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.
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 you to feel sorry for me, 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 marriage is ending.
No one teaches you how to run a business when you're managing lawyer appointments between client calls and financial negotiations between discovery calls and grief between everything.
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 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 has fall after fall and you start to quietly brace for what's coming.
No one teaches you how to run a business when you are navigating a relationship with parents who are complicated — an alcoholic father, a mother with her own struggles — and relearning 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 is sitting in the chair across from you during every client call and you are pretending it isn't there.
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 having an identity crisis so profound that you don't recognize yourself in the mirror 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 and I couldn't break down right now.
I kept the businesses running. Both of them. I showed up. I delivered. I coached. I advised. I held space for other entrepreneurs who were struggling with their own versions of hard.
But I did all of it alone. Because nobody had built what I needed. Nobody was sitting at the intersection of the business that had to keep running and the human being who was barely holding it together.
"That gap — between the business and the human —
is the most expensive thing in entrepreneurship that nobody talks about."
What I built from it
When my father passed away in December 2024, I learned something that changed the direction of my work entirely. I learned that when someone dies there is no single person or company who guides you through what comes next. You are suddenly communicating with banks and accountants and lawyers and government departments and insurance companies and clients and colleagues — all at once — while you are grieving.
The chaos is staggering. The overwhelm is complete.
So, in February 2025, I started my second business — Your Business Executor — to help entrepreneurs get their affairs in order so that the people they love are not left in that chaos alone.
And somewhere in that process of building something from the hardest chapter of my life, I had a realization about my first business too.
The entrepreneurs I most want to serve are not the ones who are scaling and growing and optimizing. They are the ones who are surviving. The ones who are sitting at their desk before a client call trying to remember how to sound like someone who has it together. The ones who are running their businesses at 40% capacity and hoping nobody notices. The ones who went through something enormous and had nobody in their corner who understood both sides — the professional and the human behind it.
I have spent 12 years as a business coach. I have helped hundreds of people start and grow and scale and close their businesses. I know strategy. I know financial forecasting. I know systems and processes and pricing and growth planning. I have built frameworks and programs and communities.
But the work I am meant to do now is this.
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 now a Business Triage and Stability Advisor. I work specifically with Canadian entrepreneurs navigating separation, divorce and relationship breakdown — the season where the gap between the business and the human is widest and the cost of falling through it is highest.
I built the STEADY Framework from everything I learned the hard way. I created programs that meet entrepreneurs where they actually are — not where a growth plan assumes they should be. I built this because I was this person - more than once. I was the one at the desk with the heavy chest and the camera turning on.
And I am not willing to let other entrepreneurs keep doing this alone.
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 your business deserves support that meets the full reality of your life. Not just the growth plan version of it.
No one teaches you how to run a business when your life is falling apart.
Until now.
READY TO TALK?
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 20-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."
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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.