#94: Is your business a toddler or teenager?
Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Jeweler's View. I'm Courtney Gray. I've spent nearly 30 years in this industry, running schools, doing custom work, coaching, consulting, and working with makers at all stages. Over time, I've started to see the patterns, the things that actually move a creative career forward and the things that can quietly hold it back.
I built this podcast to cut through the noise. Less time in your head or down the research rabbit hole and more time building something real. Let's get into it
Courtney Gray: have you ever stumbled across an old photograph and caught yourself wondering, where the heck did the time go?
That happened to me the other day. I wasn't looking for anything in particular. I was scrolling through my phone trying to find an old receipt and somewhere along the way, I disappeared down the rabbit hole we all know a little too well: vacation photos, old jewelry, pictures from [00:01:00] creative side, the boys.
And then I stopped. There was a picture of Tristan, who's now 15, almost 16. He couldn't have been more than three or four years old in the photo, missing a couple teeth, dirt all over his face,, that unmistakable smile that somehow took up his entire little face. I just sat there looking at it, not because it was an extraordinary picture, because I had forgotten.
I'd forgotten how little he used to be, and then something else hit me. While I was busy living those years, I never noticed that we actually had entered new seasons. Nobody announces this. There's no ribbon cutting or parade. One day you're tying tiny shoes, packing snacks, loading strollers into the car, and the next, you're helping them apply for jobs, borrowing your charger back, or watching them drive away on their own.
Life doesn't usually [00:02:00] change all at once. It changes one ordinary Tuesday at a time. And somehow it's only when we look backward that we realize how much has changed. Hindsight. When the boys were little, every trip out of the house felt like preparing for some sort of expedition.
Snacks, water bottles, extra clothes, Band-Aids. Someone always had to use the freaking bathroom the minute we pulled out of the driveway. There was always something. Back then, I could not imagine those days ever ending. I probably wished for them to, right? And now I'd probably smile if someone even asked me to carry their backpack again.
It's funny how that works. As parents, we understand something almost instinctively. Every season asks something different of us. You don't expect a toddler to mow the lawn. You don't hand a 10-year-old the keys to the car.
You [00:03:00] don't celebrate the same milestones forever. Take walking, for example. When they're learning to walk, Falling is not failure. It's expected. Nobody watches a two-year-old wobble across the living room, fall down, and says, "Well, maybe walking just isn't for him." That would be ridiculous. We understand practice. We understand patience. We understand that growth unfolds in seasons.
So here's the question I've been thinking about lately: Why don't we offer our businesses that same kindness?
One of the first things I hear in coaching almost every week is some version of this: I feel like I should be farther along, or I should have started sooner. , Sometimes it's the very first sentence out of someone's mouth before we ever talk about anything else.
There's this belief that somehow they've missed the timeline, that they're [00:04:00] behind, that everyone else has figured it out first. The interesting thing is, many of the people saying this didn't even discover jewelry until their 40s or their 50s, Sometimes even their 60s.
They've already lived entire lives, raised children, built careers, taken care of parents, weathered things none of us would have chosen, and now they're beginning something completely new. Of course it feels awkward. They're beginners again. The mistake isn't being a beginner. The mistake is expecting yourself to feel like an expert from the beginning.
I don't think they're late. I think they arrived exactly when life made room for this chapter. And I wonder how many beautiful creative businesses never get started because someone believes they're too late, instead of realizing they're simply beginning this reminds me so much of [00:05:00] Creative Side Jewelry Academy. When I first opened the doors, I knew every student, every single one. If someone registered for a class, I probably knew where they were from, what they wanted to learn, maybe even what kind of jewelry they dreamed of making. I answered the phone. I answered every email. I taught every class. If a light bulb burned out, guess who changed it? There wasn't a department, there was me. Looking back now, I wouldn't trade those days for anything, although I'm sure I looked like a chicken with my head cut off. There was something really beautiful about being that close to every part of the business.
Watching students discover they could actually do this. Seeing confidence grow one class at a time. Sharing in those first little victories I won't lie, those early years were exhausting and absolutely wonderful. Then something started happening. The school began [00:06:00] growing. 20 students felt incredible, then 50, then hundreds, eventually thousands. And without realizing it, the business entered this completely different season. The skills that helped me start the academy weren't the same skills needed to grow it.
At first, success meant saying yes to almost everything. Later, success meant learning to say no. At first, I needed to be involved in every decision. Later, that became the bottleneck. And that's when I finally realized something. The business wasn't asking me to work harder anymore. It was asking me to become someone different, a different leader, a different teacher, a different business owner.
I didn't recognize that right away. Most of us don't. We keep trying to parent a teenager like they're still a toddler. I think businesses are alive, in the sense that [00:07:00] they're always becoming something. They grow. They surprise us. They struggle. They ask different things from us as time goes on.
A newborn business needs constant attention. Every little sale feels like a miracle. Every encouraging comment keeps you going another week. Then comes the toddler stage, and honestly, that's where things get wonderfully messy. You're experimenting. You're trying on new collections, new techniques, changing displays every other minute, wondering if your prices are right, doing your first show, then your fifth, then your 10th. Trying Instagram, ignoring Instagram, trying it again. Some things work, some don't. It's easy to mistake all that wobbling for failure, but toddlers are supposed to wobble. That's how they learn where their balance is. And I honestly wonder how many creative businesses have been [00:08:00] abandoned simply because someone mistook a perfectly normal season for proof they were failing.
Maybe that's why comparison can be so dangerous, because we rarely compare seasons. We compare snapshots. We see someone's beautiful booth at a show, a full workshop, a busy website, a waiting list, a thriving studio, a website that says sold out. What we don't see are the years that came before, the collections that never sold, the shows where almost nothing sold, the pricing mistakes, the late nights wondering if any of this was going to work.
We compare our first chapter to someone else's 20th, and that's never a fair comparison. One of the things parenting taught me, if I was paying attention, is that growth is not predictable. There are seasons where everything changes almost overnight.
One [00:09:00] day they're crawling, the next they're running through the house and you can't keep up. Then there are stretches where it feels like nothing is happening or changing at all, Until one day, you look back at a photograph and realize everything changed while you were busy living your life.
Businesses have a funny way of doing the same thing. There are seasons where opportunities seem to appear out of nowhere. Ideas flow easily. The right opportunities show up, the right sales. You can almost feel the momentum. And then there are quieter seasons, fewer orders, more questions than answers, long afternoons at the bench wondering if you're moving in the right direction. Those seasons can feel uncomfortable. But uncomfortable doesn't mean unproductive.
Some of the most important work your business ever does happens where no one else can see it. [00:10:00] I think back to Creative Side again. There came a point where I simply couldn't answer every email anymore, not because I stopped caring, because it was not possible. I had to trust other people.
I had to document systems, train instructors, delegate responsibilities, release control. And if I'm honest, I did not do that gracefully. There was a voice in my head that kept saying, "No one will do it exactly the way that you do." Maybe you've heard that voice too.
Eventually, I realized something. They weren't supposed to do it the same way that I do, because my job had changed. The business no longer needed me to be the best teacher in every classroom. It needed me to become the facilitator of something much bigger.
That wasn't better, it wasn't worse, it was simply the next season. Years later, another season arrived, the season where it was time [00:11:00] to let it go. Selling Creative Side wasn't abandoning something that I'd built. It was recognizing that healthy things continue growing. Sometimes they even outgrow us. I couldn't have sold it in year two.
I couldn't have sold it in year five. Neither the business nor I were ready but when the time actually came, it felt right
Looking back now, I can see every season prepared me for the next one, even the ones I resisted the most. Maybe especially those. I see the same thing happening with clients all the time. Someone comes to me convinced they just need better marketing. Sometimes they do, but sometimes what they really need is patience, or healthier boundaries, or confidence in their pricing, or permission to stop saying yes to every opportunity that comes along.
Sometimes, yeah, they need better [00:12:00] systems. Sometimes they need rest. Sometimes they simply need another year. We spend so much time asking, "What should I do next? What should I be working on?" Lately, I've found myself asking a different question: Who is this season asking me to become?
That's a very different conversation because if your business is a newborn, it needs your attention. If it's a curious toddler, it needs encouragement far more than criticism. If it's beginning to find its footing, it probably just needs consistency, practice. If it's growing quickly, it may need boundaries before it needs more customers.
And if it's mature, it may be asking you to think less about growth and more about legacy. Every season asks something different of us. The mistake is trying to solve every season the same way. Push harder, stay later, do more, layer more. [00:13:00] Sometimes that's exactly the wrong answer
Now, the deeper I get, the more I believe businesses are extraordinary teachers. , they have this remarkable way of revealing whatever we're avoiding. Afraid to raise your prices? Eventually, your business will ask you to.
Afraid to become more visible? Eventually, your business will ask you to tell its story. Bad at asking for help? Sooner or later, you won't be able to grow without it. Need healthier boundaries? Just wait until everyone wants a piece of your time. Your business doesn't create those lessons, it simply reveals them, and if you're willing to listen, it shapes you into someone more capable than the person who started.
That's why I don't think building a business is really about building a business anymore. I think it's about becoming. Becoming more [00:14:00] patient, more resilient, more intentional, learning when to trust yourself, learning when to trust other people, Learning that every season has something to teach you if you stop wishing that you were somewhere else
And that's actually why I've become so excited about evolving creatively
I love these conversations. I found myself becoming really interested in the person behind the business, how we evolve, how we stay creative over decades through tragedy, how we navigate change,
that's what inspired this event. It's coming up. I'm bringing together three people I deeply admire: Holly Gage, who will be sharing a beautiful conversation around vulnerability, authenticity, and finding the courage to let people really see your work; Francesca Watson from The Makery, whose journey through resilience and reinvention reminds us that sometimes our greatest challenges become our greatest [00:15:00] teachers; and Teresa Kiplinger, who has spent years exploring creativity itself, not as something we occasionally find, but as a lifelong practice that keeps you grounded
i'll be joining them throughout the day as we explore what it really means to build not only a successful business, but meaningful creative lives. I hope you'll join us for this event. Now, here's your bench note for this week. Instead of asking, "How successful is my business?" Ask yourself these two questions: What season is my business in? And who is this season asking me to become? Not who you hope to become five years from now, not who someone else thinks you should become.
What does your business need today? Maybe it just needs your patience, maybe your courage, maybe better systems, maybe healthier boundaries, maybe your willingness to ask for help. [00:16:00] Whatever the answer is, that season isn't happening to you,
it's preparing you for what's next I keep thinking about that picture of Tristan, when it was taken, I had no idea who he would become, and if I'm honest, I wasn't ready for every season that followed either. But that's the beautiful thing about raising children. You don't have to know how to parent a teenager when you're holding a toddler. You learn one season at a time. I think our businesses ask exactly the same thing of us. We don't have to become the leader our business will need five years from now. We simply have to become the leader that it needs today, and tomorrow we'll grow a little more, one season at a time
Next week, I wanna ask one final question that brings this whole conversation together. If our businesses really are living things, like kids, what are we feeding them? Not just with [00:17:00] our marketing, but with our thoughts, our relationships, our curiosity, our confidence. Because whatever we feed has a remarkable way of growing.
Thank you for spending a little time with me today. If this episode resonated with you, I do wanna hear from you. Come find me on Instagram, maybe leave a review for the podcast if you have a minute, I would be so grateful. I'm @courtneygrayarts, and I wanna hear what season your business is in. I read every message, and I genuinely enjoy hearing your stories. Until next week, keep making, keep learning, and remember, every season is preparing you for the one that comes next. Onward and upward.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you're here. This path takes a lot, especially when you're building something of your own. If you wanna go deeper, I share key takeaways and additional teaching through my email list at courtneygrayarts.com. Keep going. This part matters. I'll see you next [00:18:00] [00:19:00] week
