Entrepreneurial Balance with Savannah Blake

Rebooting Business, Episode 25

A conversation about the girl who made herself small, the meditation that fits inside a ten-minute shower, and the difference between the money you want and the reason you want it.

She made herself small on purpose, and that is where this story begins, and it is worth sitting with for a moment before you skip ahead to the business advice, because the business advice does not work without it.

Picture the back corner of a classroom, the headphones in, the book held up like a shield against a world that had already delivered its verdict. Savannah Blake spent her childhood shrinking, shoulder by shoulder and inch by inch, folding herself down into the smallest shape a person can occupy while remaining technically present. She was bullied at school and bullied at home, and she was shushed so steadily and so successfully that she came to accept the arithmetic of it, believing that her voice was noise, that her stories taxed other people’s patience, and that her existence amounted to a mild imposition for which she ought to apologize.

“I was terrified somebody would notice I exist,” she told me.

And yet she is a confidence coach now, a yoga and meditation teacher who spends her days telling content creators, who are passionate and creative and practically vibrating with the things they need to say, how to unclench their throats and let the words out. The distance between those two Savannahs is the whole subject of this episode, and the road that runs between them is paved with something sturdier than affirmations.

The Restaurant Was a Forge

She grew up in a one-horse town, the sort of place where everybody knows your name and your mother’s name and the thing your cousin did a decade ago, and in a town like that nobody has to get to know you, because the file is closed long before you are old enough to open it.

Then she got a job, and the job took her out, and for the first time in her life she stood before strangers who carried no dossier and no verdict and no prewritten history, strangers who would have to actually talk to her in order to discover whether they liked her. They talked to her, and she talked back, and they behaved, to her genuine astonishment, as though she were a person worth the trouble.

She stayed six years in that restaurant, and those six years gave her a chosen family of servers and cooks bound together by the fierce, chaotic intimacy of people who survive a dinner rush shoulder to shoulder. Somewhere in there they decided, without ever taking a vote on it, that Savannah was going to be dragged into the light whether she wanted the light or not. In the middle of a staff presentation, with fifteen people watching or more, one of them would turn and announce that Savannah would be taking it from here. There was no warning and there was no script, and she could either sink or swim.

“I can’t breathe. I’m shaking. I’m sweating. I can feel the heat in my face. Tunnel vision is setting in, everything is going dark, and I’m focusing right here, and words are still coming out of my mouth, because it’s sink or swim.”

She thanks them for it now, and she calls those moments terrible and traumatizing and necessary in the same breath, which may be the most honest sentence anyone has spoken on this podcast. Courage is not the absence of the sweat and the shaking and the closing tunnel of the dark. Courage is the words coming out anyway.

What Meditation Actually Is, and What It Very Much Is Not

Ask the internet what meditation is for and the internet will shrug at you, because if you look up the definition you get something close to the act of meditating, which is a snake swallowing its own tail, a word explaining itself in a mirror. Savannah spent years chasing guided visualizations across YouTube, floating down imaginary rivers toward imaginary light, asking the only question that mattered and receiving no answer at all, which was simply this: what is the point of any of it?

She built her own answer eventually, out of eight years of practice, and it is short enough to carry in a pocket. Meditation, she says, is learning to control your emotions and your mind, and that is the whole of it.

It is not the mountaintop and it is not the wind chimes, and it is certainly not the incense and the impossible cross-legged hours, which, as she points out with the flat practicality of a woman raising two small children, nobody actually has, and which remain functionally unavailable to anyone who is not a Buddhist monk with an unusually forgiving schedule.

Her practice, when she began, was the ten-minute shower. Later it became five quiet minutes lying flat in the dark before sleep, centering herself against the ceiling. She counts passive meditation and active meditation both, so a walk taken without headphones qualifies, and so does a floor swept with full attention, and so does any present moment you enter on purpose rather than by accident. If you can lose yourself in it calmly and contemplatively, it counts, whether it is a painting or a song or a short story or a single page turned beside a lake while you pray the delivery driver stays away.

It is a flow state wearing a different name, and it waits for you in the cracks and crevices of an ordinary, overcommitted, thoroughly unmonastic life. That is the entire point of it. You adapt the practice to the life you actually have, and not to the life printed on the meditation app poster.

Who You Are, How You Are, Why You Are

Savannah returns again and again to three questions, asking who you are, how you are, and why you are, and they run beneath the episode the way a bass line runs beneath a melody.

She realized, somewhere in the eighth year of formal study, that she had been meditating her entire life without knowing the word for it, because all that solitude had been practice, all those silent hours with nothing but walls and books and a mind circling its own perimeter. She had been asking the question all along, and the question shifted beneath her as she aged. It began as a lament, asking why her life was the way it was, and why she had been dealt these particular cards, and why these things kept happening to her, and it ended somewhere quieter and immeasurably more powerful, in the recognition that something happened, and so she believed a thing, and so she became a thing.

That recognition is the work, and the incense is not. The work is dismantling the beliefs brick by brick and sorting them into two piles, one holding what is true for you and the other holding what was planted in you from outside. Most people never sort at all, and they run their whole lives on inherited software whose license they never read.

Here is where the conversation turns from healing to entrepreneurship, because you cannot write to an audience you cannot see, and you cannot see an audience if you cannot see yourself. Every content creator I have worked with who was truly stuck, spinning wheels in wet clay, was stuck at precisely this junction, unable to answer what to write, or who to write it for, or the question hiding underneath both of those, which is who they are to be writing it at all.

The Money Mirage, and the Difference Between Means and Ends

The first stage of her program, which she calls the Battle Plan, asks the client to establish goals, and that sounds ordinary until you notice how many of us set goals that have nothing whatsoever to do with what we want.

We say that we want money, but money is a means goal, a ferry rather than a shore. Behind the money, if you dig honestly, sits the actual cargo, which is purpose and acceptance and love and peace and happiness and time that belongs to you. Those are the end goals, and they are the far bank the ferry was supposed to be carrying you toward while you stood on deck counting the fare.

I watch the same failure play out nine times in ten. A business owner arrives knowing that they want to travel from Point A to Point B, and having no idea what Point B actually is, which means they cannot value the arrival, which means they will never know whether they got there, which means that most of the time they never do. It is the same disease Savannah treats, dressed in a different coat.

This is also why the unique selling proposition is not really a marketing exercise at all. It is a self-knowledge exercise wearing a marketing costume.

Stars to Soil

Her old brand was cosmic, all planets and stars and moons, manifestation and zodiac and the whole spangled celestial spread. She liked it, and it photographed beautifully, and it was not, as she eventually admitted, true.

Savannah does not spend her days staring at clouds. She spends them in the dirt, in the garden, hands down in the loam, growing things that require water and patience and an entire season to arrive. So the brand came down to earth, and the stars gave way to soil and flowers and water, and roots took the place of orbits.

The clientele shifted along with it, which lays the mechanism bare. Stars and zodiacs summon the seekers of the ethereal, while earth and water summon the practical and the holistic and the hands-in-the-ground. The kind of honey you set out determines the kind of bee you attract.

Consistency, then, is not aesthetic tidiness but a signal. If you are flowers on Monday and stars on Tuesday and hearts on Wednesday and football on Thursday, you have not built a brand at all, you have built static, and nobody tunes a radio to static. Narrow yourself to a pattern, narrow the pattern to a truth, and broadcast that truth until the right people find the frequency.

The Battle Plan Takes Three Months, Minimum

Her process is neither a weekend retreat nor a webinar, and it runs three months at the very least, longer if the client is busy or scattered or insufficiently disciplined to do the homework, which she will tell you plainly, and which I respect enormously.

The architecture is simple and unglamorous, which is generally how you know a thing works. There is a Trello board and a sequence of exercises, most of them journaling prompts, each one paired with meditation. The client moves through it at their own pace, section by section, and at the end of every section there is a conversation in which Savannah reads the work and pressure-tests it and hunts for the holes and the soft spots and the places where the client is quietly lying to themselves. Only then does anyone move to the next step.

The goals come first, and then the gap, and then the thing standing in the gap, which is nearly always the client.

Scarcity Says Steal, and Abundance Says Build

We spent a long stretch of the conversation on the hardest question I know how to put to a coach, which is what she does about the people who cannot pay her and who desperately need her.

They are mostly nonprofits, and they arrive reciting the same three-part liturgy, which holds that they have no money, that everything must therefore be free, and that they are not entirely certain what they want or why they want it. If you volunteer anyway, the asking grows and the reciprocity never does.

Savannah’s answer is neither cruel nor comfortable, and it amounts to putting your own gas mask on first.

Her free content is the open hand, written for the person standing in the produce aisle counting the fifty-cent difference between the organic bell pepper and the other one, knowing perfectly well which is better for her family and knowing also that fifty cents is fifty cents. Savannah has stood in that aisle herself, and she still writes for the person standing in it.

Her coaching, though, is built for people whose stability is already in place, because coaching is a force multiplier. When she helps one person carry a voice out into the world, she reaches everyone that voice will eventually reach. Saying no to the work that drains her makes room for the work that ripples.

Scarcity says you are going to steal from me. Abundance says let us make this work for everyone. There are always enough resources. There is just never enough for everybody’s greed.

There is a tell that gives away the people pleaser every time, and it is the apology. Listen for it. The person who says yes to everything, who organizes the get-together and cooks eight dishes and stays behind to clean, is very often the same person murmuring an apology while she does it. She is apologizing for existing, which carries us all the way back to the girl in the back corner of the room with the book held up like a shield.

Piggybacking, and the Divorce Lawyer Who Combed Them Out of His Hair

Collaboration is the oldest trick in the marketing book and very nearly the least used. In my agency days we called it piggybacking, and it meant two businesses, adjacent rather than competing, pooling their audiences to serve a client that neither one could serve alone. Your tires are made for off-roaders and mine are made for luxury sedans, so why on earth are we glaring at one another across the street?

I told Savannah about the divorce lawyer. He cornered me at a networking event, thoroughly miserable, and told me he could not get clients, so I asked him why he did not start a singles group for the newly and nearly divorced. He would make it free, and he would not pitch, and he would simply gather people who were living through the worst chapter of their lives into a room with coffee and other people who understood. He could mention his services at the top, mention them again at the end, and hand a card to anyone who wanted one.

He did it, and fifty people a week began showing up at some café, and for months he complained that nothing was coming of it, and I told him to keep going. Then one day, at another event, he told me he was combing them out of his hair.

In twenty years of marketing I could count on one hand the number of people receptive to that idea. The rest guard their million-dollar concept, the one that has never gone anywhere and never will, like a dragon brooding on a hoard of coins it cannot spend. That is scarcity in its native habitat. You do not need ten collaborations, you need two good ones, or perhaps five, and if the good ones take a while to find, that is fine, because strategy comes before the scramble and always has.

Not on the Rocks, but in a Shift

We recorded this episode in the thick of the pandemic, when the economy was a listing ship and every business owner I knew was standing at the rail. Strip the timestamp away, though, and the counsel survives intact, because the counsel was never really about a virus.

Sameness feels safe, and sameness is a story we tell ourselves inside a world whose only constant is change, a world where security can dissolve overnight, where nothing is impenetrable, and where nothing was ever promised. An entrepreneur who cannot adapt is not a businessperson. An entrepreneur who cannot adapt is a monument.

So your business is not on the rocks. Your business is in a shift, and the work now is to find out where it is shifting to. Ask who your client is at this moment, and what they are carrying at this moment, and whether the offer moves online, and whether it changes shape, and whether it needs a new door cut into it. Then get yourself into a room, a real one or a virtual one or a group full of people fighting the identical fire, and ask them. People love talking about the thing they think about all day, so ask them a business question and watch them light up.

The Niche Is Not a Coffin

People hate niching with a passion bordering on the theological, and I understand why, because it feels like amputation. Entrepreneurs are multi-passionate by design, wanting to know everything and share everything and try everything, so choosing one thing feels like closing doors that may never open again.

Savannah’s reframe is the kindest thing in the entire conversation, and it is this: you are not choosing forever, you are only choosing for the next three to six months.

Pick one thing, or two things that hold hands, and work them until they are working. Then step back and survey the field, adding here and shifting there and retiring whatever has gone quiet. It is an evolving process because you are an evolving process, no longer the person you were last week and a stranger to yourself in five years. Everything is malleable, and everything moves through its seasons.

The alternative is the lifestyle blogger who writes about lifestyle for five years, collects precisely no traction, and cannot understand why. What kind of lifestyle, and whose, and why should anyone want what she has? Specificity is not a cage. Specificity is a lighthouse, and lighthouses exist so that the right ships can find the harbor.

The Last Word

Nobody can compete with who you are. Two people can sell the identical widget, and the only variable remaining is the human being holding it. Businesses are becoming human again, because people want the story behind the service and the scar behind the smile, and the prom queen’s story will never reach the kid in the back corner of the room with a book held up like a shield.

Savannah’s story will reach that kid, and that is the whole of the strategy, dressed in plain clothes.

You have to believe in yourself, and that is the first step, because if you do not believe you can get there, you never will. Believe something and hold on to it even when doubt is everywhere, and trust me, as an entrepreneur, doubt will come from everyone and everything and everywhere.

About Savannah Blake

Savannah Blake is a holistic healer, birth doula, meditation teacher, and confidence coach who works primarily with content creators. You can find her at earthandwater.co, where her New Year, New You, New Life framework lays out the coaching path described in this episode, and she can be reached on Twitter and Instagram as @earth_water.

Listen to the Episode

The full conversation is available to watch on YouTube and on BitChute, and to listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Podbay, and Castbox.

Understanding Your Why with Leah Zimmerman is the same excavation performed with a different shovel, and it asks what happens when purpose is allowed to precede profit.
Your Unique Selling Proposition gives the marketing name to the thing Savannah simply calls the truth.
The Real Benefits of Working With a Business Coach explains why the mirror somebody else holds up will always show you more than your own.
Marketing Perspectives for Coaches is about building a practice that attracts rather than one that chases.
Conscious Capitalism and Lasting Organizational Change with Johanna Lyman takes abundance thinking and scales it all the way up to the org chart.
Building Better Businesses sits with growth, mindset, and the stubborn gap that opens between them.
Eight Ways Digital Marketing Can Reboot Businesses in a Post-COVID Economy is the tactical companion to the mindset work in this episode.
Digital Marketing and the Stages of Denial maps the stations of the cross for business owners who refuse to change.
The Cart Before the Horse insists that strategy leads and tactics follow, and that the reverse is always a wreck.
Tactics Over Tools Every Time argues that the software will not save you, though the thinking might.
Do You Need a Marketing Plan or Marketing Strategies? is about knowing Point B before you ever buy the ticket.
Five Roadblocks You Need to Avoid in Your Business finds that most of them live somewhere between the ears.
Small Business Failure reports what the research shows and what almost nobody wants to admit.
Free Consultations: Are You Giving Away Your Expertise? is the gas-mask problem with a price tag attached.
Screening and Onboarding Freelance Clients teaches you to say no early so that you can say yes well.
Conversational Client Onboarding puts trust before paperwork, as it should always be put.
Eight Types of Digital Marketing Clients You Do Not Want to Be Like is a field guide to the scarcity mindset in the wild.
Are You an Ideal Client for Digital Marketing? asks the honest question most agencies are far too polite to ask.
Ghosting and Lead Generation listens to what the disappearing prospect is really telling you.
Nonprofit Digital Marketing with Mickey Desai stands on the other side of the no-money conversation.
Church Marketing looks at mission-driven organizations and the communities they build online.
Creating Client Farms turns collaboration into a system rather than a favor.
Leveraging Case Studies in Digital Marketing offers proof, which remains the only argument that closes.
How to Acquire New Business Through Testimonials lets other voices carry yours across the water.
How to Use Workshops to Grow Your Business is the divorce lawyer’s singles night, formalized and repeatable.
Reasons to Use Meetup.com for Business Networking helps you find the room where your peers are already gathered.
Meetup.com Alternatives and Competitors shows you other doors into that same room.
Corporate Team Building and Bonding rebuilds the restaurant crew on purpose, and with a budget.
I Hate Social Media, and Here Is How I Use It Properly Anyway treats the platform as a tool rather than an identity.
Content Repurposing Explained demonstrates how one honest voice can fill a hundred channels.
Building a Flow State Writing Routine is meditation for people who make things.
Writing in Trance: Music, Loops, Inspiration, and Flow States descends into the trance that lies beneath the craft.
Whereby for Video Conferencing covers the tooling that made conversations like this one possible.
Zoombombed examines what the pandemic revealed about the rooms we meet in.
Marketing Magic with Magician Daniel Chan introduces another performer who learned to command a room he once feared.

Sources Cited:

Quotations from Savannah Blake are drawn from the episode transcript and lightly tightened for readability without any alteration of meaning.