Reflections on a busy Q4

Building an entrepreneurial career isn’t just a professional pursuit — it’s a deeply personal one.

Your energy, your clarity, your season of life… all of it shows up in your business. Often there is a lag time between the work you are able to put in (due to the season of life you’re in) and the results that your business reveals back to you, some months later.

These past two weeks have been interesting: a previous season of intensity in business is now bearing fruit for me. But the fruit arrived just before a ten day trip abroad!

Enquiries, new subscribers, followers and 267% increase in LinkedIn engagement after a slower few months on the platform (a pain I know many others have felt!)

All good problems to have, I suppose.

I’ve always strived to make this newsletter an honest reflection of my own business. I have many personal connections with readers outside the inbox. So today is a more personal one for you. I know the “human context” can be as valuable as frameworks themselves.

Today there are wins to celebrate, and I’m grateful for this newsletter channel to share these with you.

If you’re new here, welcome! I’ll return with longer-form pieces on building Authority and surviving an entrepreneurial future of work very soon.

Here’s what’s been unfolding in my world.

I’m writing to you today from a small town just outside Salamanca. In Mogarraz, the owners of the homes have their faces painted outside every house. It’s so quaint it hurts.

Last week I was in Porto. Working remotely has brought a familiar tension: am I balancing ‘life’ and ‘work’ appropriately? It’s the question we all face when we choose autonomy.

Here’s why despite being in a sleepy town, in laptop world, things are moving fast:

My Financial Times Feature

I was featured in the Financial Times, quoted on whether you can make more money working for yourself. LinkedIn loves a mainstream press announcement!

Speaking at The Portfolio Collective’s London Conference

The Portfolio Collective are a 13k+ community of professionals building portfolio careers. When they got in touch to see if I’d run their workshop at the London conference on Finding Your Superpower (the throughline of strengths that exist between your various professional pursuits) of course I said yes! Think coaching reflections, pair work and hot seat coaching. Hello if we met last week!

In their words:

Gross To Net Podcast

Host of the Gross to Net newsletter and podcast, George Milton, a Hot Sauce entrepreneur (how cool), invited me online to talk in depth about the future of work, being, well, you guessed it, entrepreneurial! Take a listen here or check out George’s Substack.

Authority Letters is up and running

Eleven Authority-led entrepreneurs joined me inside the first cohort of Authority Letters at the start of November and already we are halfway through. They’ve landed on the One Big Idea they are excited to write their Hero Piece on, and writing time soon begins in earnest.

Here’s how Caitlin described her experience so far.

I designed Authority Letters seeing a gap in the market both in my own offer suite, and in the world at large. Partly, due to the closure of previously successful programmes like Write of Passage which I’ve long admired. So, the next update was pretty ‘serendipitous’….

A serendipitous invite

An unfamiliar email in my inbox nearly went ignored. Thankfully I opened it. An invite to the London Internet Serendipity Tour — a gathering of creators and multi-hyphenates.

I met the brilliant Will Mannon (the operational mind behind Write of Passage!) and a whole host of creators building wild, meaningful things online.

Unplanned, but perfectly timed. So many excited folks in that room last week.

Authority Club hits the 6-month mark

Members have been landing press, running retreats, and relaunching their brands. Here’s some recent community wins.

If you’re unfamiliar, Authority Club is essentially the MBA for coaches and consultants building lean, profitable, authority-led businesses.

I’ll be reopening doors soon — if you want to be first to know, add your name here.

_{Oh, one more thing. If you share a photo of churros on LinkedIn, and don’t reply to any comment because you’re offline, you’ll still get your highest post impression in years?! Oh LinkedIn, how you continue to confuse us all.}

Thanks for reading today and if you’ve joined this newsletter lately, I’d love to hear what’s happening in your world and business? Hit reply and say hello!

Ellen from The Ask is brought to you by Ellen Donnelly, Founder of The Ask, offering strategic business coaching & mentorship to Authority Entrepreneurs ready to grow a profitable business in a way that feels true to them.