When I launched my business coaching practice, I had a clear picture in my mind of what the work would look like. Long sessions spent workshopping offers, untangling brand messaging, mapping out the financial future. I’d help women get visible, get clients, and get paid.
I was so excited when I started booking calls, but then reality walked right in with all of my new girlies.
It wasn’t obvious what was happening at first. The first call came and I was ready to answer all of their general business questions. I was excited! Then it became a subtle stream of similar calls. A client would hop on Zoom, we’d exchange pleasantries, and then when I would ask them their pain point or their concern, but before we could ever open a single financial or sketch out a single strategy, she’d pause. There was always a pause. And then came the question I hadn’t expected to hear so soon:
“Do you know how I can get funding?”
Or, with a kind of weary hopefulness I’ll never forget: “Can you help me figure this out?”
The first time, I brushed it off as a detour. We’d address it, I thought, then move on. But it happened again with the next client and the next. It didn’t matter what industry the woman was in, I talked to womanpreneurs with food products, construction businesses, architecture firms, content creators, and nonprofit founders, to name a few. It didn’t matter whether she was just getting started or had been running her business for years. One of the ladies in construction had already worked 30+ years for other people learning the ins and outs of her business, but she was trying to start or buy her own, and that’s where she was lost:
The money. The applications. The “how do I get from an idea, to funding it?” questions.
Somewhere in the first few minutes of every conversation, the question surfaced like she had been tip-toeing through a room not built for her.
After a few calls like this, I stopped calling it a detour and I started asking myself what kind of help with my knowledge and experience could I give these business owners?
Because here’s what I was actually witnessing: these weren’t women who lacked ideas, or drive, or vision. They had all of that in abundance. What they lacked was clarity about money; specifically, where to find it, how to ask for it, and whether they even had the right to ask in the first place. Funding wasn’t a side topic that they were nervously sneaking into our sessions. It was the sole focus, quietly blocking the path to all the strategy work we were supposed to be doing together. In a lot of our phone calls, it was the entire reason they called!
The more I listened, the clearer it became. These women were navigating a system that had never been designed with them in mind at all. This is a system where capital has historically flowed toward certain people, in certain rooms, through certain networks that many of these founders had never been invited into. Now they were trusting and asking me, their new business coach, to help them draw one. I can only assume, but they felt with my CPA I had cracked the code to getting in the rooms with money, and they weren’t wrong.
That’s when everything shifted for me.
It wasn’t a dramatic, change your whole life moment, although I’ve had those! It was quieter. My clients didn’t just need someone to help them polish their messaging or refine pricing, which so many coaches can do. They needed real, practical, demystified access to the funding that could actually move their businesses forward.
Realizing that changed the way I work. It changed the questions I ask, the resources I seek out, and the conversations I’m willing to have. Because if I kept steering every call back to branding and visibility while the deeper need went unaddressed, I wasn’t really helping anyone build anything sustainable.
Women-owned businesses are not struggling for lack of ambition or creativity. They are struggling because too few people have been honest with them about the funding landscape and the things they need to know. They needed a space where they could feel welcome and brave.
Femme & Funded is one of those spaces.
And it all started because my clients were brave enough to pause, trust me, and ask.