WELCOME!

Welcome to the first edition of Empower’s newsletter! Our goal is to provide your inbox with a combination of value-add content and fun on a (hopefully) weekly basis. The newsletter will generally be written by yours truly, but at times may also include guest posts.

The structure will largely remain the same for each edition:

• Featured post of the week: A longer-form piece on a topic relevant to business building, operations, growth, etc. These posts will also always be available on Empower’s website.

• Weekly dose of empowerment: A practical tip of the week that’s aimed to be relatively low-lift to implement, but powerful in terms of its potential impact.

• Jessica’s read (or listen) pick of the week: Something that got my brain going this week and I wanted to also share with you.

• Just for fun: Really, this section is just for fun.

I hope this newsletter can also be interactive, and I’m always interested in thoughts and feedback. If you have contributions, please send your ideas to [email protected].

Happy reading!

Jessica Murray, founder & owner of Empower

FEATURED POST OF THE WEEK

Our long-form article of the week. You can always view the current and past featured posts on Empower’s blog.

Launching Empower — why do we exist?

I’m thrilled that I’ve been able to launch Empower into the world this month! In this first chapter of the business, I want to convey what the company does and why we exist.

Our “why” sits at the intersection of:

• My kernel of an idea.

• My innate desire to see emerging businesses succeed and to play a role in driving those outcomes.

• A market environment that’s challenging for emerging businesses — rising costs, tight labor, more restricted and costly funding, and high competition, but also one that can open opportunities.

• First-hand validation from business owners that there’s a broad-based need for operational support.

The coming together of the abovementioned formed Empower’s underlying purpose — to empower our partners to create both the business and life they envisioned when they started on their entrepreneurial journey. We live into this purpose by helping our partners optimize their operations, achieve their goals, win back time and create a framework for long-term success that not only outpaces their own expectations but moreover reignites the spark that inspired them to get started in the first place.

The rest of this post dives further into our origin story, why we exist and why now. I want to bring you along Empower’s journey and to do so effectively, you must understand where we came from so you can contextualize where we’re headed.

The Genesis of Empower

The inspiration for Empower came from my desire to see more emerging businesses succeed coupled with my aspirations to build a business. I’ve spent the past decade driven by learning as much as I could about how businesses were built from the ground up and strategies to scale. I’ve been fortunate to have worked with a range of founders and executives, in companies of all sizes (seed stage to publicly traded) and served in cross-functional leadership roles that gave me great opportunities to solve complex business challenges, build products and drive strategy execution. Despite these successes, I felt a persistent pull toward building my own business from scratch and also one that enabled me to broaden the number of companies I could potentially impact at any given time. 

My first step to uncovering what is now Empower began with conducting discovery interviews to understand macro headwinds for small businesses and startups, as well as gain first-hand insight from business owners in different industries about their aspirations and challenges. What surfaced is that business owners across industries have an increasing need to focus on:

• Driving efficiency: Streamlining every part of the business to allow owners to focus on strategic growth and to free up employee time from repetitive tasks that could be automated. 

• Controlling costs: Implementing strategies to do more with the same or fewer resources, without sacrificing quality. 

• Enhanced experiences: Improving how customers and employees interact with the business to foster loyalty and trust and also enable the delivery of personalized experiences.

• Differentiation: Identifying other innovative ways to stand out and thrive in a competitive market. 

As I observed these challenges, it became clear that the results I’ve driven at various businesses equip me to tackle them effectively and deliver meaningful solutions.  

Two quick examples to make this more tangible: 

Why Empower? Why now?

• Dedicated to partner success: I’ve always been passionate about helping emerging businesses succeed. I’m motivated by success stories of local businesses that don’t just deliver great experiences and products but also foster a real sense of community. These are the ones that have made the biggest impressions on me and Empower is my way of giving back to the ecosystem. 

• Filling a tangible need: The evolving macro landscape and dynamic competitive environment underscore the importance for small businesses and startups to optimize their operations and be nimble enough to adapt. 

• The right expertise: My background and track record position me uniquely to provide practical, impactful solutions to my target client base. 

Empower truly has come out of a great blend of passion, expertise and surfacing a clear need in a vast market. We don’t want to be just another service provider; we rather see ourselves as a committed partner in your entrepreneurial journey. We value delivering meaningful returns on the investment you make in us and strive to put you in a position to grow a resilient, thriving business. 

That’s the shortened origin story for Empower!

WEEKLY DOSE OF EMPOWERMENT

The weekly dose of Empowerment is meant to provide one weekly tip that’s both practical and approachable, to help drive incremental improvement to your day-to-day. We’re always open to your contributions! If you would like to submit a tip to be shared with the Empower community in a future newsletter, please reach out at [email protected] with the subject line “Weekly Dose of Empowerment Submission.”

Two weeks of task tracking

If you’re feeling bogged down by your day-to-day and aren’t focusing on the most important things to help you accomplish your goals, then this first tip may be for you. 

My challenge to you is two-fold: 

1. Write down your 2024 goals for visual clarity of what’s important.

2. Keep track of all your daily tasks during your working hours every day for two weeks. 

You’re going to say – “Why are you giving me another  thing to do?” The answer: This simple process can drive meaningful change and save you time in the long run. Two weeks is also important because it allows you to identify patterns and what’s repeatable vs. one-off. The goal is to take stock of how you spend your time so you can better identify opportunities to effect change — quick wins and longer-term initiatives. 

It’s also a pretty low-maintenance exercise. It doesn’t matter where you write all of this down, as long as it’s written down and you can aggregate all the information at the end of the two weeks. Use a journal, your Notes app, a project management tool or any other accessible way to quickly jot something down as you go through your day-to-day. One recommendation: I suggest organizing them by each day so you can reflect on how time was spent on a given date, but other than that, keep this simple. 

Once you’ve aggregated your two weeks’ worth of task-tracking, the next part of this exercise is to organize all of the tasks into four quadrants, using a helpful framework called the Eisenhower Matrix. This linked article from Asana provides a detailed overview of the Eisenhower Matrix if you want more reference material. 

This tool provides a visualization of your tasks, on the spectrums of urgency and importance, to further your ability to change your status quo.

You’ve now organized your two week’s worth of tasks into the buckets of “Do,” “Schedule,” “Delegate” and “Delete.” Great. Now what? 

Take action. You now have the tools to feel empowered to make a change. 

• Do the tasks in Quadrant #1. Those are consequential and will impact your long-term goals. This and Quadrant #2 are the areas to spend most of your time. However, you’re possibly too distracted by everything else to adequately focus on them right now. 

• Schedule the tasks in Quadrant #2. These aren’t urgent today, but they are still tasks that require your time and attention, and ones which you’re well suited to move the needle. They’re also important to long-term success. So, while they aren’t urgent today, they still require prioritization. Set a future deadline and block time in your calendar (more tips on managing your calendar next week!) to accomplish those things so you’re proactively making space for them at the right time. 

• Delegate the tasks in Quadrant #3. This one will probably be the most challenging for business owners and entrepreneurs. However, at some point, your ability to be successful will depend on how well you can disseminate knowledge and effectively delegate. You can’t and shouldn’t do everything. The other important consideration in this quadrant is identifying opportunities for effective automation. Automation is a form of delegation, and depending on the tasks in your list, there may be powerful ways to “set it and forget it” to get things done. 

• Delete the tasks in Quadrant #4. Simply put. …get rid of the stuff that doesn’t serve you and your goals. 

The same article I linked above provides helpful tips for how to apply the Eisenhower Matrix, organize your tasks and turn them into actionable to-do lists.

Take the challenge and let me know how it goes!

JESSICA’S READ, OR LISTEN, PICK OF THE WEEK

A little something that got my gears turning this week and might pique your interest as well!

From The Wall Street Journal: How Online Shopping is Saving the Bricks-and-Mortar Store

TL;DR*

In the world of rising e-commerce, this contrarian view caught my attention and it’s also a trend I’ve noticed recently, with more e-commerce-first brands starting to extend into the brick-and-mortar space. The article highlights how companies are integrating their online and offline experiences, and leveraging their brick-and-mortar locations to bolster their store fulfillment operations. The other points I found interesting were those around how the consumer still desires the ability to physically touch, feel and try on products before purchasing, which bucks the trend of thinking that e-commerce would render the store obsolete.

What do you think?

Does this trend help emerging brands extend their reach, grow and diversify retail options or will it lead to further homogenization in brick-and-mortar?

*For those unfamiliar with the acronym TL;DR, it stands for ”too long; didn’t read” and it’s generally used as a lead-in to a summary of longer-form text or articles. In this newsletter section, I will use the TL;DR as a teaser for the interesting read/listen, and then you can dive in on your own!

JUST FOR FUN

Really, this section is just for fun. Who knows what will be in store each week?

As a native New Yorker living in Nashville, I sometimes feel deprived of certain things that, well, let’s face it, are just better in New York. Bagels and Lox fall into that category. There are a couple of options for good bagels in Nashville (shoutout to Big Ben’s), but finding the complete package with high-quality, paper-thin smoked salmon is hard to come by. Last weekend, however, in honor of Mother’s Day, my husband did a wonderful thing. He ordered the New York Brunch from Russ & Daughters, a true New York institution, on Goldbelly. The package came with a half-dozen bagels, cream cheese, lox, a babka, coffee and a mug. It was a delicious treat.

If you’re looking for a gift that’s a bit different, I always think Goldbelly is a fun choice. It can be a bit pricey, depending on your selection, but you can send awesome food favorites from all over the country.

SEEKING MORE EMPOWERMENT?

You’ve worked hard to build your business. Let’s work together to make it last. We want to be your partner in the journey to build the business that lives into your vision.

If you want to learn more about Empower’s offerings or methodology, please reach out to discuss how we can support your goals. 

If you were forwarded this newsletter and enjoyed it, I encourage you to subscribe and join the Empower community.