My microbusiness flatlined. After 17 successful years. I'm shocking it back to life—stronger than before.

Whacking 90% of my health couldn't kill off my venture. TRY ME, economy.

The last time I felt this way, I thought $28k was a real salary. It was MY salary, twenty years ago, as the lowest graphics grunt at the coolest ad agency in Montana.

I worked in a windowless leaking basement, scooching my desk under the stairs to capture scraps of skylight beams. I cowered when our team-building exercises hosted homophobic comedy shows. I sank into my seat as the owners forced us to watch pole-dancing lessons at a company retreat.

I hyperfocused, so I “wasn’t billable enough.” I had high standards (and was female), so I was “condescending and abrasive.” I wanted to go HOME after work, not drinking with my office mates. “Not a team player!”

My work won Addys. They put the male copywriter’s name on them.

I shriveled as a human being. I felt like a complete failure as an adult. I couldn’t do a “dream job.” What way forward could there possibly be?

*

We never have all the facts in the here and now. As Steve Jobs put it, “You can only connect the dots going backwards.”

My business bootcamp leader Karen says, “More will be revealed.”

The present moment, no matter how seemingly clear, is still a mystery.

*

Flagging hard over Christmas break 2007, I read a get-rich-quick book about freelance copywriting.

At 26, it felt like a blueprint to a life I might just thrive in. Or at least an escape hatch from the oppressing feeling that I wasn’t going to make it in the one I had.

*

My boss gave me an ultimatum: I could either change my “negative personality” or clean out my desk.

She seemed exasperated when I picked the latter. “You’d be great at freelance,” she snapped, sarcastically.

I didn’t pick up on the sarcasm. I actually beamed. My first real compliment from her.

I was great at freelance. I loved the work. The clients loved me.

Including that same agency, who wound up hiring me back for freelance and paying me more than my old salary while I also worked for their competitors.

This time, when we won awards and bigger clients, my name was in the credits.

I became a human being once more. I felt like an adult. And the way forward was wide open with possibilities.

A very minimally staged shot of my early freelance days—undercharging, bad with boundaries, and having the time of my life.

*

More was revealed, in time.

Mainly, I got a professional autism evaluation. That explained my clashes with a traditional workplace (and an earnest inability to spot a bluff or pick up on subtle sarcasm.) It cleaned up my heartbreak over “failing” at “real life.”

Decades later, an old colleague clued me in that maybe I wasn’t bad at jobs…maybe that work place had just been especially toxic. Somehow, I’d never considered that. Another “personal failure” that made more sense as just…an impossible task.

*

But when I was so miserable I was unshowered at my basement desk, praying for the whole thing to just cave in already, I didn’t have all the facts.

All I had was a clear inability to continue in the direction I was going—the only direction I knew existed. Until something changed, and a new path opened.

*

With my big fish small town setup, work fire-hosed in for 16 and a half years…so much so that I AVOIDED new clients and had to be dragged into most new projects.

Then, for the past six months, my proposals bombed. Half my pleas to people who I considered ride or die colleagues went unanswered. My year-to-date profits keeled down to 4% of usual. FOUR PERCENT.

I’d never felt so useless, old, irrelevant, and hopeless, in all my solopreneur years.

My boss lady buds started cracking earlier this month—they’re struggling, too. The branches I shook said they were laying people off, scrounging for work themselves. My sister just lost her tech gig this week over government nonsense.*

I read back over my proposal rejections. People weren’t saying they don’t want to hire me. They were saying, I can’t. In this economy?

In a calm easy groove, just before I got disabled. My rates had doubled and doubled again, work was planned 6-9 months out, life was good.

*

I started my business in a Recession, with $600 from selling my mountain bike. I had to rebuild the whole thing five years in after a brief fling with having a real job again.

I revamped operations when I became disabled with limitations that felt impossible to work around. (They weren’t impossible. Just hard.)

I made my business work during the scariest parts of the pandemic, when absolutely no one gave a flying fart about a brand strategy because everyone was suddenly a mask factory, duh.

Now, I’m restarting. Again. In whatever this is. (Name idea: the Desperation?)

It’s different this time. The stakes are a lot higher. My roots run deep here and my health is squirrelly. I anticipate everything getting harder and more expensive, for everyone. I don’t expect it to lighten up, anytime soon.

But sickies don’t just give up. We get more creative. We accept what needs accepting, we fight what needs fighting, and we jury-rig the rest.

If there’s one thing I have a fair bit of experience with, it’s making a business profitable in truly shit circumstances.

So I’ve fought harder to shock my business back to life than I did STARTING it. I’ve opened to pivots I hadn’t considered. I’ve done things I didn’t have the guts or vulnerability to do before. I’ve gone out on limbs. (Some of them snapped clean off; some led to unexpected insights and possible contracts.) There are more leaps of faith and 20 seconds of insane courage moments ahead, and I’ll be sharing them here.

Sprigs of hope are starting to sprout, just in the past few days—little consults, almost-done-deals, more meetings, a conference next week that I’m somehow pretzeling my disabled, immunocompromised ass into (with a shit-ton of planning and support).

In the past week, I’ve gone from completely friggen dead for an unprecedented six months (that I survived thanks to a robust-enough 2024) to “I think I might land an avalanche of work that I need four Kiras to do.” Whoops. We’ll figure it out.

As Karen (the business coach) says, “If you’re going down the main path, it’s PAVED. Everybody else has already gone that way. We’re on a rarer course…so our only option is forging the weedy hard-to-see route.”

Steve Jobs also said, “you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

More will be revealed.

Let’s go find it.

-

(Sidenote: any tech peeps here have an intro for my sis? She’s a beast of a machine Product Owner/Product Manager and she puts her heart and lots of oomph into her work.)

---

---

Anybody know my dream client?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this latest surprise famine, it’s that personal connections count the most, by a million.

I’ve probably shaken out enough leads short-term, but long term…

I’d love to meet a midsize (25-250 employees) do-gooder company or non-profit crying for a rebrand and hankering for copy support on ongoing launches and initiatives.

Alternatively, I’d love an intro to a social-good-oriented, high-performing ad agency who needs brand strategy and evergreen website copywriting for their clients.

Thank you, all!

How’s this economy affecting you and your livelihood?

Pours us both a shot of something strong—and yes, answers from folks on disability absolutely belong here.

---

Meatscons made me a hundredaire mwuah ha ha ha!

That’s another path I didn’t see coming, but if you got one…please review it! If you downloaded it for free and got some mileage out of it—gift one to a sickie friend!

---

Substack is just the nicest.

In the spirit of letting good things happen, I gleefully accept decaf Americanos at Venmo kira-stoops, any payment you like on the Meatscon, and useful gifts here.

---

PS. Because we could all use a break right now:

• Get $100 when you open a new Ally account using this link. (I’ve maxed out referrals, so nothing coming back to me, but enjoy!) This one’s my fave for the buckets feature, which works very well for my apparently bucket-y brain.

• Take $60 off an Electric Liberty Trike like mine with this link (I think it gives me $60, too?) For the cheapest deal, get the “Classic” (aka, old, aka, mine) model or a refurb. I gotta do a post about how good this thing is for low-stamina folks like me!

• Take $10 off Instacart (and give me $10 too!) with this code: KSTOOPS109C5. (My hot tip for good Instacart service: tip above 15%!)