Origin Story
Noé here with the story of how Worth The Journey came to be. So grab a cup of tea and get cozy, cause it’s story time.
The failure that started it all
It all started way back on July 1st, 2013 when I quit and walked out of the 24 story building of my lucrative yet soul sucking job at Microsoft to open a yoga studio. I’d studied to become a yoga teacher because I wanted to work for myself doing something I loved, something that actually mattered in the world. I had psyched myself up for the big transition and I was finally ready to leave my job and take flight.
I wanted to go big right off the bat with a bold new idea, so I decided to open a completely sliding-scale yoga business. It was called Ease and Flow Yoga and I had a special deal with a friend for free rent for a few months at her tiny dance studio in the back of an alley. So I made a one page website, put out an A-board sign, and I waited.
I had a couple students here and there, but nothing like the crowds I’d seen at other studios and had assumed would flock to mine. One particularly painful week, after the 5th day in a row of zero students, I broke down. I distinctly remember crying out to the heavens above, shouting to whoever lives up there, “Why me?! Why isn’t this working?!!!!!!”
I sat down on the floor of the studio and cried about how unlucky I had been and how unfair it was that I wasn’t succeeding, upset at the beings above who had clearly cursed me. And then a lightning bolt of insight suddenly occurred to me. There was nobody there but me. I was wailing and flailing to myself. Then the answer to my questions came.
In response to “Why isn’t this working?” I heard, “Because I’m not taking the right actions. Business isn’t all about luck, it’s about knowing what to do and when to do it. I need to learn more. I need to study how business works.”
And the answer to “Why me?” came next, “I’m failing now so I can learn quickly and never repeat the same mistakes. Everything I’m learning now is a crucial lesson setting me up for the future. Nothing happens by mistake, and failure is the quickest teacher.”
These answers rattled me for days and somehow I left that evening changed. I had a month left on my free-rent agreement, so I made a promise myself: if I didn’t see a big turnaround in the next month I would pack up shop and audition to teach at other yoga studios.
Something magical happened. Business started to pick up. For the next month I had 3-5 students per class. And for me that was a big uptick. I had learned the value of facing head-on the emotions I was avoiding, in this case, fear of failure.
But a month passed and 3-5 students per class was simply not enough to start paying rent and run the business. This time I knew I had failed, but it no longer bothered me because I saw what lay ahead for me - a lifetime of learning and becoming more successful than I previously was. So I let the business go. It was one of my smartest business decisions to date.
The next bit of the story
After the dust settled and I’d nursed my bruised ego, I sat down to figure out what went wrong. Over the next few years I read every blog and book I could find about business, time management, productivity, and marketing. I started taking online courses and trained for and got certifications as a life coach and a career coach. I realized that while yoga teacher training had trained me to become a great teacher, there were quite a few missing lessons in how to actually run a business - and anyone who knows me, knows that when I become obsessed with something, nothing can stop me.
At this time I was teaching yoga at a handful of studios around Seattle and was a couple years into my life coaching business when something occurred to me. I had been studying business and trying different experiments in marketing, financial models, curriculum design, and tech systems for years, but I hadn’t ventured out to discuss these ideas and concepts with other people like me. I was nervous to go out networking because I abhorred typical salesy business people pushing their business cards on me and trying to intimidate me into buying with their overdone larger than life shpiels where I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Yuck!
So I set out to find people who were heart-centered. I set out to find people who valued extending a hand of support out before asking for money. I was looking for folks who wanted to create unique, self-determined lives, working for ourselves and doing things that make the world a better place. And what I realized in my search was a key lesson in community building: if you can’t find what you’re looking for, create it. Enter the birth of our monthly community gathering, Homebase. Except, it wasn’t called Homebase then.
Homebase
On a very sunny Sunday afternoon in June of 2016, I gathered ten of my freelance / solopreneur friends and asked them if they’d like to join a group that meets once a month for 6 months at my house to discuss business topics, form accountability buddies and learn from each other. I promised to bring the topics I was learning and share them, along with snacks and hugs and lots of room for all of us to share and discuss and grow our work together. I called it the Entrepreneur Leaders Group (or ELG) because I believed that every person in that room is already an entrepreneur leader. Four years later, this regular monthly gathering remains at the heart of our business. We love to connect in real time with our community, to hear how things are going, and to laugh and cry together. We gather feedback and change what we focus on and talk about based on that feedback. It’s our connection to our people and it’s one of the most brilliant accidents to happen to me.
Coaching
After 6 months of gathering with other entrepreneurs in our guided self study, I found myself often helping friends with their businesses. At this time I had been practicing as a career coach and life coach, but I went on a meditation retreat that revealed something to me: I saw that I got more satisfaction and noticed more profound results working with people on their businesses than helping folks write resumes. So with the encouragement of my community, I started offering sliding scale coaching for friends and friends of friends, sharing what I’d been learning from studying and from growing my own business.
Our first event
As things continued I had the great notion to host a weekend long learning experience conference workshop thingy. I named it Entrepreneur Workshop Weekend (or EWW for short…which I thought was clever at the time but...yea, eww). I spent weeks prepping, wrote a one hundred page workbook, and planned out 5 workshops over two days all of which I led. I also filmed them all, did all the set up and tear down on my own, as well as every bit of participant coaching, logistics, etc. I’m not sure if it went well or not, because after that weekend I basically slept for 2 weeks straight. I learned a TON about events, including that I absolutely could not do my next event by myself. Fortunately, I had this housemate...
How I found Harmony
If flopping my first business is one of the best-worst things to happen to this business, Harmony, my business partner, logistical other half, and person who starts many of my sentences, is among the best-best things to happen. We met briefly and virtually in 2016 when she was co-facilitating an online course I was taking with Jonathan Fields. Six months later she found a Craigslist ad looking for a housemate in Seattle, recognized my name from the course, and ended up moving in. Since we both worked for ourselves, we became not just housemates but inadvertent co-workers.
After a few months of bouncing ideas off each other, I asked her to help with the second weekend event. It went so well that over the next 18 months we kept working together until eventually we formed an official, legal business partnership in 2018 on the Autumnal Equinox (a day celebrating balance between different energies and forces, like the ones we each bring to the table).
Here’s the selfie we took after signing our business partnership paperwork!
Since then
For the next couple years, we grew our coaching offering and threw events of all kinds and sizes from epic conferences, to winter retreats, to a summer festival in the park. Along the way we constantly looked to our communities for feedback, ideas, and needs. In 2019 we decided to pilot a new offering that our clients had been requesting for years: web design. With my background as a software engineer, and Harmony’s background as a writing coach, we knew we had the skills to support our clients in creating beautiful, custom websites. But we weren’t sure if we wanted to do it. What if changing things this much changed how we felt about work?
But after the first few websites, it became obvious that this was something exciting. Because of our depth of knowledge as business coaches, we realized our approach to web design was uniquely helpful to our people. Because we understand the right questions to ask, the right actions to call for, how to craft a compelling UX design, and how to present a unique edge, we found that we had something special.
Today
Over the last year we’ve expanded these services, officially re-launching Worth The Journey as a small business agency - the business you see today. Many many things have changed since those gatherings in my backyard. And I know things will continue to evolve. But the heart of our company remains the same - we are driven to serve and love our community, to teach heart-centered, soul-connected, purposeful, spiritual, activist, healers and visionaries how to build businesses that nurture them and the world around them.
It’s who we are, who we serve, and why we exist. And if you’ve read this far, my guess is you’re one of us. I hope you’ll join us and help us shape the future of business, together.
Our community still meets every month for Homebase to connect and learn and support each other and we would love to have you join us!
