10/03/2026
Wrapping up my trip to Austin and reflecting on the reason I came here. 2026 put me in the middle of hundreds of cleaning business owners in all stages of growth and massive success and challenges! Wherever we are in our journey, I got to spend 3 days with people who are willing to show up for themselves, their teams, and fellow entrepreneurs.
It was like rocket fuel for my business mindset. I’m not kidding y’all, I’ve been trudging and have been getting discouraged. My business has been growing but I have not been thriving. I came away feeling supported, seen and believing all kinds of things I wasn’t able to see before, including loads of ideas on how to run things more efficiently so I can begin to live a bit more holistically.
I learned I don’t have to be the bottleneck for everything and I can create systems, automations and delegate better… in other words, let go a little. I have an amazing office manager, Arend, who wears many hats along with me and has a brilliant leadership capacity. I wish he could have come with me- hopefully the next one because maybe by then we will have cultivated another leader within our team who will hold down the fort, and he takes on even more operational duties so I can step back and truly develop as the leader I am called to be; the one that was first awakened when I got sober 11 years ago and immersed myself in servant leadership. I was ecstatic (and fan girly) when I got to hear one of my favorite authors Kristen Hadeed speak at the event about servant leadership, and the invaluable lessons of learning from our mistakes. She wrote ‘Permission To Screw Up- How I learned to lead by doing (almost) everything wrong’.
There were tons of aha moments and takeaways, but one of the biggest ones was to be reminded that I’m not trying to just grow my business (and profits, please!) but I’m in the business of growing leaders. I love that.
Thank you immensely to the founders of CleanCon, the vendors with such innovation and enthusiasm for our industry, and my fellow business owners for and all your hard work bringing us all together in Austin. Yeehaw!🤠 💗 🤓 🧹
