Lead Like a Mother:
Why We Should All Have Matriarchal Businesses (And How to Make it Happen)
A paid workshop for care-based service providers who are ready to create or refine their matriarchal business practices, values, and spirit, and lead with care, collaboration, and complexity.
Saturday, February 11, 2023, 11AM-1:30PM CST
$225 USD
($200 until 1/30/23, no code needed; payment plan available)
We’ve got entrepreneurial Daddy issues.
Scaling pressure. Hierarchy. Scarcity. Individualism. Manipulating insecurities. Urgency. Perfectionism. Toxic positivity. Othering. Abusing trust. Performing. Competitiveness. Grinding. Supremacy.
All brought to us by the patriarchy (and white supremacy, and capitalism…)
It’s time for rebellious and justice-centered care-based service providers to birth a new model for doing business.
It’s time to lead like a mother.
You’re a care-based service provider (therapist, educator, coach, sex worker, aesthetician, doula, fitness professional) who is ready to start (or already runs) your own solo business. You got into this line of work because you deeply believe in the work itself, and because you uphold care as a core value. You are confident in your skills to provide services, the change you want to make in the world, and your purpose.
But the standard models and messages for business practices, marketing, selling, and goal-setting feel sleazy, boring, and antithetical to the values you channel in your work, the vision you have for your world, and to YOU in general. And that feeling is right.
Because they aren’t meant for you.
Here’s the truth: by the nature of the work you do, you intuitively know how to connect with people without weaponizing trust or likeability. You instinctively know how to bear witness to what your clients need without using it against them. And you know in your bones that the most important tool of your business is you, without diluting, performing, or succumbing to a script or template.
You know that patriarchal business practices are not what you, your work, or your clients need. So let’s create a new paradigm.
Let’s use your work to build a matriarchy.
A Matriarchy?
Let’s start with this: no, you do not need to be a mother, or a woman, in order to operate a matriarchal business. Matriarchal businesses are based in matriarchal values: collaboration, creation, wisdom, trust, nurturing, attunement, generativity, and conservation, and therefore are the birthright, and duty, of everyone.
Matriarchal businesses are in opposition to patriarchal and supremacist business structures and practices, which are unfortunately the norm and model.
Patriarchal businesses are:
Individualistic, when they should be interdependent
Objectified, when they should be intuitive
Intellectualized, when they should be embodied
Coercive, when they should be consensual
Destructive, when they should be generative
Shaming, when they should be nurturing trust
Dying of thirst, when they should be thriving
Care as a feminine duty, when they should be feminist ethic
#Mompreneur, #Girlboss, #LeanIn, when they should be #BeyondHashtags
In Lead Like a Mother, we will use the Care Leadership Framework to imagine a new way of doing business- a way that centers and legitimizes care as a leadership practice.
If you’re struggling with:
Finding a framework in a sea of blueprints:
The Care Leadership Framework is not a scripted protocol. Instead, it highlights some of the pillars of a matriarchal business and invites you to tune into your needs and ask yourself powerful questions about the foundations of your work.
Creating a lens for analyzing your business practices:
The CLF Assessment rubric is designed to walk you through whatever version of your business you are currently in, to determine what feels expansive, and what is immobilizing you, and identify action steps and mindset shifts that you can begin to take.
Whether to infuse your business with your personality, values, and spirit:
You will learn how matriarchal businesses see you- your story, your expertise, your spirit, your vision- as the throughline of your work, and encourage you to bring a megaphone to it instead of hiding or muffling it.
The isolation, loneliness, and competitiveness of a solo business:
We will start to create your care-leader ecosystem (a vital part of a matriarchal business!) by creating a container of other entrepreneurs with shared experiences, so that you can co-regulate and normalize through group coaching and breakout rooms.
Being social justice-oriented in your work, and feeling sleazy about marketing and selling:
You will begin to explore a new paradigm of the matriarchal business, which is attuned to and aligned with your care-based, relational services, so that you can get that good work to the people who need it most (and get paid for it) without feeling gross.
Asserting your care-based work as a leadership practice:
You will recognize why care-based work has been undervalued and relegated to the background for so long and learn how to legitimize your work as the culture-changing magic it is.
Your business is my business.
I’m Allison Staiger, and I’m a care-based business coach and consultant. I want care-based service providers to create their own rebellious, substantial, and justice-oriented small businesses in order to take a stand and care for themselves and their communities.
Because not only do I hold these care-based identities, I am also the owner of two successful care-based small businesses (both of which started as side dreams), and I have seen time and time again how the oppressive messages we internalize as care providers seep into our business practices. We weaponize the same outdated and oppressive narratives of what a “good caregiver” is against ourselves, and let them run through our bodies of work, our business practices, and our marketing.
This is the water in which we swim, and we are drowning.
I firmly believe that what sees you through the pain of unfurling and meeting your edges when you start a solo business is not stepping over other people, accumulating a million haphazard skills and certifications, or crafting language that embeds in people’s brains and stomps on all their pain points (yiiiiiikes). Instead, what nurtures you is a lush business ecosystem tended by co-creators, your own rhythms, attunement, and a fierce protective instinct.
Lead Like a Mother helps you assess and refine your own business practices and foundations through a lens of care leadership, whether you are still in the dreaming phase or navigating your next iteration. Where will it take you?
Our Work Together:
THE POINT OF IT ALL:
Participants will be introduced to the idea of creating care-based service businesses based on matriarchal values, learn the Care Leadership Framework, and use the CLF assessment rubric to assess, refine, and set goals for their own business practices.
PART I: DREAM
We will take a critical lens to the recurring themes, messages, and practices in the entrepreneurial space and define why they don’t feel right and who they benefit (hint: not you or your clients!), and then collaborate on a new paradigm: matriarchal businesses.
PART II: BREW
We will walk through the Care Leadership Framework, and its four domains: Fangs & Claws, Attunement, Generativity, and Lineages, and apply it to the concept of matriarchal businesses.
PART III: BIRTH
Here’s where we get our hands dirty: using the CLF assessment rubric, participants will assess their own business practices across the four domains, with opportunities for live coaching, feedback, and collaboration. Participants will leave with attuned and intuitive goals for the next generation of their matriarchal business.
