You're working hard. The business isn't moving. Paula Washington shows you exactly where to look — and what to fix first.
GROWTH PILLAR: Leadership & Ops
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs / Corporate escapees / Leaders who've outgrown their original business identity
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A clear diagnostic framework for identifying what's actually blocking growth — identity, strategy, or infrastructure — plus a free tool to find out where you stand right now.
Most business owners who feel stuck aren't failing. They're in the mid time — the space between who they've been and who their business now requires them to be. That gap is real. And it's fixable.
Paula Washington has spent over 30 years helping leaders and business owners move through that gap. She started her first business after being downsized from corporate, walked into a bank for a loan, and walked out with a contract. That story tells you everything about how she operates.
In this East Trade Winds session, Paula breaks down the three places to look when nothing is moving: identity, strategy, and infrastructure. She explains why effort alone doesn't compound — and why the operating system you built five or ten years ago may be the very thing slowing you down today.
Key topics covered:
Paula Washington is a leadership strategist, executive coach, and author. She works with business owners and leaders who are doing everything right but still can't seem to move forward. She helps them identify the real block — then gives them a clear path to grow their leadership, strategy, and systems in alignment.
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Paula (00:06)
So what many of you may not know about me is I started my business over 30 years ago when I was downsized from corporate and training and development. And I went into an organization to get a loan for my business, ended up coming out with a contract. Because I had a program to help women in business transition.
from corporate to entrepreneurship and they needed an entrepreneur program. Well, how about, so I had one folded out of my bag and there we go. So I'm gonna talk about a little bit about how we get stuck throughout the years and decades. The longer we have a business, sometimes we find ourselves not able to move from one stage to the other with all of this AI and everything like that. So much is swirling around. So.
How does this sound familiar? We are working hard in our companies, we're staying committed and doing the right things and yet we still can't seem to move forward. Remember over the years when I first got started, you how you had that big wind and all these clients are coming and everything is wonderful. Then what happens? Everything stops. You've got to figure it out. What's next? What am I not doing? What should I be doing? And then I started listening to everybody else and do what they're doing and what happens?
And then technology changes, opportunities start to shift from one direction to another, and something is just not quite coming together. And what I've seen over the years is it really didn't have to do with what I was doing or not doing, it had to do with my own leadership and what happened in that process of me growing as a business owner from one stage to the next. And in that growing,
My clients were growing as well. And so I had to go from where I was to the next stages. So we're going to talk about here the aha moment that I had, which I call now the mid time. At that time, it was the most devastating time, but I call it the mid time, which is the space between who you've been and who your business now requires. A little backstory about me.
I went back to school while I was healing from a health challenge when I turned 54. And I tested out the thesis for the business I have now. And that was over 10, 15 years ago. And not realizing that when I tested that out, that how things will evolve over the years. So I saw the limitations in moving forward. So I put that business on hold. I put everything on hold because everybody always thought that all I did was work with women.
And that wasn't the case, although I ran a business, a women's foundation for about 10 years with my training and development company. And over those years, I was pigeonholed in one area of my business, which constantly kept me behind in a certain way. So in 2025, we're going to fast forward. And I decided to write a book for women transitioning out of corporate into entrepreneurship, but those were displaced.
And that's the unquote playbook. So because of the 300,000 women that have been displaced and then now with the Americans in the United States not being able to retire with that challenge, that created the golden gap methodology. So in realizing all of these things over the years, it was really about an operating system. In the mid time of our business,
of our strategies, of all of our time management tools and all of the AI. It's the operating system. I realized over the decades and with my clients that they needed to change how they operated as a leader, not so much the work, but the vision and how to make it cohesive and bring it all together. And so with that, this year I launched out all those things that I had worked on years past.
And so we're moving forward now into the questions we forget to ask. As business owners, we forget to ask those questions of ourselves to check in what I call the soul of the matter. Who am I now compared to when I built this? That helps us get off focus sometimes, but we don't pay attention to that because the person that
started the business over 20, 25 years ago, whatever, it's not the same person we are today. Where is the business actually going? Do I want this company to move in this direction that it's going, or do I want to shift it in another direction? Am I still leading in the way it needs to, or is it me that's stuck?
So how many of you have asked those questions may feel like you're stuck.
Love to hear what you have to say.
Okay. All righty. Well, and moving forward with that, there are where the fog lives, there are three places to look when nothing is moving. And one is the identity. Who is running the business? Are you leading from who you are or who the business now requires? And what is the strategy that's needed? Is effort being compounded?
Are your efforts compounding or just keeping you busy? And many times I found in many of my clients that I've worked with are busy going around the same circles as mentioned earlier about you can't manage more than six people at a time. And they're thinking they need to add services in, they need to add people in, I need to go to this tool and that tool and all of these other things. And one of the things I learned from my coach, which I thought was really interesting, he said, Paula, you serve your business, you serve your market.
through your niche market, your technology should serve your niche market and that should be included in your strategy, not actually what everybody's doing with technology, how your clients respond to what you have to offer. And that's how you stay focused and that's how you streamline your processes. And that's how you keep your operating system constantly flowing. And I was like, wow, that's really cool. You know, that's why he's my coach, right?
So that was a strategy there. And then we, then now we move to the infrastructure. Does everything depend on you? If you step back for 30 days, does the business grow or stall? Now, many people are solopreneurs. So of course they would say yes. So where does that leave me? But even if you are a solopreneur, and if you step back from your business, it can still grow because you have systems in place. You have...
opportunity, know, YouTube, you have all types of tools in place where your business can actually grow. And even with your clients and how you shift them around and how you schedule them and reorganize them and help them move from one stage to the next, that can actually be managed in a different way as to when, so that you can step back. And I've tried it over the years, stepping back for two weeks.
three weeks and four weeks, and it really does work. And when we do that, it gives us a clear picture, helps us to stay focused, it clears the fog, we're not running around in the busy work, and it allows us to actually exhale and also the business debris. So it's something to consider in moving forward.
And this is a tool I created, the Golden Gap Compass, to help you actually clear that fog. It's a diagnostic tool where soulmates strategy and wisdom becomes wealth. So over the years, I realized there's a gap between every decade. There's a gap between how your business grows, how we grow as leaders.
And like I mentioned earlier, that we need to stop sometimes and pause and take a deep breath. So when you look at this compass here, you look at your values, you're always reevaluating those, your identity, owning your truth, owning things that you've made mistakes in and didn't work. And so we own all of that stuff, because I've made a lot of them, I've had more failures than successes. But when I hit the mark though, I really hit it.
That's something that we all need to celebrate because when we hit it, we hit it and we're on point and our vision and precision are moving forward. We're not doing the perfection. We're not doing all those things. Because after all these years, we know better than that. We know better to get caught up in those loops that keep us going around in circles and circles and circles. So I put it the link for the conference that you can take for free. And it's real diagnostic in helping you to identify not.
like the other tools, where you are now on your way to where you're going. And that is the highest level of who you are as a leader and in business, you know, that alchemy stage of life, which is where we're all progressing through as we mature. So that's where wisdom becomes wealth. The experience we have now is more of an asset than ever before. know, experience does not have an expiration date.
It is the thing that's our competitive advantage as we move forward. And so learning to leverage that within our business, giving ourselves a break as business owners and allowing our identity to lead the company that allows the strategy to elevate and this infrastructure, which is our operating system to shift in the directions that we are looking to move forward to with an end game in mind. So that's true wealth. That's our legacy. And it increases our capital over time.
And so that is the story I share with you today. And you can find out exactly where you are with my Golden Gap Compass. Thank you.