When you’re starting a business, it’s hard to have all the pieces together right away. In fact, it’s hard to know what you’re doing when what you’re planning is your first venture into the business world. Regardless of what business you have—be it digital, brick and mortar, or a combination of the two—being able to find your way through the help of someone who knows what it’s like to start their own business can be immensely helpful, especially if that person knows and understands the struggles that surround starting your own business with little to no guidance from someone else.

That’s why Danielle Ewalt is so dedicated to helping those around her! My guest for this week’s episode of the PDX Small Business Network Podcast, Danielle is a business coach who helps small businesses owners and entrepreneurs in the Portland area get a grasp on their business strategies by coaching them through being a business owner! Together, Danielle and I talk about the kind of work she does, and how she inspires other business owners to success using her own success story. Let’s get started!

IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:

What it is Danielle does! As a coach, Danielle works with business owners to work on their business strategy in order to build up a team of people who will work for them. Usually, these people are a product based company, or they run an office, and Danielle helps to provide them with the rights steps needed to create the structure for their business to help them achieve their goals, and bring their team into it! The end goal is to have a team that’s powerful enough to run the business when the owner isn’t there, letting you enjoy time off that you need!

Danielle talks to us more in-depth about what she works on, stating that her work primarily exists in helping business owners build the framework of how they’re running their business, and how they’re working with their staff. Regardless of the type of business, she’s working with, the thing they have in common is having employees that they want to leverage, and the question revolves around helping those employees come into the fold of understanding the vision of the company. You, the founder, don’t have to do everything! You can train people to take on these responsibilities and generate high levels of experience in the process.

Danielle explains to us why she got started in the coaching industry, stating that she started her own company 8 years ago with her husband. Together, they had a cafe and coffee roastery, and they floundered during their first years in business trying to understand how to run it. They had to figure out how to run a business that’s profitable, runs well, and that they don’t have to be around all the time for the business to find success. Together, Danielle and her husband learned the hard way through trial and error—and research—and eventually reached a point where the business was successful and running perfectly. However, her struggle (as well as people asking her how she turned it around) is what motivated her to get into the coaching industry!

Danielle also tells us how much she enjoys being there for people, explaining that she felt so along during her time as a business owner, and it never really crossed her mind to connect with someone that could help her and her husband. They lost a lot of money, and it took them longer than it needed to in order for them to be successful, and she knows that if someone like her had helped their process, it would’ve been much better.

Danielle talks to us about the top problems that are happening in small businesses, explaining that a lot of the issues revolve around all the responsibility falling onto the shoulders of the owners. They haven’t created a structured system to offload some of that responsibility to others, and they haven’t created the space to hold them accountable for it.

Additionally,