am not walking away from twelve years of work. I am walking toward the work I was always meant to do. The work that comes directly from the hardest chapters of my own life and the gap I watched too many entrepreneurs fall through alone.
Nobody should have to figure out how to run a business when their life is falling apart — without support. Without someone who gets it. Without a person in their corner who understands both sides.
No one teaches you how to run a business when your life is falling apart.
Until now.
Why I'm telling you this now
Because something has shifted for me. And I want you to hear it from me directly rather than notice it quietly in the background of my content.
My work is evolving. The mission — helping entrepreneurs stay entrepreneurs — hasn't changed. But the entrepreneurs I am here to serve, and the season I am here to serve them in, has become much clearer.
If you are going through a separation, a divorce, a relationship breakdown — and you are terrified of losing what you have built — I want you to know that support exists. Specific, practical, human support that understands both the business and the person running it.
And if you are not going through that right now — if you are in a different kind of heavy season, navigating caregiving or grief or a health scare or an identity shift or perimenopause or any of the other things on the list above — I want you to know that those seasons are valid too. That you and your business deserves support that meets the full reality of your life.
TAKE THE NEXT STEP
You don't have to keep figuring this out alone
If any part of this resonated — for yourself or someone you know — I'd love to have a conversation. A free 30-minute discovery call. No obligation, no pitch. Just an honest talk about where you are and whether I can help. Or download the free STEADY Framework guide and start there.
"Which line from the list stopped you? I'd love to know — because that's probably exactly where we need to start."
Leave a comment below or share this with someone who needs to read it today. Every share puts this in front of one more entrepreneur who is doing it alone and doesn't have to be.
Jodi Laking
Business Triage & Stability Advisor · Work Smart Canada
Jodi has spent 25+ years as an entrepreneur and 12 years as a business coach helping hundreds of Canadian business owners start, grow and protect what they have built.
She is the founder of Work Smart Canada and Your Business Executor and the creator of the STEADY Framework.
She helps Canadian entrepreneurs keep their businesses alive through separation, divorce and life disruption — because she has been there herself.
All of it.