Run Your Business Like a CEO. Lead Your Life Like the CEO of YOU, Inc.

The business you’re building matters. So does the woman you’re becoming while you build it.

If you own a business, you can spend an astonishing amount of time thinking about what it needs …

What do my clients need?

What does my marketing need?

What does revenue need?

What does this project need?

What does the next quarter need?

What needs to happen today so everything else keeps moving?

These are legitimate questions. Important ones, even. After all, you’re the CEO of your business. Paying attention to what it needs is part of the job.

But there’s a second company that you’re also in charge of. And it’s one whose needs can be remarkably easy to push farther and farther down the agenda.

This other “company” is YOU, Inc.

After spending this quarter exploring what it means to think, choose, and lead like the CEO of YOU, Inc., I’ve realized there’s a distinction at the heart of this whole idea:

Your business is something you run.
YOU, Inc. is something you lead.

Your business needs strategy, clients, revenue, systems, marketing, operations, and good decisions.

YOU, Inc. needs energy, health, relationships, learning, creativity, confidence, boundaries, joy, purpose, and a future you’re excited to live.

They’re different enterprises, but they have something very important in common.

They have the same CEO.

And neither one should have to fail for the other to succeed.

🌿 YOU, Inc. CEO Perspective

You are leading two interconnected enterprises.

Your business creates value, serves clients, generates income, and supports the work you’re here to do.

YOU, Inc. stewards the woman doing that work — her energy, relationships, growth, confidence, health, creativity, interests, dreams, and life beyond the business.

The goal isn’t to choose which company matters more.

It’s to lead both intentionally.

The question to keep asking is:

What would the CEO of YOU, Inc. choose?

Two Companies. One CEO.

At first, the idea of having two companies might sound exhausting.

Fantastic, Michele. I already have one business to run. Now you’re giving me another one?

Don’t worry.

YOU, Inc. does not require a separate tax return, quarterly filing, or another software subscription.

It’s simply a way of remembering something that’s surprisingly easy to forget when you’re building a business:

Business Owner You is part of you. She isn’t all of you.

To put this in perspective, think about the other important roles you’ve held throughout your life.

Maybe you’re a wife or partner.

Maybe you’re a mother.

Maybe you’re a daughter, sister, friend, caregiver, mentor, volunteer, or some combination of those things.

Those roles can become deeply woven into our identities.

Being a mother, for example, can change how you see the world. It can influence your priorities, your schedule, your relationships, your decisions — even the way you think about yourself.

You wouldn’t necessarily want to give that role up.

But you’re not only a mother.

Similarly, being someone’s wife or partner can be an important part of your life and identity. But you’re not only a wife.

The same is true of entrepreneurship.

You can love your business.

You can care deeply about the people you serve and the work you do.

Yes, you can be proud of being a business owner.

And you can want the business to grow.

These can all be true, and you can still recognize that Business Owner You is just one part of the whole woman CEO You is responsible for leading.

Business Owner You is just one part of the whole woman CEO You is responsible for leading.

That matters.

Because when one role begins consuming every available resource — time, energy, attention, creativity, emotional capacity — the other parts of us don’t simply disappear.

They wait.

And sometimes they get very tired of waiting.

Your Two Companies Aren’t Competitors

This is where I want to be careful and very clear …

The YOU, Inc. idea isn’t another version of the old work-life balance conversation where we imagine work sitting on one side of a scale and life sitting on the other.

Your business and your life aren’t enemies competing for custody of your Tuesday afternoon.

Your business is part of your life. It’s part of who you are.

In fact, for many of us, that’s one of the reasons we became entrepreneurs in the first place.

We wanted meaningful work.

Or more autonomy.

More flexibility.

Or more control over how we spend our time.

Maybe we wanted to be available for our families.

Maybe we wanted work that fit the season of life we’re actually living.

Or maybe we simply wanted to build something that was ours instead of working to keep someone else’s dream alive.

The business was supposed to support a life — not replace one.

But that support doesn’t mean YOU, Inc. takes resources away from your business.

In fact, when YOU, Inc. is well led, your business benefits.

For example, a woman who has room to think can make better strategic decisions.

A woman who continues learning brings new skills and ideas to her work.

The woman who protects meaningful relationships has sources of connection that don’t depend on business performance.

The woman who has interests outside her work brings more experiences, creativity, and perspective back to it.

And the woman who trusts herself doesn’t need every decision to be perfect before she makes it.

Rather than competing, your business and YOU, Inc. should be symbiotic. Because the success of one can strengthen the other.

The goal isn’t to make the business smaller so YOU, Inc. can become bigger. And it certainly isn’t to make YOU, Inc. endlessly accommodate whatever the business demands.

The goal is stewardship.

And to achieve that goal we need to ask, “How do I lead both well?”

Leadership Is What Happens Between the Big Decisions

When we think about CEO leadership, it’s easy to picture the big moments ─ setting strategy, choosing goals, making investments, launching something new, changing direction, etc.

Those moments matter.

But most of leadership happens somewhere much less dramatic.

It happens on an ordinary Tuesday when you close the laptop when you said you would.

Or when you notice that something isn’t working and are willing to change it.

Leadership is having the conversation you’ve been avoiding.

It’s taking the sick day instead of spending eight miserable hours proving you can technically remain upright near a computer.

It’s asking for help.

Or investing in something you need to learn.

Leadership also is protecting relationships.

It’s saying no to something that technically fits on the calendar but doesn’t deserve the square.

It’s admitting that the plan you made three months ago no longer makes sense with the information you have today.

And it’s acknowledging that Employee You did good work before immediately handing her the next assignment.

These choices may not look particularly impressive posted on your LinkedIn feed or Instagram story. And let’s face it, nobody is giving you a trophy because you closed the laptop at 5:30 four days in a row.

But that’s leadership.

Leadership is the accumulation of ordinary choices that reinforce what you’ve decided matters.

And when you make enough of those choices, something else begins to happen.

You start becoming the kind of CEO who makes them.

Look at What You’ve Been Practicing

That’s what I hope you’ve noticed throughout this quarter.

We haven’t been trying to transform you into some polished, hyper-efficient CEO version of yourself who always knows exactly what to do.

Instead, we’ve been practicing self-leadership.

We’ve asked what deserves your attention.

We’ve looked at the information your business and your life are already giving you. And we’ve used that information to inform decisions not to pass judgment.

Additionally, we’ve considered what it means to protect the company’s greatest asset — you.

We’ve stopped treating every boundary, break, or investment in yourself as something requiring fresh permission.

We have decided what matters and put policies in place to protect those decisions.

We’ve chosen direction.

We’ve thought about what kind of workplace culture Employee You experiences every day.

And we’ve turned values from attractive words into standards for behavior.

Again and again, we’ve returned to one question:

What would the CEO of YOU, Inc. choose?

Not because CEO You always has the perfect answer.

She doesn’t.

Neither do CEOs running companies with corner offices, executive teams, and expense accounts.

Leadership isn’t knowing exactly what will happen.

It’s being willing to look at what you know, remember what matters, make the best decision you can, and adjust when you learn something new.

That’s not just business leadership.

That’s self-leadership.

Who Is the CEO of YOU, Inc. Becoming?

Which brings me to the question I want us to ask as we finish this quarter.

We’ve spent a lot of time asking, “What would the CEO of YOU, Inc. choose?”

Now I want to ask:

Who is the CEO of YOU, Inc. becoming?

Is she becoming a woman who trusts herself a little more quickly?

Maybe she’s realizing that she doesn’t need exhaustion as evidence that she worked hard enough.

Maybe she’s learning to make decisions from her values instead of guilt.

Or maybe she changes her mind when new information appears without turning that change into evidence that she failed.

Perhaps she protects what matters before the calendar gets full.

Or maybe she invests in herself before every other need has been satisfied.

Maybe she lets good work be good enough instead of demanding that it become perfect.

Or she recognizes progress while it’s happening instead of waiting until some distant finish line to decide whether any of it counted.

Maybe she asks for help or support.

And maybe she’s learning that confidence isn’t always the feeling of knowing exactly what to do. Sometimes confidence sounds more like:

I don’t know yet. But I trust myself to figure out what comes next.

Here’s the best part …

You don’t have to become that woman before you can start leading like her. You become her by practicing what she would do and making her choices now.

Your Business Will Never Be the Whole Story

There’s another reason this matters, especially at this stage of life.

We’ve lived long enough to know that the seasons of our life change.

Children grow. Relationships evolve. Parents age. Our bodies change. Interests shift. Priorities get rearranged.

Businesses change, too.

The work that lights you up today may evolve. The service that’s central to your business now may not exist five years from now. You may grow. Simplify. Pivot. Sell. Start something else. Or discover an idea you can’t even imagine yet.

That’s exactly why YOU, Inc. matters and needs attention alongside your business.

Your business deserves a CEO who is committed to leading it well.

And, at the same time, you deserve a CEO who is committed to leading you beyond the needs of the current business.

Someone needs to be thinking about the woman you’re becoming. Someone needs to be asking questions like:

• What does she want to learn?
• What relationships does she want to deepen?
• What does she want her days to feel like?
• What does she want to experience?
• What is she curious about?
• What kind of health, energy, confidence, creativity, and connection will support the next version of her life?

Those questions aren’t distractions from serious entrepreneurship.

They’re part of serious self-leadership.

Your business has a future. And so do you.

Stewardship Means Caring for Both Your Business and YOU, Inc.

I keep coming back to the word stewardship because it asks something different of us than productivity does.

Productivity asks, “What can I get done?”

Stewardship asks: What has been entrusted to me, and how do I care for it well?

Your business has been entrusted to you ─ its clients, reputation, and finances, as well as its ideas, opportunities, and its future.

And so has YOU, Inc. ─ your health, relationships, talents, energy, confidence, creativity, time. Your one actual life.

Being a good steward doesn’t mean protecting everything from difficulty.

Businesses have demanding seasons. And so do lives.

There are times when we work harder.

Sometimes another role needs more from us.

Sometimes a deadline really does matter and needs to take priority.

There are days when dinner is cereal and the inbox wins our time and attention.

Sustainability doesn’t require every day to be perfectly balanced.

It requires us to notice when the exception has quietly become the operating system.

That’s when CEO You needs to pay attention.

Because leadership isn’t about giving every part of your life equal time all the time.

It’s about making sure the things that matter don’t become invisible.

🌱 Action Step This Week: Write a CEO Letter to Future You

As we finish September — and Q3 — I want you to do something a little different.

Write a one-page letter to Future You.

Start by imagining it’s the end of December …

But don’t make this a goals report. And don’t write a list of accomplishments Future You is required to produce before she’s allowed to open the letter.

This is not September CEO You putting December CEO You on a performance improvement plan. 😉

Instead, write about the leader you hope you’ll have practiced becoming during the final months of the year.

You might begin:

Dear Future Me,

I’m proud of the way you …

And then keep going.

What did you protect?

What did you make room for?

Is there something you stopped tolerating?

What did you learn?

How did you respond when plans changed?

What did you trust yourself to do?

How did CEO You treat Employee You when things were difficult?

What relationships did you nurture?

Where did you show courage?

What did you allow yourself to enjoy?

How did the business benefit from the way you led YOU, Inc.?

And what are you proud of you for?

You can write the letter by hand, fold it up, put it in an envelope, and write a December date across the front.

Or — and I really love this option — write it as an email to yourself and schedule it to arrive in your inbox at the end of the year.

Imagine opening your email one December morning and finding a message from September You.

Not demanding results. But instead, reminding you what mattered.

Encouraging you.

Trusting you.

Cheering for the woman you are still becoming.

That’s a CEO communication worth opening.

🌿 Your Next Leadership Step

If you’re an Insider or VIP, pull out your Tenacious WFH CEO Vision Brief one more time before you write your letter.

Look at your CEO North Star, your Leadership Compass, your Next-Season Vision, your Big 3 priorities, and your CEO Investment. Look at your word for the season.

Then write your letter from that place.

As you do so, remember that September’s CEO Vision Brief was never supposed to predict exactly how the season would unfold. It is simply a tool to help you choose how you’ll lead it.

Your Future You letter is your chance to imagine what that leadership could look like when it is lived — not perfectly, but repeatedly — through the final season of the year.

And if you’re not yet a Tenacious WFH Entrepreneur Insider or VIP, consider upgrading your experience today. Premium subscribers receive each month’s Mini Power Tool plus access to the complete archive of previous tools — practical resources designed to help you lead your WFH business and YOU, Inc. with more clarity, confidence, connection, and sustainability.

The Business Matters. The Woman Matters.

There will always be another business question demanding your attention.

Another goal.

Another client.

Another project.

Another metric.

Another idea.

Another quarter.

That’s part of entrepreneurship.

And I hope you continue building a business you’re proud of.

I hope it grows in ways that matter to you.

I hope it serves people well.

I hope it creates income, opportunity, satisfaction, and meaningful work.

But I also hope you remember this:

The business you’re building matters. So does the woman you’re becoming while you build it.

She isn’t a resource the business gets to consume.

She isn’t the supporting character in the business’s story.

You are the CEO of something bigger ─ YOU, Inc.

So run your business thoughtfully.

Build good systems.

Serve your clients.

Watch the numbers.

Make strategic decisions.

Do excellent work.

Run your business like a CEO.

And then protect what matters.

Invest in yourself.

Nurture your relationships.

Stay curious.

Pay attention to your health and energy.

Make room for joy.

Keep becoming.

Trust yourself to adjust when the season changes.

Lead your life like the CEO of YOU, Inc.

Because you are building a business.

But you’re also building a life.

And you get to lead both.

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