Karen Aucoin has been doing this long enough to have changed her mind about the most basic question in small business: who the other people in your industry actually are.
Most People Quit When It Is Hard
“I would say that most people quit when it’s hard. And that’s why businesses fail.”
— Karen Aucoin
Her advice for the moment it gets hard is unusually calm: “when you get to the point when you’re truly terrified — first off, breathe. It’s always gonna be okay. You started your business with nothing, more than likely. You’re still gonna be okay, whether it goes according to plan or not.”
And she is realistic about why plans fail, which is not incompetence: “a business is designed with people in it, and people are unpredictable, life is unpredictable, and you have to be able to pivot and go with your gut.”
All Of Your Competition Should Be Friends
Aucoin is honest that she did not start here. Early on, “I was a little scared and thought that everyone was my competition, because I didn’t know what I was doing” — and, memorably, “I don’t want them to figure out that I’m figuring this out as I go.”
“as you get more experienced and you start really understanding and growing, you realize quite quickly that all of these people you network with, all of the people who are your competition, should be your best friends. They should all be in your corner.”
— Karen Aucoin
How A Referral Circle Actually Forms
Aucoin’s mechanism is not sentiment, it is capacity. “The more you can collaborate and network and market together, you can design bigger and better packages, and it all scales — it scales everybody up.”
Her illustration is the practical one: “instead of you doing a really small job by yourself with your two people, you can do these massive, amazing events with huge budgets.”
The circle forms when somebody passes on work they could technically have taken. That is the entry fee, and it has to be paid before it is collected.
Running Two Things Without Splitting In Half
Aucoin runs more than one business, and her answer to how is aggressively unglamorous. “Google’s my best friend,” she says — “I probably create about 10 or 15 new Google Docs or forms, or some kind of Google somethings, every single day.”
And the calendar does the rest: “Always keeping a calendar — I live off the calendar. When you stack your whole week and frame it out and really make a solid plan for yourself, you don’t have to spend time every day getting to the office wondering what am I gonna do today.”
Deciding once a week beats deciding every morning. That is most of the trick.
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